Slashdot Mirror
Apple Laptop Upgrades Costing 200% More Than Dells
An anonymous reader writes "C|net is highlighting the astonishing cost of Apple laptop hardware upgrades, compared to Dell — in some instances, Apple is charging 200% more for upgraded components, such as memory and hard disks. Either there's a serious difference in the quality of components being used, or Apple is quite literally ripping off those who aren't able to upgrade hardware themselves."
Top end vendor charges more for service than mass-market vendor.
Film at 11.
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
Just pay your neighborhood friendly computer geek to install the upgrade for you. You aren't forced to go through the Mac store.
They cost 200% more because owning an apple makes you 200% cooler.
This is also true of Apple desktops.
Simple check: Go to the Apple store, and price a Mac Pro 8-core with the basic amenities; 2 GB ram, the recommended HD. Then price it maxed out; one HD of the largest size (1/2 TB last I looked) and 32 GB of RAM. Finally, take the original price and add 32 GB of RAM in 4 GB sticks (the Mac Pro can take 8 sticks) from a reputable online store. The difference is astonishing.
I have a recent Mac Pro, and I expanded it the sensible way; the amount of money I saved by doing that is staggering. I've had absolutely no problems.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Doesn't matter if it's trendy clothing, a trendy car or anything else, it's going to be more expensive if it's the 'cool' thing to do.
I get my oil changed at the dealer for various reasons:
1. I don't know how to change my own
2. I prefer to use the dealer since they can do warranty replacement on the spot if something is broken
Yes, I pay probably twice as much, and I like it. Kinda seems like the same situation here.
I like Apple. I've got my MacBook Pro next to me. At home we have another MBP, a MacBook, and an iMac. In the past we've owned numerous other Macs (all the way back to an LC II).
So let me say... duh. It is very well known that Apple does this. Read any thread on Macs here on /. Someone says Macs are great computers. Someone replies "but look what they charge for RAM!". The someone else says "well yeah, Apple is like that, buy the RAM separately."
This OLD. This is STALE. This is well known by anyone who watches this stuff. It's stupid, but Apple is allowed to price gouge if they want. This is just some "journalist" writing about a "discovery" to get page-views.
Just don't buy your upgrades from Apple.
And don't give this guy the hits he doesn't deserve.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Cut him some slack. He also said that "Apple is quite literally ripping off those who aren't able to upgrade hardware themselves" (emphasis mine) when this is almost certainly not the literal meaning of ripping off.
A fool and his money are easily parted.
In other news: radio upgrades cost more on a BMW than on a Hyundai. With that or with RAM upgrades, you can either do it yourself (or hire someone), or you can let the dealer do it. Guess which is always more expensive?
Apple is quite literally ripping off those who aren't able to upgrade hardware themselves.
That would literally hurt.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Also, compared to most smaller market players, both Apple and Dell are outrageously overpriced in this regard.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The thing is not about the 'dealer' generically overcharging. It's about Apple overcharging more than other vendors overcharging. All of them charge more for options for the general philosophy you hold justifying it, but overcharging more than a comparable competitor....
BTW, I did have the dealer change my oil during warranty because they sent me coupons for free oil changes for the duration of my warranty, but in the end, I find it hard to see how an oil change could break anything else, so I do it myself now that it is out of warranty.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's true that Apple gouge on upgrades, but it's hardly a new phenomenon. They were doing it 4 years ago when I bought my first Mac and were doing it well before then too. It's a form of price discrimination, similar in that way to rebates and coupons. Those willing to expend more effort (fit their own RAM, fill out a rebate) effectively pay a lower price which allows the store to sell to a broader range of customers while maximising profit.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Sometimes (the last two times) I change my own [automobiles'] oil. Sometimes I don't. The point is whether or not I feel capable or up to it and whether or not the money and time I spend is worth more or less than the money.
Personally, I wouldn't dream of paying someone to work on my computers. But that's just me... and probably most everyone here has similar sentiments. HOWEVER, the masses think of computers as difficult, scary and complicated beasts and would rather pay. If they bought an Apple, they are no stranger to the belief that they pay more but are getting more. While the latter is debatable, that's not the point. The point is that they are more than likely very comfortable with paying whatever price they end up paying or else they would seek less expensive alternatives... and there *are* alternatives. This is a classic "what the market will bear" capitalism. Leave it alone.
