Apple’s Mac RAM upgrades were already expensive enough to raise eyebrows. After the company’s latest round of price hikes, some of them now look ridiculous.
Apple recently raised prices across its Mac and iPad lineup, along with other products, citing rising memory and storage costs. The supply crunch is real, but Mac buyers were paying steep premiums for RAM and SSD upgrades long before this jump. Recent MacBook Pro configuration screenshots shared by 9to5Mac show how much worse the upgrade path has become.
Apple was already charging a heavy premium
The screenshots show a MacBook Pro configuration where 48GB of unified memory is included as standard. Before the price hike, upgrading that MacBook Pro to 64GB, or 16GB of additional memory, cost $200. Moving to 128GB, or 80GB of additional memory, costs $1,000. After the change, those same upgrades are listed at $400 and $2,000, respectively. Apple has effectively doubled the price of those MacBook Pro memory upgrades, and some other Mac configurations appear to have seen similar increases.
Apple
The increase lands badly because Apple’s upgrade pricing was already difficult to justify. Notebookcheck recently reported that Apple charges $200 for an 8GB RAM upgrade, while the estimated market price is around $120. Apple’s 16GB upgrade costs $400, compared to roughly $185 on the open market.
Storage upgrades are even harder to defend. Apple charges $1,200 for a 4TB SSD upgrade, while comparable SSDs are listed at around $459. The comparison is not perfect because Apple uses soldered unified memory and integrated storage rather than standard removable parts. Unfortunately for buyers, the locked-down design also means Mac memory and storage cannot be upgraded later.
Chris Hagan / Digital Trends
Buyers are the ones left paying more
Ultimately, Mac buyers are the ones absorbing these higher costs. Apple can point to rising memory and storage prices, and those pressures are very real. Even so, the company’s RAM and SSD upgrades were already priced far above comparable market hardware before the current shortage became this severe.
For customers, there is no easy workaround. You either pay Apple’s higher prices upfront or live with the base configuration for the life of the machine. As RAM and SSD prices keep climbing, Apple’s already expensive upgrade ladder is starting to look absurd for anyone who needs more headroom.
