Hacker News Reader

Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

RAM pricing is ridiculous, no one will order it like that, you can buy RAM for 1/3 the price and just replace it yourself. But i will buy a stock version. Plus a Dell 4K 28'' monitor. As soon as my Christmas bonus arrives :)

View on HN

Where are you getting 1866MHz DDR3 ECC RAM for less than those prices?

The cheapest 8GB module I could find[1] is £75 ex VAT, 4x is £300 which is approx. $490USD. I think this compares fairly well with the $400 upgrade pricing on that rumour page.

[1]http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT8G3...

Newegg has 16GB and a 4GB sticks for $209.99 and $72.99 respectively. I have no idea if they would work with the Mac Pro though.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...

Yes real prices announced by Apple are not that bad. With this being ECC memory, that is okay - bit overpriced, but not an outright ripoff.

Apple's RAM prices are no longer extortionate. While you can certainly find it cheaper, there's the convenience factor to consider. Also, while Apple has been good about this in the past, there's no guarantee the AppleCare warranty will cover 3rd party memory.

In their new laptops, it's soldered to the system board so you can't swap it, anyway. (So max it out up front)

Seems like everybody does this, except companies (which is probably why manufacturers still slap these high prices). It's ECC memory, though, I think it's more expensive than non-ECC (still not that expensive).

What I see is most Mac owners that buy out of their own pocket have the basic models. And the team-leaders / management types always bight the overpriced stuff because the company is paying. (It mildly hacks me off when I see this in academia, where most research is publicly funded.)

Academics (like other knowledge workers) are fairly well paid, so making them waste time by using crappy equipment does nobody any favours.

In academia — or at least in STEM and the social sciences — quite a lot of people need a somewhat high-spec machine (e.g. to run quantitative models on large data sets, compile code, process large LaTeX documents, etc).

And the basic model Macs generally come with woefully little RAM and rather small SSDs. So I'm not sure it's reasonable to be hacked off.

Computer purchasing in Academia is strictly controlled by procurement rules and other types of regulations. One magic number is $5000- universities normally doesn't charge overhead for capital investments above this, but the full purchase has to be done at the same time. This means that I'm not allowed to buy RAM separately from the computer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com