It's not a ripoff, it's plain and simple price discrimination, and it makes good business sense.
When you are selling something that appeals to a wide section of the market, including some people with a little money and other people with a lot of money, you face a tough choice. If you price it low, you get more of the poor people to buy it, but you fail to capture more revenue from the rich people who would have been very happy to pay more. If you price it high, you get the extra margin from the rich people but the poor people won't buy it.
So what companies do is take a substantially identical product, and create artificial distinctions, usually based on prestige, to separate the different customer groups. In this case, they are selling the same computer in two different colours, a fundamentally meaningless distinction that nevertheless (as you can see from previous posts in this forum) has been successful in extracting an extra $150 from a great many people who had extra money to spend.
The same thing happens with airline tickets (you think it costs the airline more for you to return the same week without a Saturday night stay?), generic groceries (ever notice how many of them come from the same factory as the name-brand stuff?), designer clothes at factory outlet shops, and countless other consumer goods. None of these is a ripoff; it's just a way to allow low- and high-income buyers to get what they want without costing the seller revenue.
The day you can prove to me that you were forced to buy the black one, or you NEED black, is the day when you can start talking about being ripped off.
