[bitdiffusion]

Yes - because whenever you buy hardware, optional upgrades are always available to purchase at cost-price /sarcasm

Although I guess it's not quite as bad with something like a notebook where at least you have the choice of buying your own upgrades and installing them yourself...

[kaolinite]

He acknowledged this:

"I can understand paying a nice premium over what you'd typically pay for flash memory, but it gets a little ridiculous when you're paying five times what you'd normally pay."

However Apple adds an awful lot onto the price for upgrades. When I bought my iMac a while ago, the only difference between the two 21.5" models was one had a 500MB HDD whereas the other had 1TB. The difference in price was somewhere in the region of £250. It will have cost Apple maybe £20-30 more for that extra price yet they charged around 1/4 of the original price for the upgrade.

In the end, I just got the 500MB iMac. It was a great machine and worth every penny, it's just a shame that they sting the customer on upgrades. When I bought a Lenovo laptop a year or so later, they too were pretty expensive to upgrade (battery, CPU, HDD), but nowhere near the premium that Apple adds.

[weiran]

It would've also had a discrete GPU which would add much more to the total cost than a bigger HDD.