Reduce and Reuse is the best way to help pollution, yet Apple is known, famous for Planned Obsolescence and non-repairability
you can not be Environmentally Friendly and maintain the only solution to any problem is to just toss it and buy a new one
And it‘s easily recycled afterwards. The RAM is rarely the issue and I know few non-technical people who ever changed their RAM in a notebook.
Sustainability is really important, but I don‘t think upgradable notebooks make a significant difference at all.
Hardware can be both long-lasting as well as upgradable.
There is a popular myth among the lazy-minded about this, but the fact is that Apple's hardware lasts a lot longer, and is intentionally supported for a lot longer, than competing hardware. This is true for Macs as well as iOS devices. If Apple is "planning" for anything, it's for their stuff to last a lot longer than others' stuff, not the opposite.
This is not planned obsolescence - this is going out of your way to make the repairs harder. I can understand when certain decisions are made for engineering reasons(like say, having the ram soldered on), but this kind of thing when Apple goes to the manufacturer and asks for a version specific only to them so that no one else can buy it, ever - that's just anti-consumer, and I hope the hand of the law will come on them super hard due to this.
As someone who has bounced in and out of Apple products for ~10 years at a time (1985-1995 and 2005-2014), I have a couple of nits.
The last two Mac laptops I had (2009 plastic Macbook, Early 2011 MBP with known heat issues) - both can still run the latest version of Windows 10 adequately for what they are hardware-wise. Every "modern" (as in OSX capable) Mac I have had at some point lost support from the latest version of OSX (which means you lose the ability to upgrade some apps). In some cases, like the 2011 MBP, for seemingly no reason, as it is still a decent computer even now.
While I know a lot of people here like to change their computer every couple of years like it's nothing, I still like to use things I buy for as long as possible before recycling them.
In terms of "hardware lasts a lot longer", I generally agree with that statement, but there have been notable instances of bad designs combined with bad support (and I generally think Apple's support is a notch better than everyone else).
The most notable (in recent times) being the Early 2011 15" MBPs with overheating issues. That thing was a lemon that was poorly handled by Apple. There's still a good chance that I'd still be using a Mac right now had that experience not left a sour taste in my mouth. I've never had a laptop die on me in 20+ years of having laptops (my very first was a Powerbook 170, and I've had a pile of PC and Mac laptops since) outside of that early 2011 MBP, which lasted just over 3 years before it died. It died again after the recall service was performed on it, because they basically just replaced the logic board with the same board having the same design defect. (FWIW, someone else I know who bought the same model had the exact thing happen).