alt Hacker NewsThere's also the fact that they were charging $200 to add 8GB of RAM before the prices went up, when that much RAM was something like $70 at retail.
The problem then is that when the supply gets more expensive and you were already charging the maximally-extractive price to customers, they can't eat much more of a price increase, so instead most of it has to come out of margins.
Replies
I think part of what's happening lately is that chip folks are start to realize they can make margin too. Maybe it's possible thanks to consolidation but for sure folks see the crazy margins nvida, apple etc have, and I suspect they're like - we want that too!
I was configuring my M5 MBP preorder and 48=>64 was 250 EUR so not sure if they cut prices or your numbers are outdated ?
Actually that is relatively cheaper than Apple has ever sold ram. They would always charge $200 for each ram upgrade and it might have been only 4gb or less back then.
The twist now though is they started soldering in the RAM with the retina macbook, so you can't run around apple's extortionate pricing like you could in the past and just buy components off the market.
Such a stupid cartoon evil villain move too, just to force us into getting RAM from them. I have never been memory bandwidth bound (Apple's excuse for soldering in the RAM) in my life and yet I am forced to buy computers that optimize for this at the expense of things I actually care about like serviceability. And also consider the fact it incentivizes people to buy more RAM than they need today in effort to future proof their device, in a time of RAM shortages. And who knows maybe by the time that RAM amount is relevant the CPU can no longer keep up so the hoarding might not even be for anything either.