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Comment by skrause | Hacker News Reader

Even worse is that the RAM upgrade pricing hasn't changed in almost a decade.

When I bought my 2012 MacBook Air more than eight years ago it cost me 100 euros to upgrade from 4 to 8 GB of RAM.

Currently it costs 225 euros in the German Apple Store to upgrade form 8 to 16 GB, which is a higher per GB price than in 2012!

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That's (slightly) unfair because obviously the RAM produced in 2012 isn't the same as the RAM produced in 2020. Better to compare Apple's price against the cost of top-of-the-line RAM available for other laptops. I checked around and it looks like you can get 8GB 3200MHz DDR4 from a highly respected brand for 56 USD, while Apple will sell you some mystery RAM for 200 USD. It's not an (ahem) apples-to-apples comparison because the Apple RAM is closely integrated with the SOC, but I think it's fair to say they're making a comfortable margin.

https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-HX424S14IB2-2400MHz-Unbuffered...

Do we truly believe that on die memory has similar costs? I don't see how this is remotely possible but its going to take tear downs of both configurations to check what is going on; as in are the 8gb units using chips which never had the circuitry or perhaps disabled by hardware and its still there?

I upgraded my MacBook in 2012 from 4 to 16gb for 110 euro... Just put new memory even before first booting

it seens that RAM is now in the package, making it very very hard (almost impossible in practical terms) to upgrade.

Right? Or did I miss something?

yes, right now memory is built-in into the motherboard... So you need to buy overpriced memory from Apple (and it makes me think about leaving Apple platform)

With the new macs, the RAM is on the chip. So even the mini can't be upgraded once you buy it.

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