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Comment by borisk | Hacker News Reader

SoC RAM let's the vendor abuse the user. The 8GB needed to go from 8GB to 16GB on a MacBook Air cost Apple less than $10, but it charges the customer extra $200 for it.

Don't see how Apple makes more money is a good thing - it means millions of their clients have less money left.

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"on a MacBook Air cost Apple less than $10"

I don't think $200 is justified nor do I want to defend Apple... but where do you get 8GB with 100 GB/s bandwidth for $10?

Am I right that you as a consumer want to get the memory at the price Apple gets it from the fabs? That's a bit silly.

Right, but 20x seems like excessive

Not as silly as a 1900% markup.

I can go buy two sticks of 6400MHz DDR5 for $20 per 8GB, to match the bus width and speed. The manufacturer might be paying more than $10 for the chips, but not much more. I don't know if I should expect much price difference between DDR5 and LPDDR5?

6400 MHz * 64 bit = 51.2 GBps. Apple's laptops memory bandwidth varies between 100-400 GBps.

Regardless, I'd want Apple to have two additional LPDDR5 slots. The system could swap there or have a tiered memory.

Where did you get 64 bits though? That's a single stick, and normal devices use two sticks in parallel. They are in the range of 100GB/s.

Sure, although we were talking about $10.

And again as a reminder, we agree that Apple's RAM pricing is ridiculous.

We were talking about $10 for Apple to buy raw RAM chips.

I showed that a company can buy those chips, put them on boards, package them, ship them in tiny quantities, market them, and support them for a total cost of $20.

How much do you think those things cost? They all need to be subtracted from the $20, and also Apple can probably get a better wholesale deal than the brand I was looking at.

I'm not saying $10 is definitely right, but I think it's a pretty good guess.

I'm not sure what they cost to Apple (can they use standard parts?), but I'm also pretty sure other laptops don't have up to 400 GBps memory bandwidth like Apple's Max laptop lineup.

So there's something they're doing pretty differently.

That said 8->16 GB should be more like $50, not $200.

They're getting more bandwidth by having more chips in parallel. It makes their CPUs more expensive but it doesn't affect the price per gigabyte of memory at all.

They do use LPDDR5, which was harder for me to find a price on, but so do lots of other laptops, and I don't know if it's more or less expensive than DDR5.

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