The Curse of Soldered RAM

The race to make laptops thinner is pointless. I wish I could buy a thicker laptop that is more robust, repairable, expandable, and has better cooling, with the extra space filled with batteries.

I'm stunned that "mapping out" blocks of bad RAM is a thing you can do. It reminds me of the old days when hard disks had to be "low-level formatted" first (ask your parents, kids) and it would ask you for a list of bad sectors to map out. Sometimes hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.

We used to buy Dells with minimum RAM and add quality third party RAM for way less than Dell wanted for it. They also use ram quantity to leverage other specs we're not bothered about. Of course they are moving to soldered.

Like the exact case with phone batteries that are not easily changable by the owner, soldered rams are evil...

LPCAMM2 sockets were supposed to provide all the benefits of soldering while still being a socket. Anyone know the state of adoption?

> I then had to manually transcribe this, which [w]as “fun”.

Can't you select and copy the text in the photo (on most smartphones and PCs at least)?

Bash me all you want, but after CPU, GPU, memory controller & a host of other things integrated in modern System-on-Chips (SoC), I've long held the belief that next logical step would be to integrate RAM.

Optimal: piecemeal. As in: X sockets on a board, each socket takes a chip that adds CPU core(s), GPU cores, and some amount of main RAM. More chips, more powerful computer.

Keyword: socket. Read: replaceable. Bad chip out, good chip in. Slow chip out, faster chip in. Soldered onto board = reliable, but a defect could junk the whole machine.

It it possible to desolder and replace the offending RAM if one were sufficiently motivated? I've seen folks doing that to soldered SSDs in MacBooks

Am I the only one who wonders if there is a way to get the kind of performance we want out of non-soldered components/SOC designs? Like from what I've heard, it's a "physics says no" problem, but I'm not sure if that's actually true (not being an expert in this technology) or if it's just the excuse many companies use to justify soldering everything to make serviceability impossible. And it would be really neat if this is actually being looked into by labs right now (possibly with AI's help), since areas like that are where I think (non) LLM AIs might be very useful. Same thing for medicine, materials, etc.

Since the OP mentions Lenovo, look at their other product lines for ones that still have socketed RAM. I'm currently running an E16 with 40GB RAM, 8GB soldered, 32GB socketed. And aside from that it leaves my previous X1 for dead in terms of performance. Lenovo's replacing the carbon fiber case, the whole reason the X1 line is called "Carbon", with crappy black plastic was the last straw.

Well that was good to learn!

i had to move a very very small resistor in the correct place to make a laptop disregard the soldered ram and only use the sodimm

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