Apple is once again selling its laptops with too little RAM, and it’s charging customers an exorbitant amount to upgrade.
The base model of the new M3 MacBook Pro has just 8GB of RAM, which is not enough for many users today, and certainly not enough for a “Pro” machine. If you want more, you have to pay $200 for an additional 8GB, or $400 for 16GB.
Apple justifies this high price by saying that its LPDDR5-6400 RAM is more expensive than other types of RAM. However, this is not true. In fact, the price of RAM has been falling steadily in recent years.
The real reason Apple is charging so much is because it can. It knows that many people will be willing to pay extra for a MacBook Pro, even if it means getting less RAM than they would from a competitor.
The cheapest MacBook Pro with more than 8GB of RAM costs $1,800. This is more than the starting price of many premium Windows laptops with 16GB of RAM or more. Apple charges $200 for an additional 8GB of RAM. This is the same price that some companies charge for a full 16GB upgrade.
Apple’s RAM upgrade prices are the same across all of its M3 Macs, regardless of the configuration. This means that you pay the same to upgrade the RAM on a base model MacBook Pro as you do to upgrade the RAM on a maxed-out Mac Studio.
The sources for this piece include an article in MacWorld.