An 8-headed display Mac Pro is $3239. To which you add four 1TB drives, and RAM, both from elsewhere. You chuck out (or sell, it's very good hardware) the 2 GB stick of RAM and the HD it comes with.
RAM is $699 per 8GB (as pairs of 4GB sticks @ memorysuppliers.com); so you need $2800 for 32 GB; a 1 Tb drive is $190 (WD Caviar GP WD10EACS Hard Drive @ buy.com), so you need $760 for four drives. Total:
$3239 - macpro w/wifi, 8 display outputs (4x ATI 2600 XT 256MB), 2.8 GHz
$2800 - ram
$ 760 - drives
---------
$6799...
Same configuration (32 GB, 4x1 TB drives) from the Apple store:
$13,989.00
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
my personal experience is that the Apple hardware is far superior and requires less upgrades and that is why the cost is much more.
Right... because Apple's memory comes from a *completely* different part of Tiawan than Dell's.
If Apple is literally ripping off consumers, I think you forgot your direct object. Maybe Apple is quite literally ripping the arms off those who aren't able to upgrade hardware themselves? Why isn't this bigger news?
Huh? We're not talking about the base hardware here. We're talking about the upgraded components you can get. Those components are the same ones you can buy on pricewatch or anywhere else. Anyone who is buying RAM or HDs from the Apple store is getting completely ripped off.
And what does supply and demand have anything to do with it? Trust me, Apple has plenty of computers to sell to anyone who wants one.
"Can you believe it? When I go to the local steakhouse, they charge me more than twice what the meat itself actually cost! I can grill porterhouses for the whole family for half of the cost of going to the restaurant, and then there's the cost of gas! WTF! Restaurants suck!"
And yet you keep going to them.
Geek squad, car mechanics, roomba accessories, batteries for power tools, printer ink cartridges, etc... the list is long of transactions that grossly favor the seller. This is business. Things are not priced according to their material cost, they are priced based on their market value. They cost what they are worth to the target market.
You could sit all day making little beaded merkins with fur trim and I won't pay you a damned cent because I don't want your damned merkins. You get paid what you're worth. Apple gets paid what their products are worth on the market. They have done the math and figured that they make more money by charging X dollars and losing a few customers than charging X to more customers.
I hate it too and when I do buy apple hardware I downgrade the memory as far as I can in order to save money by buying it elsewhere.
Think of it this way: Buying RAM at newegg or wherever is cheaper than buying it from apple, but it's also cheaper than buying it from dell. So skipping the RAM from both companies saves you money. Right?
Maybe you feel like people are getting ripped off, but that's just because you're sensitive to this area of the market. I think people are getting ripped off whenever they pay a premium for something made out of 'aircraft grade aluminum' or titanium or whatever. I work with those materials all the time and the phrase 'aircraft grade aluminum' is as useless as saying mil-spec or heavy duty. There are mil-specs for shitty things, too. 'Heavy duty' batteries are among the worst. And aircraft aluminum ranges in strength from steel down to something you can rip with your hands.
So screw people who can't open the memory access panel on their computers. Apple has free and detailed instructions on how to do that for all of their hardware. If you're paying that much for RAM, then you're also probably the kind of person who pays $45 for someone to do their oil change or $6 for someone to make their coffee for them.
Again: Market value.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
that Apple still made computers. Thought they were in the online music business or something.
Three rules for owning Macs:
1) Do not talk about Fight Club.
2) Never buy the first generation of hardware.
3) Never order RAM or drives from Apple.
Seriously, this is old news. Buy the machine bare bones, order the stuff thuird party and install it yourself. As a bonus, it gives you an excuse to buy a set of Torx drivers!
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Sorry to burst your bubble but I just took apart 2 macbook pros over the weekend, to see exactly what the hype over the hardware is all about. Besides the well engineered layout of the mobo, there is nothing special about the components that apple uses. They use the same Samsung/Micron DDR2 memory module as Dell, Lenovo and other vendors. They use the same Hitachi hard drives, which from my experience is inferior compared to Seagate drives (Thought I have heard that some macbooks do come with seagate drives). The processor is the same Intel processor as everyone else. So while the Macbook pro as a whole is a good laptop, I would have to disagree that its hardware components are far superior compared to Dell or other PC counter parts - it's the same hardware after all.
