In practice, and we know this is true, the more parts you have and more removable parts you have the greater the number of points of failure, fragility and ultimately e-waste. People chuck broken parts, unused parts and depleted batteries haphazardly away in general garbage bins and can't be relied on to recycle the way they promise they will. People are lazy about that.
The e-waste problem is massive and a lot of consumers are blind to the problem because the waste doesn't end up in your soil, your water or your food. It gets shipped off to poor countries and pollutes their lives.
To be in favour of that makes us complicit in a human rights crime and an environmental crime. So I'll take less parts, less points of failure, more rigidity and reliability and easier recycling.
I see the opposite problems. For example, locking down the supply chain so on one can fix a component (such as NAND flash) failure, forcing people to throw a whole board away otherwise good logic board is hardly ecologically responsible.
For example, one’s A1398 had a dead SSD? , one have option get an original SSD blade from somewhere, or upgrade to nvme drives with an adapter. And mind you, its even faster than original.
If one had soldered on SSD, well… one is SOL.
Personally I think it had to do with streamlining production/ locking in customer to their services only than anything else (with benefit of making people pay more up front in configuration.. or pay for iCloud). Less people would pay AppleCare/buy new macbooks if Original parts are readily available for end users (and independent repair shops) to acquire, and have the ability to replace/repair their older machines.
Its not that its impossible to replace parts in todays machine. They just make it a pain or nigh impossible to do so for end users/ind. repair ppl.
Google a video about M1 Air having its on package ram and ssd upgraded. It is indeed possible, just that it would be insanely hard to source the new parts
Think about it, if say a hypothetical Macbook X from Apple have replaceable CPU, RAM, SSD, WIFI cards (these days its soldered and paired), a lot more user would pay for a minimum configuration they need, and then upgrade the parts as needed.
On the other hand, a Macbook Y with soldered on everything. It is guaranteed to generate more revenue.
One would have to “future proof” on configs when they buy. (higher margins)
People whose need exceed the config would have to trade-in/sell and buy new (more margins both ways)
If mitigation is available. (Such as storage full), the easiest choice might be their own services (iCloud storage) since they killed Back to My Mac dead.
And in event of disaster, you’d for sure need backup (no recovery for soldered on ssd)
