have you ever noticed that the starting at configuration always sucks it cheaps
out on memory and usually has zip all for storage meaning that you're going to
need to upgrade the thing if you want to keep it useful in the longer term which
used to be a much smaller problem cuz you could just pick up the base model
today then upgrade years down the road once your needs have changed and the
best part is you'd often save a bundle of money doing that thanks to the
improved affordability of those replacement parts but you can't do that
anymore RAM and even storage drives are
being soldered directly onto the main boards of everything from phones to
laptops forcing consumers to pay today's price Upfront for their hypothetical
future needs but today's prices aren't even the reason I'm making this video
you see while there can be consumer benefits to more integrated product
designs a convenient side effect for
manufacturers is that whether it's today or tomorrow the only source of otherwise
commodity upgrades for your system is them which has led to a troubling Trend
that I really don't think we're talking about enough the complete and utter
disconnect between market pricing for
commodity memory and storage chips and the prices that are being charged to
Consumers by big Brands like apple and Dell prices that we are forced to pay if
we don't want to be stuck literally forever with a machine that is hamst
strung by its utterly inappropriate starting
configuration let's take a look then at how we got here and see if we can come
up with some ideas for how to fix this going forward and some ideas for a
message from our sponsor MSI don't just
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check it out at the link below it's only fair for me to begin with the advantages
of a tightly integrated Hardware design because they are real and in some cases
provide measurable benefits to a platform let's start with memory have
you ever wondered why your GPU doesn't have memory slots the same way your CPU
does I mean they're certainly capable of being equipped with different
capacities well believe it or not they used to but this practice fell out of
fashion for a number of good reasons for starters slots or sockets add complexity
and therefore cost to the board design which will need to be passed along to
the end user and for what to deal with more compatibility edge cases and user
error and besides who knows better than the GPU designer what memory
configuration would be an ideal match both for the onboard processing power
and for upcoming games all of which is fair enough but the biggest Reason by
far was performance to address the growing demand for High Fidelity visuals
gpus needed to be fed with ever faster memory have you ever wondered why your
GPU memory is laid out like this rather than like like this or like this the
reason is that the shorter you can keep your traces the connections between your
graphics processor and its memory chips the stronger the signal and the higher
you can push your performance and while GPU makers could theoretically just
cover the board in little sockets for RAM chips the interface pins or the pads
or whatever they ended up using would ultimately have the exact same effect of
lengthening the traces that is that they would harm signal integrity and
therefore real world performance and we can see this exact same thing in action
in modern ddr5 laptops have you ever noticed that while you can buy ddr5
sodium sticks they run at much lower speeds compared to systems with lpddr5
memory soldered to the motherboard we did a whole video about a new memory
module standard that Dell is proposing to overcome this challenge but the tldr
is that traditional slotted memory modules suffer from signal Integrity
issues that prevent them from reaching the same speeds as their non- upgradable
counterparts and that puts manufacturers who choose to stick with slots at a
performance disadvantage compared to the ones that don't and this disadvantage
extends to more than just performance from some quick digging ddr5 slots
appear to be much more expensive than ddr4 slots adding as much as $8 each to
the cost of the machine while also taking up valuable internal space that
could be used for cooling or just to make the device Slimmer and sexier so
this trend isn't reversing and in fact
it's accelerating lpddr 5x is coming in
at speeds of up to 8500 megat transfer per second that is double what we can
get from a ddr5 sodium and surprise
surprise it needs to be even closer to the processor in order to achieve these
speeds with ASUS using a technique that they're calling so or system on module
to hit 7,467 megatrans per second what's so you
ask well basically it's exactly what Apple's been doing ever since the
introduction of their M1 Apple silicon where they took the system memory that
they were already soldering to the motherboard and moved it onto the same
package as the processing die which I
guess is actually a pretty strong argument for integration am I right I
mean Apple silicon is pretty impressive from a performance and efficiency
standpoint but here's where I think it becomes
clear that this whole Trend was never just about performance why is storage
being soldered down every argument that we've considered for memory the extra
thickness it adds to the machine the high cost of the interface the
performance all of it falls apart completely for storage which almost
exclusively runs over PCI Express in
modern laptops and while PCI Express
certainly has its own signal Integrity challenges to overcome over the next
decade or so it is designed to scale to the data center level and can easily run
at the distance between a storage chip and the controller on your CPU or S so
this is where the tinfoil hat comes out a little bit then but hold on don't tune
out because I think I can demonstrate why I think that this just comes
straight down to maintaining a monopoly on upgrade parts for your computer all
we've got to do is follow the money because the profit that can be captured
by doing this is astounding now apple is
not the only company to have taken the step of soldering down their storage but
they are the only one that's Brazen enough to put barriers in place that
prevent users from upgrading even their non soldered ssds so we're going to be
picking on them a little bit I want to start by going back to memory Apple
appears to have decided at some point that 8 GB of memory costs
$200 that same figure pops up whether we go from 8 to 16 or from 16 to 24 by
