It’s because AI needs a not a ram. I think Apple did not expect or plan for ai which shows in the fact that only the latest pro phone can have Apple intelligence. It’s because that phone has enough ram.
Now they will boost ram across the board because Apple intelligence will not run well without it.
Depending on pricing, I may actually buy a MacBook in 2025.
I’ve wanted one since the m1, but I’ve held out until 16gb was the starting amount of ram.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but most things and light laptops have had soldered ram for many years now. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far between.
What? Lol nah plenty of laptops have removable RAM. It tended to show up often on the "Ultralight" tier, but outside of that and Chromebooks it's been by no means the norm
It has kind of come with newer laptops being driven to be thinner, and for newer devices, because the old SODIMM format is no longer capable of the throughput/latencies needed for higher speed memory.
From memory, 2.1Ghz DDR5 is where it caps out. Anything faster, like 2.8 GHz either requires it to be soldered, or one of the new formats like the one Dell has started using.
The replacement you're talking about is called [CAMM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module\)) and personally I'm excited about it. Not only does it support faster speeds than SO-DIMM, it takes up less physical space. And I believe you can't even put LPDDR on a SODIMM, so CAMM should also use less power?
But RAM on the non-mac side is plentiful and relatively cheap. For the same cost of that base model 16GB Mac you can get a PC laptop with 64GBs of RAM and plenty of storage
With all that RAM and storage you can slap Linux on it and run Windows on a VM for that work software that doesn't work under alternatives such as Wine
Or alternatively run a hackintosh-VM then you can have MacOS without supporting Apples user-hostile decisions