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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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Well yeah, they're enough to meet the minimum use cases so they can upsell most people on expensive RAM upgrades.
That's why I don't buy laptops with soldered RAM. That's getting harder and harder these days, but my needs for a laptop have also gone down. If they solder RAM, there's nothing you can (realistically) do if you need more, so you'll pay extra when buying so they can upcharge a lot. If it's not soldered, you have a decent option to buy RAM afterward, so there's less value in upselling too much.
So screw you Apple, I'm not buying your products until they're more repair friendly.
I had a extra stick of RAM available the other day so I went to open my wife's Lenovo to see if it'd take it and the damn thing is screwed shut with the smallest torx screws I've ever seen, smaller than what I have. I was so annoyed
Torx is legitimately useful for small screws, because it's more resistant to stripping than Phillips.
Now, if they start using Torx security bits or some oddball shapes, then they're just being obnoxious. But there are not-trying-to-obstruct-the-customer reasons not to use Phillips.
IFixit kit is a great toolset from the site that has every type of bit in it.
Got myself an IFixit Mako a while ago, really nice even if I mostly just use the philips head ones
Right? It's nice to have the occasional reverse tri head metric upside down weird random bit when you need it.
I've taken apart so so so many things... sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong reasons....my ZuneHD still works. I'll never ever try to open a Surface product.
The real question is why you don't have a complete precision screwdriver set.
I thought I did! Until I got the smallest one out and it just spun on top of the screw
I bought the E495 because the T495 had soldered RAM and one RAM slot, while the E495 had both RAM slots replacable. Adding more RAM didn't need any special tools. Newer E-series and T-series both have one RAM slot and some soldered RAM. I'm guessing you're talking about one of the consumer lines, like the Yoga series or something?
That said, Lenovo (well, Motorola in this case, but Lenovo owns Motorola) puts all kinds of restrictions to your rights if you unlock the bootloader of their phones (PDF version of the agreement). That, plus going down the path of soldering RAM gives me serious concerns about the direction they're heading, so I can't really recommend their products anymore.
If I ever need a new laptop, I'll probably get a Framework.
I keep looking at the Frameworks, because I'm happy with the philosophy, but the problem is that the parts that they went to a lot of trouble to make user-replaceable are the parts that I don't really care about.
They let you stick a fancy video card on the thing. I'd rather have battery life -- I play games on a desktop. If they'd stick a battery there, that might be interesting.
They let you choose the keyboard. I'm pretty happy with current laptop keyboards, don't really need a numpad, and even if you want one, it's available elsewhere. I've got no use for the LED inserts that you can stick on the thing if you don't want keyboard there.
They let you choose among sound ports, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, and various types of USB. Maybe I could see putting in more USB-C then some other vendors have. But the stuff I really want is:
A 100Wh battery. Either built-in, or give me a bay where I can put more internal battery.
A touchpad with three mechanical buttons, like the Synaptics ones that the Thinkpads have.
The fact that they aren't soldering in the RAM and NVMe is nice in that they're committing to not charging much more then market rate, so I guess they should get credit for that, but they are certainly not the only vendor to avoid soldering those.
Yeah, ThinkPad used to allow either a CD drive or an extra battery in their T-series. They stopped offering the extra battery and started soldering RAM, so I got the cheaper E-series (might as well save cash if I can get what I want).
I think there's a market there. Have an option for a hot-swap battery to bring on trips and use the GPU at home. Serious travelers could even bring a spare battery to keep working for longer.
Yes please! And give me the ThinkPad nipple as well. :) If they had those, I'd not bother with even looking at Lenovo. The middle button is so essential to my normal workflow that any other laptop (including my fancy MacBook for work) feels crappy.
I'm guessing the things they made modular are just the low hanging fruit. It's pretty easy to make a USB-C to whatever port, it's a bit harder to make a pluggable battery in a slot that can also support a GPU.
