> It absolutely is different. You just said the Mac Mini is upgradable but the Pi is still soldered on.

I'm sorry, you seem to be confused. Soldering is not the problem. Locking up the hardware to have hardware provisioned tier limits to block you from upgrading your own hardware is silly.

And do note, raspberry pi doesn't prevent you from switching RAM chips. The board will continue to work just the same with high capacity variants. But for some reason raspberry pi hardcodes a max memory size that prevents you from using the hardware upgrade you paid for in full.