Comment Who wants a thinner, lighter laptop? (Score 5, Insightful) 217
But why do people want a thinner, lighter laptop? The pushback from high-end users against the Retina MacBook Pro was so bad that even Apple has realized that making laptops thinner isn't automatically a good idea.
Lighter, maybe, but you're not going to make enough weight difference by removing SO-DIMM slots to be noticeable.
And battery life is almost entirely a red herring. A RAM chip draws the same amount of power to keep it running and refreshed whether it is soldered onto the motherboard or onto a separate SO-DIMM. You do save a tiny bit of power on the memory bus itself by not sending the signals as far, but that tiny savings would be entirely lost in the noise compared with, for example, the power consumed by the CPU itself.
No, there are really only three reasons:
- Reliability. Soldered-on RAM won't ever have problems caused by the RAM getting unseated. Realistically, this is a minor concern, though, because that almost never happens in the real world.
- Memory bus latency. If and only if the soldered-on RAM is closer to the CPU, reduced memory latency could improve performance in some workloads.
- Disposability. Soldered-on RAM can't ever be upgraded, so when you realize that you need more, you have to buy a new computer instead of being able to upgrade it. Similarly, soldered-on RAM can't be replaced, so if you start getting errors from your RAM, you have to buy a new computer (or at least replace the entire motherboard for a sizable percentage of the cost of a new computer) to fix it.
Manufacturers love that last one. Why would they want to make it easier for consumers to keep using their products longer? That means they make less money. If consumers are still willing to buy computers with non-upgradeable, non-replaceable RAM, why wouldn't they take maximum advantage of that to earn more revenue?
The only time I could see it being a real benefit to users is when the RAM is integrated into the CPU, because that could provide significantly lower memory bus latency and maybe higher memory bus speeds. But even that would only really be beneficial for users who frequently do some operation that is impacted significantly by memory latency, and only if the CPU's pipeline is efficient enough to take advantage of the lower latency.
Otherwise, soldered-on RAM seems like a rather large net negative from my perspective.