This tracks. In a laptop, there's only so much space that can be used for components, and that free space grows smaller by the year to make ultrabooks possible. They're an industrywide trend that was first popularized by Apple, and the rest of the laptop manufacturing world quickly caught on. Each year, laptops are released thinner and lighter, and that means having to squeeze the components together in new, innovative ways... Soldering the memory down onto the motherboard means that it can be attached almost anywhere within the laptop instead of being slotted into a specific part of it. It effectively makes the laptop thinner by cutting back on the space that the RAM module takes up. The space saved by soldering memory can be used for other things, such as a bigger battery....

This is a fucking lie/very deceitful exaggeration from a jurno who has never seen SODIMMs in their entire fucking miserable life. There are just two of them, they are tiny and soldered RAM instead of them allows you you to have a 0.05% larger battery if any.

Secondly, HP has a boatload of laptops with upgradeable RAM, thanks god.

This is ONLY done to 1) upsell 2) planned obsolesce 2) fat nice margins and yachts for top managers.

In Apple's defense I can say that they have unified RAM, a concept which is AFAIK still alien/missing on x86.

iPhone users have no clue.

Geeks check specs on third-party websites, 'cause Apple doesn't publish this info. There's no "specs" on the page either. You just trust you're buying something sufficiently specced.

Everyone else doesn't care.

Fat margins don't just happen.

Last time I had a PC with that much RAM was in 2007.

Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays â" Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) Notes 19/1 claims: DVD and BD (read-only, such as a DVD or Blu-ray movie) : 10 to 20 years which is even worse than BD-RE, rated 20 to 50 years.

I've not been able to find any research on the topic.

I'm curious: I've read many times that pretty much all organic optical media has a certain lifespan, 15-20 years at most, normally less than that. And I'm almost sure that as we go higher with storage density, the problems gets even worse, so CDs may survive longer than e.g. Blu-Ray disks. How do fans deal with this? Or they are not thinking that far?

But what about people who weigh way more than all the stuff that I'm carrying times 100? Why are not airlines addressing this "minor" issue as more weight means more fuel? Or it's not about it? If it's not about weight then what?

There are people who are overweight/obese due to medical issues (or even pregnancy), but the vast majority simply eat too much or eat junk food. Maybe extra body mass could be actually addressed first.