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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I have been continuously baffled by the people that think that soldered on RAM is somehow "throwaway". My last desktop build is eight years old and I have never upgraded the ram. Never will. My next build will have an entirely new motherboard, ram, and GPU, and the last set will end up at the ewaste recycler, because who could I find that wants that old hardware?

Soldered RAM, CPU, and GPU, that give space benefits and performance benefits is exactly what I want, and results in no more ewaste at all. In fact less ewaste, because if I had a smaller form factor I could justify keeping the older computer around for longer. The size of the thing is a bigger cause of waste for me than the ability to upgrade RAM.

Not everybody upgrades RAM, and those people deserve computers too. Framework's brand appears to be offering something that other suppliers are not, rather than expand ability. That's a much better brand and niche overall.

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> the last set will end up at the ewaste recycler, because who could I find that wants that old hardware?

You might be surprised. Living in a large city, everything I have put for sale has found a new owner. Old and seemingly useless computer hardware, HDMI cables that don't support 4K, worn-out cutlery, hairdryer that's missing parts, non-functional amplifier, the list goes on. If the price is right (=very low), someone has always showed up in person to carry these away. And I'm always very upfront about any deficiencies so that they know what they're getting.

I'd say a common profile for the new owner is young people who have just moved and are on a shoestring budget.

>I have been continuously baffled by the people that think that soldered on RAM is somehow "throwaway"

One of the primary objections to soldered RAM was/is the cost to purchase. As the likes of Apple priced Ram upgrade at a hefty premium to retail prices.

I can see that objection too, and it seems far more reasonable than assuming that soldered RAM automatically means a reduced lifespan machine.

But are Framework's RAM prices unreasonable? $400 for 64GB more of LPDDR5x seems OK. I haven't seen anybody object to Framework's RAM on those grounds.

With modular RAM, someone can buy old boards and RAM and use it for high-RAM applications down the line.

The workloads that people care most about today that need high RAM capacity are workloads that also need very high memory bandwidth. Old server hardware from eBay doesn't do a good job of satisfying the bandwidth side of things.

Also, that they often simply don’t sell what you want with enough memory, or pair memory upgrades with other upgrades you don’t need (e.g. more powerful CPU or GPU beyond your needs), or occasionally that you actively don’t want (e.g. iGPU → dGPU may be that). With socketed RAM you can buy the model you want that just lacks RAM, and upgrade that.

My current laptop (ASUS GA503QM) had 8GB soldered and 8GB socketed. I didn’t want to go for the 16+16 model because it was way more expensive due to shifting from a decent GPU to a top-of-the-line GPU, and a more-expensive-but-barely-faster CPU. (I would have preferred it with no dedicated GPU—it would have been a couple of hundred USD cheaper, a little lighter, probably more reliable, less fiddly, and have supported two external displays under Linux (which I’ve never managed, even with nvidia drivers); but at the time no one was selling a high-DPI laptop with a Ryzen 5800H or similar without dedicated graphics.) So after some time I got a 32GB stick and now I have 40GB of RAM. And I gave my sister the 8GB stick to replace a 4GB stick in her laptop, and that improved it significantly for her.

I will take your old builds, because my current PC is from a dumpster and was made in 2013. I can't afford to buy hardware.

> Not everybody upgrades RAM, and those people deserve computers too.

No. It's end of the line with consumerism and we either start repairing and recycling or we die. Framework catered to people who agree with that, and this product is not in line.

I have no idea why you would not upgrade your memory, I have done so in all PCs I ever owned and all laptops, and it's a very common (and cheap) upgrade. It reduces waste because people can then use their system longer, which means less garbage over the lifetime of a person. And as was already commented, it is not only about upgrades, but also about repairs. Ram breaks rather often.

I have had the system for eight years and at no point would upgrading RAM have increased performance.

Upgrading the RAM would have created more waste than properly sizing the RAM to COU proportion from the beginning.

It is very odd to encounter someone who has such a narrow view of computing that they cannot imagine someone not upgrading their RAM.

I have not once, literally not once have RAM break either. I have been part of the management of clusters of hundreds of compute nodes, that would occasionally each have their failures, but not once was RAM the cause of failure. I'm fairly shocked to hear that anybody's RAM has failed, honestly, unless it's been overlocked or something else.

> It is very odd to encounter someone who has such a narrow view of computing that they cannot imagine someone not upgrading their RAM.

Uncalled for and means the end of the discussion after this reaction. Ofc I can imagine that, it's just usually a dumb decision.

That you did not have to upgrade the ram means one of two things: You either had completely linear workloads, so unlike me did not switch to a compiled programming language or experimented with local LLMs etc. Or you bought a lot of ram in the beginning, so 8 years ago with a hefty premium.

Changes nothing about the fundamental disagreement with the existence of such machines. Especially from a company that knows better. I do not expect ethical behaviour from a bottom of the barrel company like Apple, but it was completely reasonable to expect better from framework.

I'm with you on this one. I've had.. 6? PCs. Basically every time I thought that they were falling behind performance wise, I realized that they generally had stopped selling RAM for them and even if I only wanted to upgrade the RAM, it wasn't enough anymore. The CPU was also falling behind and a new one needed a new socket and motherboard.

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