[awinder]

Apple's had this model for over a decade at least where the base models are fairly priced but you can really make the thing uncompetitively priced through outrageous ram/storage upgrade pricing. That's exactly where things go off the rails -- in fact, it's pretty apparent to me that Apple is normalizing profit margins over expected upgrade volumes (so that entry level machine sells at lower than the profit margin apple wants, and they make it up by making ram/ssd upgrade carry higher profit margins).

For the life of me, I can't / won't understand why Apple does this. It's a needlessly obtuse move on their part. It's the kind of thing that makes you start soldering ram & ssd to the motherboard in order to protect your biz pricing model; wouldn't it be easier to re-evaluate that biz model?

[_ph_]

Yes, their upgrades had always been expensive, but at a price point, where would be willing to pay the markup for the convenience and simplicity. Today I fear, that the pricing is driving away a lot of users. I would be interested in a new laptop, but I am not going to pay 2000€ for an Air with 16/512. And that doesn't include mandatory Apple care. The company I work for basically has dropped Macs from the list of available machines.

[asark]

$100 would be old-school Apple markup price for 8GB of memory at current prices (under $50 for good, fast laptop memory). Instead they want $200. It's nuts.

If their memory and disk upgrades were $100/step—which is still very high—I'd have probably already bought an Air to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro (the new Pros are now solidly out of my price range for a personal machine) but they're double that, so instead I've given them $0.

[_ph_]

I am in the same boat. I don't need a laptop urgently, but would be willing to spend up to 1500 for the named configuration of 16/512g. As it is, the last Apple laptop I bought was the late 2008 Macbook. Which already had 4g of main memory for around 1200€.

There is also an elphant in the room: the keyboards. Until shown otherwise, I wouldn't trust their longlivity beyond the 4 years waranteed by Apple.

[JoshTko]

Auto manufacturers, Airlines, everyone does this.