[borisk]

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.

[vardump]

"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?

[Dylan16807]

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?

[vardump]

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.

[Dylan16807]

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.

[vardump]

Sure, although we were talking about $10.

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

[Dylan16807]

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.

[zihotki]

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.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Right, but 20x seems like excessive

[hagbard_c]

Not as silly as a 1900% markup.