Yeah, I mostly agree with that. I’m not gonna pretend that I’m a hugely knowledgeable memory nerd, but I do know a bit and I’m pretty sure that having the memory on the package gives some form of benefit, and obviously because it’s on-package you’re not gonna be able to replace it. That said, their soldered DDR4 chips in their older (2016-2019 afaik) laptops were pretty stupid and anti-consumer.

And yes, Apple does charge extra for their machines. I’m happy to pay it because I live in the walled garden and because I’m reasonably sure that they’re not monetizing my data in return for that extra money that I pay them, but I can see why people would be upset about it. I own a custom build as well and while I love tinkering with it (I just did a full transplant into a smaller ITX case, which was a huge pain but super rewarding), my Apple devices just fit my life better. I would never want to do any form of work on my Windows machine, those little creature comforts that you get from having a full ecosystem (seriously, I own and actively use every single class of their products except a desktop Mac) are just without parallel. Nobody has created the ecosystem that they have, and that + privacy is really what you’re paying for when you spend $400 extra for RAM that costs them like, $50 to make.