I don't know if I'd recommend it, but if you are absolutely set on having the Thinkpad nipple -- I don't use it, even if I really want the Thinkpad trackpad -- the factory that made the original IBM Model M keyboards is still in business somewhere in Kentucky. IIRC the employees bought it or something when IBM stopped making the things. They offer a nipple keyboard, goes by the name of "Endura Pro". checks Unicomp. That's the remnants in the US of the IBM business; the Chinese Lenovo purchased the laptops and also do the Trackpoint.
I got one like twenty years back, and while the actual buckling-spring keyswitches on the keyboard are pretty much immune to time, I wore out the switches on the mouse buttons, so I don't know if I can give a buy recommendation for the mouse-enabled version (though maybe they improved the switches there). But if you really, really like it, that might be worthwhile for you. Last I looked they were still making them.
checks
They've got a message up saying that a supplier of a component used in that keyboard went under due to COVID so they suspended production. I don't know what the status is on that.
https://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=EnduraPro
Keep in mind that this is a very large, heavy keyboard that you could brain someone with; if you're going to haul it around with a laptop, it's going to be larger and heavier than the laptop. Mentioning it mostly since I figure that you might use it at some location where you could leave the keyboard.
The thing is, I only like the Trackpoint in a laptop. It's really nice to scroll while holding the middle mouse button and just shifting my finger. That way, my hand is ready to type, unlike using the trackpad, where I have to move my hands to type, and it works well in my largely keyboard-driven workflow (ViM for text editing, Trackpoint for web browsing).
On a desktop, I have multiple screens and way more real estate, so the Trackpoint isn't nearly as effective and it's worth using the mouse instead.
But I honestly don't use my laptop all that often, so it's something I'm fine doing without. But all other things being similar, I'll prefer the Trackpoint since it's a nice value add.
It's cool that they're making those keyboards though. I have and nice mechanical keyboards, so I'm not looking for one, but I would be very interested in a Framework-compatible keyboard with a Trackpoint.
The document mentions a lot of US laws. I wonder if they try the same over in the EU.
I'm guessing it wouldn't hold. But I'm in the US, so I'll just avoid their phones going forward, and will probably avoid their laptops and whatnot as well just due to a lack of trust.
Yeah, it's a Yoga
Oh, that shit is soldered on...
I mean, I did see that on some laptops, but only those cheap things in €150 range (new) which even use eMMC for storage.
It became pretty common even on higher end laptops when they switched to DDR5, but some manufacturers are starting to go back to socketed RAM.
Yup, all Apple laptops have soldered RAM for some years now...
These days I don’t realistically expect my RAM requirements to change over the lifetime of the product. And I’m keeping computers longer than ever: 6+ years where it used to be 1 or 2.
People have argued millions of times on the internet that Apple’s products don’t meet people’s needs and are massively overpriced. Meanwhile they just keep selling like crazy and people love them. I think the issue comes from having pricing expectations set over the in race-to-the-bottom world of commoditized Windows/Android trash.
I upgraded my personal laptop a year or so after I got it (started with 8GB, which was fine until I did Docker stuff), and I'm probably going to upgrade my desktop soon (16GB, which has been fine for a few years, but I'm finally running out). My main complaint about my work laptop is RAM (16GB I think; I'd love another 8-16GB), but I cannot upgrade it because it's soldered, so I have to wait for our normal cycle (4 years; will happen next year). I upgraded my NAS RAM when I upgraded a different PC as well.
I don't do it very often, but I usually buy what I need when I build/buy the machine and upgrade 3-4 years later. I also often upgrade the CPU before doing a motherboard upgrade, as well as the GPU.
I might agree if Apple hardware was actually better than alternatives, but that's just not the case. Look at Louis Rossmann's videos, where he routinely goes over common failure cases that are largely due to design defects (e.g. display cable being cut, CPU getting fried due to a common board short, butterfly keyboard issues, etc). As in, defects other laptops in a similar price bracket don't have.
I've had my E-series ThinkPad for 6 years, with no issues whatsoever. The USB-C charge port is getting a little loose, but that's understandable since it's been mostly a kids Minecraft device for a couple years now, and kids are hard on computers. I had my T-Mobile series before that for 5-ish years until it finally died due to water damage (a lot of water).
