Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference?
For years with every other OEM I have bought the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and saved $800 or so buying the largest memory sticks that work with the machine from Crucial (R.I.P.) Doesn't work if the memory is soldered to the board though!
Hah, yes, with my cheesegrater Mac Pro 2019, Apple wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (to go from 32 to 192GB).
I bought it with 32 and OWC sold me the exact same sticks of memory (manufacturer, timings) for $1,050.
Same. $3,000 for 8TB of SSD. $1,200 for 4 x 2TB Samsung 990 Pros and a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe enclosure. Which actually ran about 500MB/s faster than the Apple SSD.
> Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference?
Yes but to a point. Like Microsoft raised their Surface series prices. There's internal threshold of what they can tolerate before raising prices.
You can see the price and trend here: https://www.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
Yet, remember that costs are more complex with currencies and shipping prices.