comparison if Apple had heroically charged us a little bit more even for
our MacBook and added some memory slots the average price we found for a single
8 gig ddr5 sodum was around $30 at the
time of recording and even if we assume
rightly that apple is using premium memory chips and we go with the highest
price we found that's $60 which is still
$140 less than what Apple wants for that exact same
capacity where else in the consumer electronics Industry can you get away
with a 300% markup oh don't worry we
found somewhere Let's Talk About Storage
the SSD in a Macbook is not magic as I
mentioned before PC Mac they're all
using the PCI Express bus and the NVMe
protocol just like the m.2 drive that you would stick to a PC or I mean who
cares for that matter a PlayStation the only real difference is they built the
controller for the flash storage chips into their apple silicon rather than
using a discret one oh and I guess they also limited themselves to two nand
flash chips while discrete drives can have space for four or more which
improves capacity at the cost of well
cost um as with Apple's RAM we can't
necessarily Source the exact chips they're using for storage but just like
with the RAM we can bul parket to give you some idea what's going on here The
Sweet Spot for commodity SSD drives these days then is about 2 tab these
will cost around $100 and use four 512
GB nand chips which means the cost to manufacture each of those must be well
under $25 in Apple's base models they're
using only a single nand chip you've
probably seen the stories talking about the reduced storage performance in those
models as a result of that choice by the way and what that means is that
upgrading a MacBook Air or a 13-in MacBook Pro to 512 GB is really just
adding a second 256 GB chip which at the
current price of around 6 cents a gig is going to set apple back
$16 if they were paying retail market pricing which they're not then again of
course neither is the customer that's right Apple wants a whopping
$200 from you for that extra 256 GB of
storage that is more than 12 times the
retail price of that chip integrated into a different prodct I mean that is
just wow and Apple's not the only one
doing it the configurator for the Dell XPS 13 2 in1 allows me to go from 512
gigs to 1 tbte for wait for it
$150 might look downright reasonable next to Apple especially considering how
relatively usable that base configur ation is so I don't have to put oh I
didn't even include this in the script but uh iCloud of course they don't want
any storage on the machine so you can just pay them monthly for iCloud instead
okay that's a whole other level to I need my hat back no it doesn't matter
what matters is that in either case the
SSD is likely the most profitable component in either of these machines
which I mean might be worth it if they were doing something super performant or
they were extra reliable or something that that's what investor disclosure
framework does where they lay out exactly what model they'll be using so
you can compare prices and decide if it's worth it but instead Brands like
apple and Dell are simply putting in whatever they like regardless of the
performance impact again like we saw with those single chip Macbook ssds so
then what's the solution here well this is going to sound pretty wild but I'm
not actually asking Apple to take less margin on their products or even mark up
their up upgrades less contrary to the
narrative Apple isn't even an obscenely profitable company they operate at about
40% gross margin that's a little higher
than Intel similar to us on LTT Store.com by the way no to Edition
screwdrivers coming soon sign up for a notification at the link down below and
actually much lower than others in the technology space like Google NVIDIA and
Texas Instruments all I'm really asking for is misleading starting app pricing
to disappear the performance claims that they make are nearly always based on a
Juiced up config that costs in some cases double or more compared to that
palatable starting at and all of this is because of those awful starting configs
that are by Design barely enough for today let alone for 5 years from now and
because of the ever growing markups on the upgrade parts that can only be
obtained from the manufacturer so I guess I am asking for them to charge a
little less for the upgrades and while I'm at it I'm also asking for some
consideration for the longevity of this Hardware I mean okay okay okay keep the
configurator prices High most customers aren't going to run out and Source
upgrade Parts anyway so you might as well profit from them but for the ones
that do want to swappable components would be a godsend here's a couple ideas
for how to do it for RAM we'll link the video we did on the cam standard which
would bring a big improvement over sodiums and even enable modular lpddr
but even if Cam doesn't take off there's been an interesting uptick in
enthusiasts who are performing DIY upgrades to soldered components on
everything from phones to gpus and so I
guess all I'm asking then is if you must
have your integrated memory because of you know unified memory access for the
cpgp whatever just please don't make any further moves towards locking down
Hardware swaps I mean maybe that's the solution in the longer term as Robotics
and automation get cheaper year by year I mean remember when Scotty from strange
Parts blew the world away with his video showing off the cottage industry players
in China that made it possible for him to build a new iPhone completely from
scratch well maybe it won't be that long before your neighborhood computer shop
has a robot ARM in the back that can do quick reliable component swaps adding
more memory to your MacBook or more storage to your phone even if everything
is all soldered to the main board what I know isn't the solution is just the tra
TR in and recycling programs that are already there they're going to be part
of it but there's a far greater environmental impact in producing a
thousand complete computers even with some recycled materials compared to
producing a thousand chips of memory for upgrades to existing ones I mean Apple
wouldn't need to recycle a th000 more computers down the line if they could
have just been upgraded to be more functional in the first place could they
and you can still sell them iCloud storage just like I can sell you this
segue to our sponsor if you liked this video maybe check out the one we did
upgrading the old Mac Pro from back when Apple let us do wild things like install
memory in computers be own