Apple products (at least laptops) are designed for aesthetics first, not longevity. They do generally have pretty good performance though, especially with the new Apple Silicon chips, but they source a lot of their other parts from the same companies that provide parts for the rest of the PC market.
If you stick to the more premium devices, you probably won't have issues. Buy business class laptops and phones with long software support cycles. For desktops, I recommend buying higher end components (Gold or Platinum power supply, mid-range or better motherboard, etc), or buying from a local DIY shop with a good warranty if buying pre built.
Like anything else, don't buy the cheapest crap you can, buy something in the middle of the price range for the features you're looking for.
In my opinion disadvantages of user-replaceable RAM far outweigh the advantages. The same goes for discrete GPUs. Apple moved away from this and I expect PC manufacturers to follow Apple’a move in the next decade or so, as they always do.
Here's how I see the advantages of soldered RAM:
The risk of physical damage is so incredibly low already, and energy use of RAM is also incredibly low, so neither of those seem important.
So that leaves performance, which I honestly haven't found good numbers for. If you have this, I'm very interested, but since RAM speed is rarely the bottleneck in a computer (unless you have specific workloads), I'm going to assume it to be a marginal improvement.
So really, I guess "smaller" is the best argument, and I honestly don't care about another half centimeter of space, it's really not an issue.
This is where you're mistaken. There is one thing that integrated RAM enables that makes a huge difference for performance: unified memory. GPUs code is almost always bandwidth limited, which why on a graphics card the RAM is soldered on and physically close to the GPU itself, because that is needed for the high bandwidth requirements of a GPU.
By having everything in one package, CPU and GPU can share the same memory, which means that you eliminate any overhead of copying data to/from VRAM for GPGPU tasks. But there's more than that, unified memory doesn't just apply to the CPU and GPU, but also other accelerators that are part of the SoC. What is becoming increasingly important is AI acceleration. UMA means the neural engine can access the same memory as the CPU and GPU, and also with zero overhead.
This is why user-replaceable RAM and discrete GPUs are going to die out. The overhead and latency of copying all that data back and forth over the relatively slow PCIe bus is just not worth it.
Do you have actual numbers to back that up?
The best I've found is benchmarks of Apple silicon vs Intel+dGPU, but that's an apples to oranges comparison. And if I'm not mistaken, Apple made other changes like a larger bus to the memory chips, which again makes comparisons difficult.
I've heard about potential benefits, but without something tangible, I'm going to have to assume it's not the main driver here. If the difference is significant, we'd see more servers and workstations running soldered RAM, but AFAIK that's just not a thing.
I understand the scepticism, but without links of what you've found or which parts in particular you consider dubious claims (ram speed can be increased when soldered, higher speeds lead to better performance, etc) it comes across as "i don't believe you, because i choose to not believe you"
LTT has made a comparison video on ram speeds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-WFetQjifc
Do you need proof that soldered ram can be made to run faster?
Yes, and the results from that video (i assume, I skimmed it, but have watched similar videos) is that the difference is negligible (like 1-10FPS) and you're usually better off spending that money on something else.
I look at the benchmarks between the Intel MacBook Pro and the M1 MacBook Pro, and both use soldered RAM, yet the M1 gets so much better performance, even on non-GPU tasks (e.g. memory-heavy unit tests at work went from 3-5min to 45-50sec from latest Intel to M1). Docker build times saw a similar drop. But it's hard for me to know what the difference is between memory vs CPU changes. I'd have to check, but I'm guessing there's also the DDR4 to DDR5 switch, which increases memory channels.
The claim is that proximity to the CPU explains it, but I have trouble quantifying that. For me, a 1-10FPS drop isn't enough to reduce repairability and expandability. Maybe it is for others though, but if that's the difference, that's a lot less than the claims they seem to make.
The video has a short section on productivity (i.e. rendering or compiling). That part is probably the most relevant for most people. Check the chapter view in YouTube to jump directly to it.
I think a 2x performance improvement is plausible when comparing non-soldered ram to the Apple silicon, which goes even further and has the memory on the die itself. If, of course, ram is the limiting factor.
The advantages of upgradable, expandable ram are obvious. But let's face it: most people don't need and even less use that capability.
