Sure, the memory upgrades aren't fantastically cheap, but they're not that much more than the kits from say OWC, and honestly thats pretty much irrelevant to me. If it's considered non-user-upgradable I may as well just get it from the start.
Apple wants
$600 for an upgrade to 32GB - if you go on crucial.com, you can get a pair of Micron DDR4-2666 16GB SODIMMs (quite likely exactly what Apple uses) for
$286 - and the
difference between that and a pair of 4GB sticks is about $210 (which is what you're paying Apple for). Apple are asking nearly three times the
consumer retail price of the RAM. I.e. the Crucial prices include a decent profit margin for Crucial.
For 16GB, its $200 from Apple vs. $142 for the sticks (or $70 more than 8GB). The best you can say is that, for 16GB, the saving is not worth the hassle of DIY - but you're still being gouged.
...lets not pretend that every time you order a 16GB BTO, someone at Apple literally has to take an 8GB machine off the shelf and spend billable hours manually upgrading it.
Trouble is, if people just sit back and take those prices, Apple might think that they can perhaps gouge a bit more. At least whinge.
And yes, you know, and I know that, in commercial use, the cost of IT equipment is almost negligible if you offset it against the potential saving in labour costs. That's great if you're your own boss and your cashflow is all in the green. Work in an organisation with more than a dozen employees and you'll have to justify your purchases to a pointy-haired boss who only knows that they've been offered a bonus if they can shave 10% off the IT budget (and if that comes at a productivity cost or forces staff to buy equipment out of their own pocket that's somebody else's problem). Even if you prevail, the usual trick is for them to bounce back the requisition with a query and then take 14 days' leave.
No matter what product is released, it's "wrong" somehow for a part of this 'community'.
However that's partly an issue with the totality of Apple's current product lineup: they're becoming quite narrowly focussed on very specific requirements. Pretty much every current Mac can be summarised as "if its exactly what you want, then its
exactly what you want!" -
Case in point, the 2013 MacPro cylinder (which may also have been the beginning of the trend) - it was a
brilliant solution if you wanted a Final Cut Pro (or other OpenCL optimised application) "appliance" with just enough internal storage for the system and applications and already used external drives to hold your projects (I've seen video studios with PCs that worked that way). What it
wasn't was the sort of "Swiss army knife" that the old Cheesegrater provided.
Apple have never offered a huge choice, but since the late 90s they've offered a carefully thought-out choice, based on Jobs' "product matrices", which
always included a user-expandable tower to tick the "other" box. That went in 2013, and since then its all got a bit random with every new/revised model pared down a little bit more for the target consumer
de jour (if you've ever endured a user-centred design session you'll be able to picture the fake dossier for Mr/Ms Deliberately Androgynous Name that the human experience team will have created).
Likewise the current laptops: if ultra portability and battery life is a key requirement for you, they're without match. If you don't mind lugging a somewhat heavier box if that means its the
only box you have to lug then they're rather frustrating.
The problem is that Apple are also trying to maintain an ecosystem in competition with Windows/Linux and the huge, huge advantage that Windows/Linux has is that if you don't like any of the "off-the-peg" mini/laptop/all-in-one offerings you can get a "bespoke" system in which you get to select every component (maybe not milk-frothers, but close).
With Apple, if you don't like one of the limited range of sealed units the only real alternative is to dump the whole MacOS ecosystem.
