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.

No, it actually does not work that way. I can’t speak to you on whether it’s LPDDR5 or not but it’s on the package which means there’s no way you’re gonna be swapping it. It’s an SoC.

I don’t know what DF said, but by looking at the spec sheet I can tell that the GPU in the Xbox Series X is in between the 6700XT and the 6800. Maybe real world performance is in between 3060 and 3060Ti, but it’s definitely not as low as a 2070. I’ve played on similar cards to the 5700/XT and the new consoles definitely outperform them. I’d guess it varies quite a bit based on the game, but since all I have to go on is the specs I can tell you it’s in between the 6700XT and 6800.

Apple’s components are not the same. The M series chips use on-package ultrafast (I forget what type) memory that’s accessible by the CPU and GPU and cannot physically be swapped, it’s not like before when they soldered the DIMMs for no reason, packaging it this way actually gives a performance benefit. The SSD I will give you being overpriced, but Apple’s SSDs are still super fast and not that bad.

An RX 5700? Not at all. Those are RDNA2 graphics and Zen 2 (3700X, not 2700X), if I recall correctly (I looked it up once upon a time, but don’t remember the exact SKU it was similar to) it’s more like a 6700XT/6800. In raw performance, a 3060Ti would actually be pretty close.

PC is still better in my personal experience, but the consoles are unbeatable value right now and there’s no need to act like they have worse hardware than they do.

Edit: looked it up and the core count is in between 6700XT and 6800, but it’s also clocked lower so it probably performs about in the middle given the slightly lower overhead and higher optimization that you can get on a console.