> the M1 is now just one step away from becoming a closed system

Just like almost every other computer. Any manufacturer can do this at will with new systems or a firmware update. You are making a strawman argument. The question is whether they will, and the answer is they seem to have no intention to do so given how much time they spent not doing it. Soldering things down has nothing to do with locking down firmware.

> install other full featured OS

All current M1 machines allow you to install any full featured OS. Apple just isn't writing the drivers for us. There is nothing locked down when you run your own OS. I know because I also run macOS kernels under my hypervisor that way and everything works exactly as it does when booting in Apple-signed mode.

Your claim seems to boil down to "Apple changed their hardware in a way that Linux doesn't support". Well, duh. That's what we're fixing. Nothing about that means they're locking anything down.

> That is deliberately misleading and ignorant.

You didn't even bother to read my comment. The M1 Max has a 512-bit RAM bus. That is equal to 8 RAM sticks (DIMMs are 64 bits). Do you want a laptop with 8 RAM sticks?

Each one of those 4 RAM chips on the M1 Max has 8 RAM dies internally, each handling 16 bits as independent channels, for a total of 128 bits per chip. Typical DDR RAM chips as used in DIMMs are 8 bits each (which is why you get 8 per DIMM to make 64 bits). You would need 64 such chips to reach the same bus width (and thus similar bandwidth).

You just can't make that modular short of putting your RAM on a thousand-pin LGA package like CPUs themselves, and that'd still increase power consumption (and significantly increase physical size, which again makes the power consumption problem worse as it makes your interconnect longer). It just can't work with DIMMs and with standard non-LP DDR technology.

> On laptops they offer only negligible power savings that doesn't really matter.

Yeah, until you make a laptop that is actually power efficient like this one, and then suddenly it does. These things draw milliwatts when idle and have aggressive RAM power saving that puts channels into low power modes after mere microseconds (I know because I've been investigating the memory controller power management config and benchmarking memory accesses). That's part of how they get amazing battery life. You can't do that with regular DDR RAM. These things will run for a week with light usage, and they can do that because they are based on extremely efficient mobile architectures. Your phone lasts a day; make the battery larger without increasing idle power usage and that's how you get a week.

> the difference power used in modular RAM vs LPDDR is between 1 to 0.5 volt.

It is evident you have little hardware engineering experience if you think power is measured in volts. That's not how it works.

I would advise you to spend some time reading up on high-speed digital interfaces and learn about concepts such as ohm's law, IR loss, capacitance, impedance, eye diagrams, and insertion loss. LPDDR RAM is much lower power than regular RAM precisely because it can optimize for very short interconnects, which is why you won't find DIMMs of it. It's not just about the voltage.