Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference?
For years with every other OEM I have bought the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and saved $800 or so buying the largest memory sticks that work with the machine from Crucial (R.I.P.) Doesn't work if the memory is soldered to the board though!
> Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference?
Yes but to a point. Like Microsoft raised their Surface series prices. There's internal threshold of what they can tolerate before raising prices.
You can see the price and trend here: https://www.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
Yet, remember that costs are more complex with currencies and shipping prices.
Hah, yes, with my cheesegrater Mac Pro 2019, Apple wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (to go from 32 to 192GB).
I bought it with 32 and OWC sold me the exact same sticks of memory (manufacturer, timings) for $1,050.
Same. $3,000 for 8TB of SSD. $1,200 for 4 x 2TB Samsung 990 Pros and a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe enclosure. Which actually ran about 500MB/s faster than the Apple SSD.