Looks about the same as the rest. Big gains for handbrake, pretty much nothing for anything else. And that makes sense, because handbrake will be doing lots of roundtrips to the GPU for encoding.
On the package, not the die. But perhaps that's what you meant. On die would be closer to a massive cache like on the X3D AMD chips.
The performance improvement seems to be that Apple has a massive iGPU, not anything to do with RAM next to the CPU. So in CPU-only benchmarks, I'd expect the lion's share of the difference to be CPU design and process node, not the memory.
Also, unified memory isn't particularly new, APUs have supported it for years. It's just not well utilized by devs because most users have dGPUs. So I think the main innovation here is Apple committing to it and providing tooling for devs to utilize the unified memory better, like console manufacturers have done.
So I guess that brings a few more questions:
I guess we're kind of seeing it with the gaming PC handhelds, like Steam Deck and Ayaneo etc al, so maybe that'll become more mainstream.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=b-WFetQjifc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The thing with benchmarks is that they only show you the performance of the type of workload the benchmark is trying to emulate. That’s not very useful in this case. Current PC software is not build with this kind of architecture in mind so it was never designed to take advantage of it. In fact, it’s the exact opposite: since transferring data to/from VRAM is a huge bottleneck, software will be designed to avoid it as much as possible.
For example: a GPU is extremely good at performing an identical operation on lots of data in parallel. The GPU can perform such an operation much, much faster than the CPU. However, copying the data to VRAM and back may add so much additional time that it still takes less time to run it on the CPU, a developer may then choose to run it on the CPU instead even if the GPU was specifically designed to handle that kind of work. On a system with UMA you would absolutely run this on the GPU.
The same thing goes for something like AI accelerators. What PC software exists that takes advantage of such a thing?
A good example of what happens if you design software around this kind of architecture can be found here. This is a post by a developer who worked on Affinity Photo. When they designed this software they anticipated that hardware would move towards a unified memory architecture and designed their software based on that assumption.
When they finally got their hands on UMA hardware in the form of an M1 Max that laptop chip beat the crap out of a $6000 W6900X.
We’re starting to see software taking advantage of these things on macOS, but the PC world still has some catching up to do. The hardware isn’t there yet, and the software always lags behind the hardware.
It’s coming, but Apple is ahead of the game by several years. The problem is that in the PC world no one has a good answer to this yet.
Nvidia makes big, hot, power hungry discrete GPUs. They don’t have an x86 core and Windows on ARM is a joke at this point. I expect them to focus on the server-side with custom high-end AI processors and slowly move out of the desktop space.
AMD has the best papers for desktop. They have a decent x86 core and GPU, they already make APUs. Intel is trying to get into the GPU game but has some catching up to do.
Apple has been quietly working towards this for years. They have their UMA architecture in place, they are starting to put some serious effort into GPU performance and rumor has it that with M4 they will make some big steps in AI acceleration as well. The PC world is held back by a lot of legacy hard and software, but there will be a point where they will have to catch up or be left in the dust.
"unified memory" is an Apple marketing term for what everyone's been doing for well over a decade. Every single integrated GPU in existence shares memory between the CPU and GPU; that's how they work. It has nothing to do with soldering the RAM.
You're right about the bandwidth though, current socketed RAM standards have severe bandwidth limitations which directly limit the performance of integrated GPUs. This again has little to do with being socketed though: LPCAMM supports up to 9.6GT/s, considerably faster than what ships with the latest macs.
The only way discrete GPUs can possibly be outcompeted is if DDR starts competing with GDDR and/or HBM in terms of bandwidth, and there's zero indication of that ever happening. Apple needs to puts a whole 128GB of LPDDR in their system to be comparable (in bandwidth) to literally 10 year old dedicated GPUs - the 780ti had over 300GB/s of memory bandwidth with a measly 3GB of capacity. DDR is simply not a good choice GPUs.
Wrong. Unified memory (UMA) is not an Apple marketing term, it’s a description of a computer architecture that has been in use since at least the 1970’s. For example, game consoles have always used UMA.
Again, wrong.
