Despair

It was more so a comment that they could have used a connector for the ram to make it user serviceable, instead of soldered on, and I combined it with a sentence that the storage should be user serviceable and upgradable instead of making my earlier comment overly explicit/wordy. The quote I took from ifixit right above even says that the mobile chip is why it was limited to 8 GB of RAM.

Some changes would have to the layout be made to accommodate fitting a physical stick instead of just the soldered modules, but there’s CAD software that plots traces, so that really shouldn’t be an issue.

All it takes is putting a SODIMM socket into the device instead of soldering in the RAM, making it possible to salvage the device if the RAM begins to fail. It’s a basic laptop, meant for browsing/writing documents, I can’t really see anyone swapping in 16 gb of ram to a device like this, and seeing any performance uplift.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years

The laptop is built on an A18 Pro, a mobile chip first seen in the iPhone 16 Pro, which limits the machine to 8 GB of RAM. Storage comes in 256 or 512 GB, and whichever one you buy is the one you keep.

https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/search?s=sodimm&filter[memoryType_uFilter]=DDR5%2CDDR4&order=product.price.asc
They could have easily made the RAM and Storage user serviceable/upgradeable, and from what I can find, they don’t provide a way for the enduser to expand storage with a secondary SSD/HDD either, so you’re either forced to carry around an external hard drive for a product that is meant to be portable, or use cloud storage where you might not always have reliable access to the internet/data caps.

Anecdotal, but the only component that has ever failed on me is a hard drive, if that happened to me on the new mac book, it would be e-waste.