After reading over a recent thread at AeroXperience regarding Apple’s product pricing, I decided to do a little browsing around the Apple Store myself to see just how much it costs for various systems and upgrades. After recently upgrading the RAM in my own MacBook with some 3rd party OCZ memory, I went to have a look at the prices for “official” Apple memory. When I finally came upon the memory shop, I was shocked to see the listed prices. A warning for the faint of heart, the following image may not be for you:

Whaaaaat? And this is no special memory either, after taking out the stock memory of my MacBook, it turns out the memory used is of the Hynix brand which is manufactured by Hyundai Electronics. Wow.

Time to compare now, I browsed over to TigerDirect (a major North American computer part retailer) to see what kind of prices they have on some of the top notebook memory available. First stop, Corsair Apple Certified 667MHz memory. Yep, this memory is actually fully certified by Apple and is guaranteed to function with your Mac. Now, 4GB (2x 2GB) of this memory goes for just… how much did you guess? $500? $1000? Even more?! No, it’s just $129! That’s right, just $129 for 4GB of fully certified Apple memory. To put that into context, that means you could get about 30GB of this memory at the same price which Apple sells 4GB.

Now, to get this out of the way (since not everyone has read my profile. Read: “The Geek Behind It“), I have nothing against Apple and as I mentioned, I have a MacBook of my own. But if I happen to find anyone knocking Apple due to their pricing, sorry Apple, but I can’t defend you there. Truth is, your prices really are absurdly high at times in comparison to other equivalent or better products on the market. Sometimes that shiny Apple logo just doesn’t justify the extra green.

Luckily, I’m making a stop over at an Apple Retail Store over the weekend, so I might just look into this while I’m there. Stay tuned.