Dunno. Apple do what Apple do. Presumably there was a cost benefit to soldering/unsoldering components.

As for mine: it's pretty solid. It's a 2014/with a 3ghz i5 and 8gb of Ram, and honestly, the RAM will be the issue if I spin up much more.

It's currently running

• Immich
• Grimmory
• Mealie
• Invidious
• Jellyfin
• Navidrome
• Nextcloud
• SearXNG

and constantly hovers around 6.5gb in active use.

That era of Macs were mid-SSD, so mine came with the option for a Fusion drive that wasn't originally specced, so I bought an adapter and now it has / and /boot on a 250gb M.2 and /home on a 1tb SATA SSD. And a 2TB external HDD is where Nextcloud lives. Honestly, I almost never have any trouble with it. It falls over once every six weeks or so, but a quick reboot and its back up on rails again.