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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

They aren't doing it to save 20$ per machine, they are doing it to make the higher price of a 16GB machine seem more reasonable than if it was the base model.

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Yeah this screams classic Apple. Advertise the cost of the Mac as lower, but with a shitty option that most people will have to upgrade. Majority are not going to want to buy a 8gb laptop for that kind of money and not just bump it up to 16gb.

This reminds me of how movie theatres offer a small, medium and large but the large popcorn only costs slightly more than the medium, thus enticing you to go for the large.

Yes, not just classic Apple but classic lots of things. Cars are sold the same way

I’ll add classic Lenovo to the list, whose base level thinkpad are underspeced and have terrible screens. The fact that apple doesnt perpetually claim their machines are on sale is their last bastion of superiority

What do you mean? I scored a sweet ThinkPad deal — $2,000 off using code “SUCKER” at checkout!

You used to be able to replace/extend ThinkPad parts quite easily. We'd buy base models exclusively and just add extra stick of ram and flip the CD rom to another hard drive or battery - those were super cheap high quality laptops.

Only recently Lenovo started to solder their parts so base models lost their power :(

It's worth noting that they are charging $200 for the 8GB memory upgrade.

The spot price for 16GB of LPDDR4 looks like it's currently ~$8 per DRAMexchange: https://www.dramexchange.com/

They're also charging $200 for a 256GB storage upgrade - spot price of 3D TLC is $3/256Gb ($24 for 256GB) - you can currently buy a 256GB NVMe SSD (full stick with controller) at retail for <$30 as well.

That is like saying the materials the baker needs to bake bread cost 5¢. Why doesn’t the baker price his bread at 5¢?

That might be a somewhat relevant analogy if you had a choice to go somewhere else to buy bread elsewhere, but since both memory and storage are now soldered, you are forced to upgrade for the lifetime of the product at purchase. The relevance on the parts pricing here is to point out that Apple is being extremely abusive in their pricing to their customers.

Many laptops now have soldered RAM, but other vendors have not chosen to do what Apple has done. In HP's premium laptop (Spectre x360 13t), adding 8GB of RAM is a +$70 option. For reference, an 8GB DDR4 SODIMM at retail pricing is about $30.

Also, AFAIK, no other major laptop or mini-desktop manufacturer uses soldered storage like Apple does, so in this case, the retail cost for storage is even more relevant.

These are commodity parts, so there's not any R&D to recoup - this is just profiteering on Apple's part. Especially for the Mac Mini, where there's not the same space constraints, the lack of storage upgradability is also a rather egregious form of forced obsolescence. Fine from a business perspective, but hypocritical for a company that claims to care about the environment.

Well, no. Apple buys RAM chips at that price, and they just have to swap one chip for another. The differential in price from one to the other including all costs is that much. Labour costs and OpEx are not affected by choosing Chip A or Chip B that are essentially identical.

This is pretty much the reason why I'll never will buy apple devices again. Recently I bought iphone 11 for my girlfriend as a present and the price difference between 64GB model (which honestly might as well be a dead brick in this data age) and 256GB model was around 30% in my country which is beyond absurd.

You can call me bitter but this sort of manipulation is making me extremely salty to the point where I'll be having seething hate for the company for the rest of my life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoy_effect

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