Fashionable vendor charges more for service than mass-market vendor.
Film at 11.
There fixed it for you :)
Apple computers have their uses to professionals, but to the average Joe on the street it's just a more fashionable (and perhaps reliable) computer - and those are the people who are getting fleeced because they don't know how to swap out some computer parts.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It has always been thus (at least since Intel Macs came around), and well known in the Apple aftermarket community, too. Buy your RAM in the aftermarket - but please get the good stuff (it's still much cheaper than from Apple.)
The remarkable thing is the bargain they give on the base MacPro system - last time I priced equivalent 8 core Linux boxes, you'd have to pay 25% more to get equivalent hardware with no OS installed.
Caveat emptor - shop wisely and save some money. And, if you're worried about your AppleCare warranty, just reconfigure yourself back to 100% factory parts before making the service call.
Drink much kool aid?
OH YEAH!!!
This guy's the limit!
Why? Because people are willing to pay it. If they weren't, then they would lower their prices until they were.
It has nothing to do with the technology or anything else other than a business decision, aimed at making more money.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Because even as someone who works on those models, I really hate opening the glass/aluminum iMac models. Suction cups and dust rollers bug the crap out of me.
I would not, however, ever pay Apple for RAM upgrades. EVER. Unless I hit the lottery and didn't care about the extra $$$.
kool aid stains are showing.
The RAM that comes in the Apple products is the SAME RAM that comes in the Dell products.
its made in the same country and in the same plant, on the same assembly line, and purchased through the same distribution channel.
It's a commodity.
Or are you goingto tell me that Micron makes a special "Apple only" ram that they rigorously test to make sure is the very best stuff out there and then only offer it to Apple while at the same time taking the reject ram and selling it to their other oem customers?
not likely.
They'd be down to selling ram to apple only pretty quickly if their failure rate was that bad for the others.
I'll also point out this holds the same for Seagate and hitachi for hard drives.
Aside from where their labor is done, we just had an article on here recently detailing how apple pays its employees LESS than its competitors..."
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Just because it might have the "duh" factor around here, that doesn't mean that Cnet's target audience is nearly as tech savvy as the rest of us. Besides, it gives us a reason to bitch about something.
Yeah the Xserves are insane. I called them up asking whether I can upgrade the drives myself and they said that you have to buy at least the 80GB units to get the drive trays. A $3000 machine and it comes with one 80GB drive and two useless blanking plates (and only a single quad-core xeon to boot)? Screw that. I just pieced together an 8-core/2GB/2x80GB 1U from Dell for $1700; even if you add $1000 to that for the OS X Server Unlimited-users version, you're still $700 cheaper in specs.
I'm willing to pay a premium to get a better product that works right the first time, but Apple is REALLY milking it on the pro-oriented hardware.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
This OLD. This is STALE. This is well known by anyone who watches this stuff.
The point of the article could be to get more people to watch this stuff.
A "rip-off" is unwitting theft or cheating. To "rip-off" someone, as a verb, is to steal from, hoodwink, or otherwise cheat someone else who is not privy to what is happening before the fact.
In this case, it is obvious that anyone doing their casual homework can figure out they are paying a premium for the same hardware on an Apple machine vs. a Dell or HP. This is hardly a "rip-off." It is simply the market at work.
Apparently, Apple feels that their customers are willing to pay that premium. They are charging what the market will bear. That's not a "rip-off."
An example of the latter would be a "switcheroo," substituting inferior components for what was advertised, for instance.
NOTE: I DO NOT OWN OR USE APPLE'S COMPUTER PRODUCTS; I OWN ONE 80GB IPOD "CLASSIC, AND THAT'S IT. I JUST LIKE PRECISE LANGUAGE.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Apple doesn't forbid you from providing your own upgrades. Anyone that has been around Macs for more than a few months knows where to order the exact memory sticks that they use for each model, at a fraction of the cost.
