price premium probably, but chip lithography errors (thus, yields) at the huge memory density might be partially driving up the cost for huge memory.
Apple absolutely loves to gouge for upgrades, but the chips in this have got to be expensive. I almost wonder if the absolute base model of this machine has much noticeably lower margins than a normal Apple product because that. But they expect/know that most everyone who buys one is going to spec it up.
Apple's not having TSMC fab a massive die full of memory. They're buying a bunch of small dies of commodity memory and putting them in a package with a pair of large compute dies. How many of those small commodity memory dies they use has nothing to do with yield.
Apple's own product shots have shown this. Here's a bunch of links that clearly show the memory as separate. Lots of these modules you can make out the serial or model numbers and look up the manufacturer of them from directly :)
- Side-by-side teardown of M1 Pro vs M2 Pro laptop motherboards showing separate ram chips with discussion on how apple is moving to different type of ram configurations: https://www.ifixit.com/News/71442/tearing-down-the-14-macboo...
- M2 teardown with the chip + ram highlighted: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/18/macbook-air-m2-chip-tea...
- Photo of the A12 with separate ram chips on a single "package": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12X
- M1 Ultra with heat spreader removed, clearly showing 3rd party ram chips onpackage: https://iphone-mania.jp/news-487859/
And the storage solution still makes no sense of course, a machine like this should start at 4TB for $0 extra, 8TB for $500 more, and 16TB for $1000 more. Not start at a useless 1TB, with the 8TB version costing an extra $2400 and 16TB a truly idiotic $4600. If Sabrent can make and sell 8TB m.2 NVMe drives for $1000, SoC storage should set you back half that, not over double that.