While iGPUs have existed for PCs for a long time, they did not use a unified memory architecture. What they did was reserve a portion of the system RAM for the GPU. For example on a PC with 512MB RAM and an iGPU, 64MB may have been reserved for the GPU. The CPU then had access to 512-64 = 448MB. While they shared the same physical memory chips, they both had a separate address space. If you wanted to make a texture available to the GPU, it still had to be copied to the special reserved RAM space for the GPU and the CPU could not access that directly.
With unified memory, both CPU and GPU share the same address space. Both can access the entire memory. No RAM is reserved purely for the GPU. If you want to make something available to the GPU, nothing needs to be copied, you just need to point to where it is in RAM. Likewise, anything done by the GPU is immediately accessible by the CPU.
Since there is one memory pool for both, you can use RAM more efficiently. If you have a discrete GPU with 16GB VRAM, and your app only needs 8GB VRAM, that other memory just sits there being useless. Alternatively, if your app needs 24GB VRAM, you can’t run it because your GPU only has 16B, even if you have lots of system RAM available.
With UMA you can use all the RAM you have for whatever you need it for. On an M2 Ultra with 192GB RAM you can use almost all of that for the GPU (minus a little bit that’s used for the OS and any running apps). Even on a tricked out PC with a 4090 you can’t run anything that needs more than 24GB VRAM. Want to run something where the GPU needs 180MB of memory? No problem on an M1 Ultra.
It has everything to do with soldering the RAM. One of the reason iGPUs sucked, other than not using UMA, is that GPUs performance is almost limited by memory bandwidth. Compared to VRAM, standard system RAM has much, much less bandwidth causing iGPUs to be slow.
A high-bandwidth memory bus, like a GPU needs, has a lot of connections and runs at high speeds. The only way to do this reliably is to physically place the RAM very close to the actual GPU. Why do you think GPUs do not have user-upgradable RAM?
Soldering the RAM makes it possible to integrate a CPU and an non-sucking GPU. Go look at the inside of a PS5 or XSX and you’ll see the same thing: an APU with the RAM chips soldered to the board very close to it.
LPCAMM is a very recent innovation. Engineering samples weren’t available until late last year and the first products will only hit the market later this year. Maybe this will allow for Macs with user-upgradable RAM in the future.
What use is high bandwidth memory if it’s a discrete memory pool with only a super slow PCIe bus to access it?
Discrete VRAM is only really useful for gaming, where you can upload all the assets to VRAM in advance and data practically only flows from CPU to GPU and very little in the opposite direction. Games don’t matter to the majority of users. GPGPU is much more interesting to the general public.
Apologies, my google-fu seems to have failed me. Search results are filled with only apple-related results, but I was now able to find stuff from well before. Though nothing older than the 1990s.
Do you have an example, because every single one I look up has at least optional UMA support. The reserved RAM was a thing but it wasn't the entire memory of the GPU instead being reserved for the framebuffer. AFAIK iGPUs have always shared memory like they do today.
I don't disagree, I think we were talking past each other here.
Here's a link to buy some from Dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-camm-memory-upgrade-128-gb-ddr5-3600-mt-s-not-interchangeable-with-sodimm/apd/370-ahfr/memory. Here's the laptop it ships in: https://www.dell.com/en-au/shop/workstations/precision-7670-workstation/spd/precision-16-7670-laptop. Available since late 2022.
gestures broadly at every current use of dedicated GPUs. Most of the newfangled AI stuff runs on Nvidia DGX servers, which use dedicated GPUs. Games are a big enough industry for dGPUs to exist in the first place.
What kind of disadvantages do you see?
User replaceable RAM is slow, which means you can’t integrate the CPU and GPU in one package. This means a GPU with it’s own RAM, which has huge disadvantages.
Even a 4090 only has 24GB and slow transfers to/from VRAM. The GPU can only operate on data in VRAM, so anything you need it to work on you need to copy over the relatively slow PCIe bus to the GPU. Then once it’s done you need to copy the results back over the PCIe bus to system RAM for the CPU to be able to access it. This considerably slows down GPGPU tasks.
Ah yeah, I see. That's definitely a downside if you work with something where that becomes a factor.