Hello, I’ve been uhmming and ahhing over which laptop to buy. I was almost decided on the HP Envy 16 but the HP Envy 17 is a much better fit for me personally (full size sd card slot and number pad). It’s also a couple of hundred pounds cheaper and atm is on sale for under £800 whereas the 16 inch model is going to be about £1100. I never felt comfortable spending over 1k on a laptop but couldn’t seem to get what I needed at a lower price point. The HP envy 16 was a bit of a compromise but has the advantage of upgradeable RAM (and 2 ssd slots but the envy 17 ssd can be upgraded).
I’m just not sure whether it’s too much of a risk to buy the potentially unfixable envy 17 (with a decent amount of RAM of course) and get everything else I was looking for spec wise or whether I should spend a few more hundred and buy the fixable envy 16 and compromise on practical use instead. A compromise obviously has to be made - where would you make it?
Main actual compromise with soldered RAM is that you have to pay through the nose for sensible amount of it and do it all up-front. Depending on your use case for a decent laptop today you’ll want 16 or 32GB RAM - so that you aren’t hampered by it 5 years down the line or so. Some vendors ask plainly absurd amounts of money for it.
As far as laptops go though I have just a general apprehension. It obviously depends on your specific use case, but for a ton of situations a standard PC along with a cheaper laptop will be a better option. This is especially egregious with gaming/workstation - if you think about getting decent GPU/CPU, an external monitor/keyboard/mouse etc, account for upgrades over the years - you quickly run into situation where desktop PC and cheap laptop together cost much less money for the same performance.
On the other hand there is something to be said about convenience of a setup with single powerful laptop and a dock that plugs into your peripherals.
A desktop would definitely be a better machine overall but unfortunately I just don’t have the space for a permanent set up so I need the mobility of a laptop even if I don’t actually take it out of the house at all! So I’m looking at more of a desktop replacement standard laptop which as you point out, have got so pricey.