A couple of weeks ago, I was help­ing to spec out some new iMacs for our com­puter labs. This is usu­ally pretty straight­for­ward; the only sticky part is actu­ally decid­ing how much RAM to get. We run a lot of sophis­ti­cated soft­ware (Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor, Final Cut Pro, etc.), so I always want to make sure that we have enough RAM, now and down the road. These com­put­ers have to get us through a three year cycle.

Unfor­tu­nately, the options for built-​to-​order RAM on a Mac range from ques­tion­able to obscene. Keep in mind, there are only two slots for RAM in an iMac. Here’s how it breaks down:

Thats right, 2 sticks of 2GB RAM will cost you $850 if you get it from Apple.

The 1GB option seems silly if you’re doing any­thing more than web brows­ing. 2GB is enough RAM for now, but the con­fig­u­ra­tion of 2 sticks of 1GB stinks. This means that if you want to upgrade to 4GB of RAM later, those two sticks are worth­less. There is no option for the obvi­ous choice: to chose one stick of 2GB RAM, leav­ing an easy upgrade path.

All of this left me pretty annoyed at Apple, and feel­ing like no matter what I did, I was either wast­ing RAM (and money) now or later. So, I really had to laugh when I came across Mike Davidson’s post on RAM Arbi­trage:

…to max out my MacBook’s RAM, Apple charges me $850, while if I go through my trusty RAM com­par­i­son shop­ping site Deal­Ram, I am pointed to NewEgg, which ships me the same amount of RAM for $120. As a point of com­par­i­son, Dell charges $465 for an extra 4GB… still out­ra­geous, but not a 700% markup!

He nails it. What really sucks about this prac­tice by Apple is that I would guess many people who buy Macs don’t know that they can get the same kind of RAM from places like New Egg. They also prob­a­bly don’t know how easy it is to replace RAM. It’s a racket.

Via Daring Fire­ball.