

If I were to hazard a guess, they’re reusing a mobile board design for this somewhat and at least in mobile applications socketed dimms draw 30-50% more juice than soldered. It could also be the npu or gpu requiring the 5-10% extra memory bandwidth they get from being soldered. I do agree that I don’t think it was worth the trade offs from a consumer perspective, but framework seems to generally make good choices so I’m thinking there must’ve been some outside pressure at play affecting the financials of the project or something.
And definitely!