Ram being soldered should not be an issue and of the 6 laptop over the past ten years have never had an issue with the ram needing to be replaced.
Your right it throttles as I ran Intel burn test and would hit 3ghz then 2.5 then 2.8 then 2.3,2.0 act.but who in there right mind would ever load the CPU that hard during normal usage.
Ran 3d 01 and saw very little throttle and max core temp was 73c
The throttling isn't necessarily due to the heat issues, though it can be but that's based on the manufacturer's HSF. The throttling is due to the TDP constraints the chip is under. If you're paying for $300 for a chip you'd expect that chip to provide $300 worth of performance, otherwise why not opt to buy an i3 or an i5? The Turbos in the 35W chips and the 17W ULVs (and LVs) act differently. The Turbo in a 35W chip can give you a consistent boost in clock speeds whereas the 17W ULVs will give you sporadic performance and persistent throttling. This has to do with the chip being too fat to fit into the 17W TDP. Unfortunately, the cost between an i7 ULV and a base i7 quad isn't much different -- and you can grab a quad with 8threads at 35W so the performance is a significant boost. In essence, if you grab an i7 in an ultrabook then you're paying for something that promises performance that it can't quite deliver in TDP headroom where it won't fit and it costs the same as a 35W CPU. If the format were much smaller then I'd sort of understand, but you can find full-figured curvy i7 quad's in 13.3" notebooks weighing the same as a 13.3" ultrabook alternative. So what exactly am I getting? It's more expensive (as a whole), performs worse, it's the same size and it's got worse battery life.
Just because you've never had an issue with RAM doesn't mean others haven't. I don't need to tell anybody here about the issues with RAM throwing up errors. Having a single stick soldered and going bad, hamstringing your entire Ultrabook so you can't replace it and can't use dual channel is horrible. I'm hoping eDRAM comes soon
To shed a little bit of light on the price issues.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile..._Pricing_to_Popularize_Ultrabooks_Report.html
Another way to reduce the costs of notebooks is to reduce profit margins of actual manufacturers. This is not easy to do, given the fact that gross margins ODMs nowadays are below 7%, according to IHS iSuppli market tracking firm
All-in-all, Intel has reportedly decided to reduce the prices of its ultra low-voltage Core i3 "Ivy Bridge" central processing units in order to make ultrabooks more affordable without further cutting ODMs' profitability or using cheap cases that may eventually crack and returned to stores, which will damage reputation of ultrabooks and PC suppliers. The reduction on Core i3 ULV chips will be in $25 - $27 range, said Cody Acree, an analyst with Williams Financial Group, citing Chinese-language Commercial Times news-paper.
At present Intel has only one mobile Core i3 chip with 17W thermal design power that is suitable for ultrabooks: the model i3-3217U with two cores, 1.80GHz clock-speed, 3MB cache and Intel HD 4000 graphics core. Right now Intel sells the chip for $225, hence the $25 - $27 slash will be over 11%, which seems to be a rather significant, yet not a dramatic price-cut that changes everything.
I believe I read elsewhere that prices were also decreasing on i5 ULVs as well, so obviously Intel is well aware of the current issues with pricing and Ultrabooks, but 10-15% decrease in the chip's cost doesn't equate to a significant decrease in the overall cost of an Ultrabook. They're just too expensive at the moment and while that is changing, there haven't been significant cost cuts. If I can buy a 17W i5 for $XX and the same (and lower) price I can grab an i5 35W laptop with the same weight and better battery life, why would I opt for the Ultrabook?
I'd like to see smaller and thinner notebooks with less processing power but instead of selling them as fashion accessories like the MBA at roughly the same price, maybe we should be seeing cheaper Ultrabooks less focused on competing with Apple. The Ultrabook manufacturers won't win against Apple if they're priced too close to them. Something like a netbook 2.0 with better graphics, more horsepower and the price of a regular 35W laptop, ~$500-$700.