It's not quite like that. Apple's RAM is in the SoC package, it might be closer to 20$, but still.

They have always done this, for some reason people buy it anyway, so they have no incentive to stop doing it.

> What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices.

Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?

Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.

And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.

Even if taking raising market prices into account, your estimate for the RAM module price is waaaaaaay off.

You can get 8GB of good quality DDR5 DIMMs for 40$, there is no way in hell that Apple is paying anywhere near that.

Going from 8 to 16GBs is probably somewhere between 3-8$ purely in material costs for Apple, not taking into account any other costs associated

GP said "LPDDR5" and that Apple won't sell at component prices.

You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.

See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.

I am aware that there are differences, I just took RAM DIMMs as a reference because there is a >0% chance that anyone reading this has actually ever bought a comparable product themselves.

As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.

Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.

Mind the difference between GB and Gb.

DDR5 DIMMs and LPDDR chips as in the MacBooks are not the same beasts at all.

A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.