[tadbit]

> What if you price out a replacement with the full RAM and SSD capacity you want from the OEM rather than as an aftermarket upgrade?

Moot point. Of course if you tie your hands behind your back your options will be limited. The point, for the parent, is that they aren't limited by insane markup pricing.

[wtallis]

It's important to correctly identify the underlying problem and whatever tradeoffs are involved. It's unproductive to bitch specifically about Apple's expensive storage and memory upgrades when it's actually an industry norm. It might be more fruitful to discuss why OEMs in general are able to get away with such steep upgrade pricing, and it's definitely more interesting and appropriate for HN to debate the pros and cons of Apple's soldered memory and storage.

[cstrahan]

It’s also important to realize that no one was “bitching” in this thread. It was claimed that the price price wasn’t all that bad, to which someone raised a counterpoint.

The reality is that, if you need a lot of RAM and SSD space, it’s going to cost you a lot more than buying a laptop and replacing the RAM and SSD yourself.

If someone said that the price of SSD and RAM in, say, a System76 laptop was outrageous and that’s why they won’t buy one, that would be a bit silly since they can upgrade those themselves.

What you can’t do is perform a RAM or SSD upgrade on a MacBook. So it’s a reasonable issue to have with their pricing.

To throw one more datapoint in: for my own development, I have to closely manage (closing and reopening stuff constantly, paying the cognitive overhead of context switching as I go) just to keep RAM use between 32gb-64gb — use never managed to go below the former, and the latter is the total my laptop can support. I’m usually sitting around 90%-95% utilization. So 64gb is an absolute minimum for what I can reasonably get away with (and I’d be much more productive if my laptop had the same 128gb my desktop has).

Some people just need as much RAM and storage they can get their hands on, and that quickly makes the MacBook a really expensive option. No bitching (really, no sentiment at all), just facts and reasoning.