Because a huge part of their business model over the past twenty years has been the upsell.
I bought my first MacBook in 2007. It had 2gb of RAM as standard. I asked about upgrading it, the guy told me to pick some up online as it would be waaaay cheaper, and he was right. Did the same for the MacBook Pro that replaced it a few years later, but in the meantime they moved to the soldered model so had to swallow the cost of the 16gb ‘upgrade’ in my M2 Air.
To be fair, the cost over time of my Macs has been incredible. My 2011 MBP is still trucking along, these days running Linux Mint. With the cost to upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD, all in it cost me around £1200. Less than £100 a year for a laptop that still works perfectly fine.
Why are apple products always so anemic on memory?
Because there are two types of mac users:
I have an m2 8 gb. And it’s plenty. It’s just a browsing/discord/stream box basically.
This pretty much. I don’t care that much that a maxed out MBP is $6000 or whatever, my employer pays for that.
Greed, it lowers the advertised price, but once you spec it decently you’ve added a grand in extras
Price discrimination based on memory loadout is real, but it’s not specific to Apple, either.
Because a huge part of their business model over the past twenty years has been the upsell.
I bought my first MacBook in 2007. It had 2gb of RAM as standard. I asked about upgrading it, the guy told me to pick some up online as it would be waaaay cheaper, and he was right. Did the same for the MacBook Pro that replaced it a few years later, but in the meantime they moved to the soldered model so had to swallow the cost of the 16gb ‘upgrade’ in my M2 Air.
To be fair, the cost over time of my Macs has been incredible. My 2011 MBP is still trucking along, these days running Linux Mint. With the cost to upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD, all in it cost me around £1200. Less than £100 a year for a laptop that still works perfectly fine.