for all those interested, the SSD isn't actually soldered. It's just a special form factor; not M.2 or anything common. All modern laptops have soldered processors, it is unfair to ding Apple for doing this when Dell, Lenovo, MSI, ASUS, Acer, Razer, HP, and other companies all do it too. People can easily get a dongle for the USB C, c'mon guys, you're spending ~$4,000 like me, you can afford a single adapter from amazon. The battery life is already significantly better than almost all windows laptops, the only exclusion may the Lenovo ThinkPads. Very few companies offer displays as bright/colorful as Apple.

Lastly, M.2/NVMe would mean sacrificing the speed that these MacBooks ships with today. Why would you rather have a slower SSD with a common form factor when you can have a super fast SSD with a specialized form? They're SSDs anyway, it's highly unlikely for them to fail unless you're writing to the disk and reading from it 24/7/365.