Fair enough. Although Asus sells at least one laptop with 8 GB of soldered RAM, too.

Granted, it’s “only” a Chromebook, but still.

Chromebooks with low RAM are fine for many use cases. I've got a chromebook with only 4GB of RAM and its perfectly fine for web browsing or watching streaming which is the only things I use it for.

Soldered RAM is almost always a bad thing, no matter the size. Maybe when it’s the most the mainboard can support it’s not too bad but even then you’re out of luck if it ends up dying.

I used to think that too, but then I realized that the way I use computers (and it sounds like you do too) is to keep a unit a long time, take care of it, and use it to its limits (and perhaps beyond). There are millions of users that don't do what we do. They may be young kids that end up breaking the unit before 2 years pass. They may be a fashionista that has to change out their unit when the new fall color comes out (so they may not even own it a year). They may be an older person that only uses it to check facebook to keep up with their kids.

In all of these cases soldered RAM is just fine because the user will never reach the point they need to upgrade it. What they get in return for this is cost savings and likely a smaller (thinner?) unit, that is probably a bit more structurally sound (because it doesn't have to have a door or clips to have the RAM sockets accessible.

For users like you and me, soldered RAM is a bad thing. For most common users they don't care. They don't even know what soldered RAM is.