$499 for M4 Mac mini is already aggressive, unless you mean easing up on storage and memory pricing.
Sorry being pedantic, but $599 right? Unless it's on sale somewhere?
Yes, guess I am mostly thinking of power users, as I build my own systems,
The RAM pricing is very heavy to take.
As a lifelong Mac user, I feel your pain here. The RAM upgrade pricing is perhaps the more understandable of the two
as after Lunar Lake Intel reportedly will be abandoning Apple's approach of packaging memory with the chip as being too expensive*. And Apple does it with much greater memory capacities. Also at higher capacities and larger chips it can effectively double as VRAM for professional applications and we can look at what Nvidia and AMD charges for similar VRAM capacities. Geekerwan even made that point themselves in their recent M4 Max video I think - according to the translation (I don't speak Chinese) saying that if "Apple's pricing for memory is in gold, Nvidia's is in platinum" or something like that. Also now that the base is 16GB, at least most normal Mac buyers won't be hit by it as much. Still, the upgrading pricing at the lower levels is really, really high.
For storage there aren't quite the same level of exculpatory facts here. It's not that Apple doesn't do anything special with its SSDs - by all accounts its homegrown controller and security are excellent (not perfect by any means, but excellent) and it does add special chips to the SSD package, but these are not: "this totally excuses the soldering down and insanely high prices" levels of justification.
And in combo together? Eoof. I mean part of it is Apple's pricing strategy and in fairness people buying the base computers through channels get pretty good deals, but yeah if you want to BYO, Apple makes sure to collect that extra profit they're missing out from all the regular customers who never even see the upgrade pricing.
*Although not all the factors that hurt Intel would hurt Apple here - i.e. when packaging memory themselves Intel has to buy the memory and they want profit on then selling that, OEMs don't want to pay them and both passing on to the customers would make the overall chip too expensive, so Intel effectively sells the memory portion of the chip to the OEM at cost. Apple wouldn't suffer as much from this since they are both the chipmaker and the OEM and their pricing is already high. Still though some of it does hurt Apple too.
