That’s not how it works.

I think the meaning was meant more as a `Nobody would intend to buy a new sports car with 14" wheels, but they sure love to advertise the price lower prices for sports cars by making a trim that way` type statement than "gee, $3,500 for an SSD!". Edit: the clarity edit of the original seems to agree.

Apple's SSDs are actually priced a bit silly though, but I think that's a different discussion. It was significantly cheaper/GB to upgrade my M4 Mac Mini's internal SSD via 3rd party despite the performance being the same (if not better) than 1st party.

... for the difference between the 256 and 512 version. You could argue that for 3500 USD there should already be more storage than that included. There are even 400 USD Android smartphones with 512 GB of storage.

You removed some words just now, which changes the meaning of the sentence.

> but the base $3.5k spec with only 256 GB is extreme.

The plain meaning of this sentence is "I expect more than 256 GB of storage when paying $3.5K for a device". You can argue for or against that if you like (I don't give a shit, because I would not buy it at any price), but not against something they did not say.

Well from that you could extrapolate 1TB overall cost is actually $400 ($200/512GB). And that a unit without any storage is $3399. A $400 1TB SSD hmmmmmm.

~$200 for that amount of storage is still extreme