> This allows for reduced thickness and reduced cost, which is what most people want
Reduced thickness? No, I think pretty much everyone agrees laptops are as thin as they need to be. Any thinner and they'll slip when you're typing on them, and we want some thickness to keep them robust.
Which also raises another problem with the "thinness" fetish promoted only by laptop marketdroids and the morons who work as reviewers for so-called "tech" websites like Engadget et al: the keyboards on most modern laptops are literally unusable. They're worse than ZX Spectrum+ and maybe on a part with the older rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum. They. Are. Fucking. Awful. And keyboards are one of the major reasons you use a computer rather than a tablet. So what the fuck is the point with these things?
People talk about how sales of laptops are declining and tablets increasing, but maybe if you actually cripple the major advantage a laptop has over a tablet, that's inevitable?
Cheaper, sure, but how much does it cost to add two dimm slots and to use mass produced commodity DIMMs? It's not even as if there isn't a cost to designing a motherboard so it only works with specific memory chips.
I hate this timeline. It's all going to shit.