The Toshiba (!?) laptops that got sold to one of my clients at nearly $1100/ea are pathetic. Basically the same kit you can get for $600-700 at Best Buy. The equivalent MacBook would have been miles better, in terms of build quality and specs. Although, I’m using a ThinkPad E16v2 right now that I am quite pleased with that was $899 with 32GB/1TB. There are reports Apple is getting ready to launch a less expensive MacBook soon. I think the <$1000 options for laptops is about to get rather interesting.
I’m still disappointed to see the days of easy RAM/storage upgrades have largely gone. I was initially suspicious of the reasons offered for why soldering memory directly to the motherboard is necessary, but with a few years of academic engineering experience (I don’t use much of my EE education in my day job), it’s not illogical—as frequency increases, the circuit’s sensitivity to parasitic inductance and capacitance also increases, and connectors/interfaces are a big source of parasitic effects and general nonlinearity. That said, my desktop has traditional DIMM slots, and it’s technically running faster DDR5 than any of my other devices with soldered DDR4 modules.
I charitably assume the difference is laptop’s need for greater efficiencies, but either way it would be nice if the manufacturers hadn’t instantly taken advantage of this new “necessity” to jack up prices on memory and storage quite so aggressively. It’s probably also worth noting that Apple was first to really do this widely, as far as I’m aware, with the M1 chipset. Also worth noting the M1 was groundbreaking, and it’s seemingly magical memory management made it so an Apple M device with ~60% of the memory of its x86 equivalent can perform just as well (if not better). I have an 8GB M1 Mac Mini that’s still quite functional for routine work. 16GB still provides great performance.
But then, my AMD desktop that cost ~$1200 a year ago (with a capable GPU) is sporting 48GB because I could pay a reasonable price for DIMMs that I can plug-in myself. Similar specs on a mass-market machine probably would have run that price up to near $2000.
I’m still disappointed to see the days of easy RAM/storage upgrades have largely gone. I was initially suspicious of the reasons offered for why soldering memory directly to the motherboard is necessary, but with a few years of academic engineering experience (I don’t use much of my EE education in my day job), it’s not illogical—as frequency increases, the circuit’s sensitivity to parasitic inductance and capacitance also increases, and connectors/interfaces are a big source of parasitic effects and general nonlinearity. That said, my desktop has traditional DIMM slots, and it’s technically running faster DDR5 than any of my other devices with soldered DDR4 modules.
I charitably assume the difference is laptop’s need for greater efficiencies, but either way it would be nice if the manufacturers hadn’t instantly taken advantage of this new “necessity” to jack up prices on memory and storage quite so aggressively. It’s probably also worth noting that Apple was first to really do this widely, as far as I’m aware, with the M1 chipset. Also worth noting the M1 was groundbreaking, and it’s seemingly magical memory management made it so an Apple M device with ~60% of the memory of its x86 equivalent can perform just as well (if not better). I have an 8GB M1 Mac Mini that’s still quite functional for routine work. 16GB still provides great performance.
But then, my AMD desktop that cost ~$1200 a year ago (with a capable GPU) is sporting 48GB because I could pay a reasonable price for DIMMs that I can plug-in myself. Similar specs on a mass-market machine probably would have run that price up to near $2000.