But is it really far fetched? I am certain some people somewhere have considered this a big plus and weighted in their decision more than perhaps many of the other reasons for making HW impossible to upgrade.
Yes, making things upgradeable generally adds weight and size to components. Sockets aren't "free", calling it planned obsolescence is absurd. They've been designed to have wired in components for a reason. You may not agree with that reason, say size constraints, but that is the constraints it was designed under. Weighting any decision is: how much will this cost our design? (note, cost here is not just money, its time, size, weight, manufacturing cost, complexity, etc...)
Upgradeability is a feature, if nobody is willing to pay for it, guess what will happen to the feature? Same thing as happened to our own species tails, they became obsolete.
To hit their noise target they'll have substantially modified the gpu package to have much more passive cooling than normal for this gpu. Making that work in a way that allowed end-users to slot in another gpu from an off-the-shelf package would be really hard.
Maybe their next iteration might have replacable gpu cartridges or something? But I can totally see why they wouldn't prioritise this. Not everything companies do is done out of malice.
