It is that time of life again.... Time to shop for a new Laptop... And I am finding a new scourge in the mix, that is "Soldered".
I am so absolutely sick of seeing "Soldered" next to the RAM specifications, like I get it for budget machines, I get it for tiny integrations, but for actual working laptops? For laptops marketed as "Business" or as "performance"... oh my word, why are they doing this?
I really hate this whole phase. I have hated the laptop hidden gotcha's for years to be honest, and I'm upset Lenovo have joined the price crunch unupgradable ewaste train.
My current machine being a Lenovo E480, I can and have upgraded the RAM, it has two drive slots (one SATA and one nVME), you can change the battery and it has plenty of USB and aux IO ports all around. The issues I have with it is that one RAM Slot has gone bad; I simply doubled the RAM in the one remaining slot - but really I'm not at end of life. And the CPU being an 8th gen is struggling with my workloads.
My options are to soldier on with the E480, maybe even move all my work into remote virtual machines and use this simply as a terminal into them; but then I would always require network access and that's not always possible.
Or get something new and locked down.
Or a Framework offering, which lets me upgrade to a point.
Or keep shopping... But the ease of finding what I want is very much on the low-side, and I'm a technical user, finding what I want should be simple. But the deck seems stacked with both retailers and system integrators wanting to pass off this shovel ware crap on me.
