btw i’ve radically changed my view on that aspect (at least for laptops it’s great), because in most cases it’s lightyears faster than removable one and less pricey.
Most important characteristics of RAM are balance of:
- Make absolutely sure it’s anything other than Kingston!!!
- Capacity
- Highest frequency you can get
- Lowest timings you can get
- Lowest voltage you can get
So, in case you can instantly get 3-5 covered with almost any soldered RAM on laptop market (compared to dedicated crap they usually sell, unless it’s 4000 $ Dell laptop and buying good replacement ain’t gonna be cheap at all), although you still need to check all that yourself, you only have to get capacity that fits your needs and will likely be decent for next 10-15 years (32-128 Gb sounds good for absolute most cases).
In terms of reliability if you buy a laptop with any RAM, but especially soldered RAM - it’s your personal duty to stresstest the living sh*t out of that CPU / RAM for at least 48 hours straight, to make sure it works perfectly, if RAM works - it works, it’s nearly impossible to “break” RAM, especially in laptop, unless you actively fry it with going way out of their specs, but you need to have some serious skills to modify UEFI/BIOS in order to do that.
So…If for some reason you need something else in a very long run - it’s very likely to make more sense to buy a new laptop / motherboard.
That being said, it all doesn’t matter anymore, because of that, you can’t do anything about it other than using older sh*ttier laptops or experimenting with RISC-V.