>Which is done because solder is thinner/lighter than sockets, and therefore you can get a thinner/lighter laptop.
So let them figure out another way to make it thinner/lighter. I don't want them to do it at the expense of upgrading common parts. We're not asking for every single chip to be replaceable. Just the obvious parts that have an established 10+ year history of being serviceable. I bet welding every single part on a car makes it lighter too, but I don't think people want to replace the entire car if their fuel pump breaks.
>There are real engineering tradeoffs all over the place here that are being elided
Huh? You switched from purely cosmetic factors - thinner/lighter, to engineering. You will have to explain that one to me...
User-serviceable parts are better, all things being equal. But all things aren't equal. You're trying to mandate tradeoffs for everyone else, and I don't think you understand everyone else's tradeoffs well enough to do that.
And "acceptable compromise" -- acceptable to who? Because the current compromise is acceptable to people who buy these laptops with soldered-on RAM. And it's not acceptable to those who buy other laptops that don't have soldered RAM. The compromise has been accepted by the market. "Well, the market got it wrong and should do it better," you might think. Sure, okay, but history is rife with examples of people telling markets to do things better and things not getting better, and it's helpful to think about why markets haven't gotten to better on their own.
