As usual. Not sure why this is, they could just charge for the labor that it actually costs them to put a different SSD in plus material cost, but no, they always mark up ridiculous amounts. It basically forces people to buy a dummy SSD with the device plus a loose one and then put it in yourself... at least that's what I do for myself and family whenever it saves more than 50 euros and takes me 5-10 minutes (usually it saves ~100 euros to buy extra hardware on top of what you already get in the laptop(!)).

If anyone is interested in unusably tiny and/or slow SSDs, let me know because right now they're just going in e-waste.

(I have similar beef with drinks in restaurants at, e.g., ~100x markup for tap water. Why not just charge a normal price for both the food and the drinks, instead of me having to guess at how much I should be spending on drinks to compensate the normal-priced food? Or make both cheap and charge a table fee, whatever floats their boat. This incentivizes people to not drink enough; usually it's calories where people overingest, not hydration!)

I have literally never seen a restaurant anywhere in the world that charges for tap water, and I eat out constantly. Is this a thing now somewhere?

Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and more limited experience in Luxembourg. (I've been to more places but honestly don't remember what drink prices were like in Finland ten years ago.)

It's often not offered because it sounds like asking for a free drink instead of paying ~13 euros per liter which seems to be the average norm. Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water, which in turn is the same price as any soft drink (demonstrating that the price has nothing to do with cost, it must be paying for the table or something but it doesn't say so I don't know).

Anyway, it's more about places charging dishonest prices to seemingly cover for something else, leaving the consumer to guessing why in the world this might cost so much and just going with another option. I can't imagine it achieves the intended goal, so it doesn't seem like a good idea for either side. If anyone ever did finances for a restaurant or has a better-than-guessing idea why SSDs are priced this way, I'd be very curious.

> Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water,

I don't think I'll be able to make sense of what you're saying until you explain what you mean by "normal water". Are you referring to branded bottled water?

Ah, sorry yes, that was bad phrasing on my part. By normal I meant what was on the menu (water that is branded, bottled, shipped, sometimes stolen) instead of my out-of-the-ordinary request (tap water), but calling that the 'normal' is of course a culture-specific way of thinking, and a cultural feature I do not like.

In these places where bottled water is the norm, do you have to specify what brand you want? Like if they ask what you want to drink and you answer "I'll just have water", is that an incomplete response?

They charge more for these things because people will pay it and they like making more money

Also because the labor costs of service don’t change based on what people are carrying around.

Wait until you find out that every place in the Netherlands and Germany charges you money to take a piss or a dump. Even places like McDonalds and gas stations. Some people make sure it goes on the side of the building instead.

Restaurants don't charge you for toilet usage in NL 0r DE when you are a paying customer, neither does McDonald's. (Yes, it's up for debate whether that's a restaurant :))

It does happen, in certain locations and under certain circumstances. And I really can't blame them, when toilet-only visitors start outnumbering paying customers by a considerable margin. When all your anecdotal data is from Oktoberfest surroundings and the like you might come to certain conclusions.

Are there public restrooms available in those places? If not, that's extremely frustrating. I don't understand why more places don't have public restrooms. People are gonna poop one way or the other.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've bought many a device with the minimum RAM and disk space which I will then throw out and replace with third party stuff. I get why many vendors do it, but I hate the waste. I'm more willing to forgive it in a general-audience company than people who are selling to the kind of technical audience who can all do the swap.

If you search for wtallis in this thread you'll find a technical reason for soldered ram. Can't respond with a link since on mobile, did it several hours ago at home though.

It might have to do with cost, although I'm not sure.

They've clearly learned some things from Apple.

Unfortunately low power ddr4 (lpddr4) does not come on SODIMs, soldered ram is the only way to get it. I know everyone likes to shit on apple about this, (and they definitely should about soldered storage) but there are practical engineering reasons for soldered ram. Note that the framework laptop has abysmal battery life relative to the competition.

Note that modern apple ram is not just soldered but actually in the SoC package. Sucks for upgradability, but that’s how they get 400Gb/s UMA speeds.

In-package RAM vs soldered on the motherboard next to the SoC package makes no difference to the bandwidth: GPUs take the latter approach to achieve equal or higher bandwidth. In either case, having a memory bus wider than 128 bits is a major factor in offering higher bandwidth than mainstream platforms. (Wide memory buses are easier to lay out on a PCB when routing to BGA memory packages than [SO]DIMM slots.)

But why doesn't it come on SODIMMS? Is there a technical reason for that or does nobody make the modules because all vendors use soldered?