I need a phone with good ingress protection to keep the Enlightened away from my portals!

Good example. John. Seems to be a pretty consistent scoring method. It was marginally more openable (as you say, without damage), but still has soldered components and lots of glue for some parts.

Most MacBooks are easy to trivial to open and replace the battery, at the very least. Many also have easily replaced storage and WiFi cards, though RAM is going the soldered route. They also don't require removal of the display for anything, unless you actually want to replace the display (or possibly the camera).

I think you have it all backwards. Without getting too deep into it, I think you blame other countries too much and automation not enough, and I think it's clear that automation has a higher initial investment cost, discouraging some, but that may change. Further, it's not that conflict with China will cut us off from consumer products, but that our interdependence lowers the chance of major conflict occurring in the first place. I understand the desire for protectionism, but not acknowledging the drawbacks of increased consumer prices and lower economic efficiency overall is being dishonest.

US manufacturing can certainly be a good thing, but mandating it via protectionist policy is pretty anti-free market.

What analysis of the connectors is needed? These are standard Intel LGA sockets.

Why give it better than a 3, iEvan? Putting it on a relative scale would seem to reward mediocrity. It's still really hard to repair since you have to take out the screen and all. 3 is the correct score, compared to the 0 or 1 they'd get if everything were soldered and you couldn't open the thing at all.

Just spitballing, but theoretically, if you *carefully* cut a door in the back of the case, would you have direct access to the RAM to be able to change it out?