People keep shouting printer like they can just do it like that. Printers are a whole different beast, likely needing a whole seperate team with a different type of engineers. A desktop, given the existing team, is perfectly reasonable.

Calling a product DOA because of soldered ram is just a braindead take. Also, just because the ram isn't upgradable the whole desktop isn't upgradable or repairable? Are you hearing yourself? Get a grip.

Framework mentioned that they worked with AMD extensively to try and find a way for upgradeable memory to be on this board. The fact that they went through iterations of simulations suggests to me that the basis for the motherboard was already largely designed in this stage.

As you mentioned, framework has a finite amount of resources. Once they determined that upgradeable ram is not a valid path forward without sacrificing half the compute capabilities of the APU, what should be their next step? Just can the project that already has a motherboard design? Like folks mentioned, there's nothing really fancy outside of the motherboard. So if that works was already done, it seems financially responsible to me to provide that as an offering. AFAIK they're the only desktop form factor for this apu suitable for a cluster, so I can see why it's worth a gamble after extensive R&D was already invested into designing the hardest part of the product.

@Ulrich The repairable space is a tricky one. They are a company that makes things designed to be taken apart. They have to support it. Supporting every kid that screws up his first CPU install is a no go. GPUs are a nightmare right now with the things literally going on fire. Ok, the ram could be user replaceable but most PC users only upgrade ram when they upgrade the mobo anyway. This is niche but I think it's the only way they could think of doing it without a million support calls.