The 3GB upgrade for my Mac Book Pro was $99 including shipping, Apple wanted $300 or so for the upgrade. This is not an equivalent upgrade, this is the exact memory stick model that Apple was trying to sell me. And it is a customer allowed upgrade, so it does not affect my warranty coverage.
In the past it was not possible to upgrade the hard drives for Apple laptops, nowadays the cases are designed so the hard disk is easy to remove.
It is not a ripoff, Apple is not in the business of selling at cut throat margins by selling volume. They are in the business of selling premium items at a steep markup. It is just one of thousands of businesses in this country that operates the same way.
Go to your local Target and see how some 19" HDTVs are $400 while others cost twice as much. Price can't be the only criteria. There's a reason why a Sony HDTV costs a hell of a lot more than an Olevia.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The comment gets to the core of the entire issue. Apple charges 200% more for the same components because their customers want to pay more. In an extremely wealthy society there is always a group of people who have much more money than the norm, and it is very important to these people that they are able to differentiate themselves from the rest of the population through a series of 'class markers'.
These are items that only they buy because they are much more expensive than similar items available for the general population. Yes these items are better quality, but the degree of higher price for better quality is much greater than would be justified by the cost of the components. So the wealthy aren't selecting these brand items solely for better quality. They are doing it to identify themselves to the other members of their class.
There are many companies that have always positioned themselves into this market niche. But Apple is one of the few companies that continues to insist that their excessively high prices are only a direct result of their 'commitment to high quality'. It is ironic that they have been successful at marketing their 'cool factor' by selling commodity components at such a large premium since the entire concept of 'coolness' in the USA is a set of behaviors and lifestyles designed to give dignity to people with little or no money.
The entertainment industry has been most successful at marketing this contradiction. Apple is the first technology company to do so as well. Even to the point of having their business revolve around a prima-donna rock star personality.
I've detected this about Apple ever since the introduction of the Macintosh, when this kind of mentality started at Apple. I recommend watching them for amusement, but don't buy their products even second-hand. Buy clones (for personal stereos) or functional equivalents (for personal computers).
Despite all their grandiose advertisements, Apple has always existed for only one reason: to transfer wealth from the wealthy (who need to have a non-proletariat PC) to Steve Jobs' bank account.
You paid more for the hard drives, and my friend's vintage first generation g4 still boots up perfectly on its original hard drive despite being continuously on for its entire life.
I'm reasonably certain that Apple has never manufactured hard drives. If you bought a hard drive from an Apple store, chances are good you could have gotten the exact same hard drive somewhere else. That has always been one great irony of Apple, that users think they're getting better hardware than PC users (and because of discount PC builders, in many cases they are), but dollar for dollar, they're not getting hardware that you can't get on a comparatively priced PC.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
You assumption has no basis in reality, yet you were modded up. /. does us all proud.
£90.01 from the Apple configurator. Doing the same upgrade with a Dell XPS M1330 costs just £30.01
30 * 3 = 90
30 + (200% * 30) = 90
Therefore, 90 is 200% more expensive than 30
using the Apple Web site will cost an extra £120. Doing that same swap with the Dell XPS M1330 costs just £40.01.
40 * 3 = 120
40 + (200% * 40) = 120
Therefore, 120 is 200% more expensive than 40
Who knew that "200% more" and "3 times as expensive" worked out to the same thing!?
I didn't read TFA, just assuming they mean 100% more expensive.
Not only does your ignorance do you proud, /. proud.
the person who modded you up does all of
/math, learn it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
BTW, nice attempt at that "carefully hand crafted computer, made by artisans who trained for decades" canard. Apple is as mass produced as every other product out there (exploding batteries, anyone?). What IS different is that Apple manages to get at least 50% profit out of everything they make.
Apple batteries may explode, but at least they explode with style ! And look at those sticks of RAM, that shade of green obviously wasn't picked at random. That's genius design at work. Reminding you that at the heart of your computer there's still a little bit of nature.
No wonder it's expensive.
Silicon Graphics (and any other maker of workstations that had standard parts in them) used to do the same thing BTW.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Bullshit. The most recent mac I purchased came with cheap HYNIX memory.