"Price gouging refers to when retailers and others take advantage of spikes in demand by charging exorbitant prices for necessities, often after a natural disaster or other state of emergency, "
I think the "natural disaster or emergency" here is the current state of Microsoft Windows, the main alternative to Mac OS and the main reason current Mac users will be shelling out $200-per-8GB for Apple's RAM upgrades rather than switching to PC
Seriously, though, whether or not "price gouging" is the correct term, what Apple are doing is creating artificial scarcity and unrealistic prices for RAM and SSD upgrades on Macs. This has always been true to a point - but it's becoming more stark now that RAM and SSD sizes are about the only thing distinguishing the good/better/best models of the M4 machines. It's impossible to compare base prices like-for-like between PC and Mac post-Apple Silicon, but the
incremental cost of (say) a 16 to 32GB upgrade, or a 256 to 1TB SSD upgrade on a MacBook is consistently at least twice the cost of a BTO upgrade to, say,
a Lenovo Thinkbook or Asus Xenbook, and something like 4x the cost of a DIY M.2/PCIe4x4 SSD upgrade on a PC.
...and yes, "the market" is "bearing" those prices - possibly because the only alternative is switching to Windows or Linux, which is a major upheaval and expense for many (and especially unattractive with the current state of Windows). Of course, the perceived difficulty of switching is also how MS gets away with pushing ads and interrupting people's work with forced updates on Windows...
Anyway, I don't think anybody here is asking the National Council of State Legislatures to beat down Apple's door and force them to cut prices. People are just exercising their right to complain...
...and, yes, although I did end up buying a Mac Studio at Apple Prices I'm pretty sure that I'd have bought a M1 Mini and maybe even gt a M4 Mini to play with if they had more generous memory and storage. (meanwhile, I recently put a 2TB SSD on a Raspberry Pi for under £100).
Anyway, a low-cost A18 Pro Mini at an attractive price would be interesting if I needed a second system - but not at 8GB/256GB with an upgrade to 16/512 doubling the price.