I remember in 2007, buying my first MacBook. It came with an enormous 2gb of RAM. I asked about upgrading it. The guy leaned in conspiratorially and told me that Apple’s RAM upgrades were a rip-off, and that I’d be better of buying it elsewhere. So I did, for half of what Apple were asking.
This is a grift that Apple have had for far too long, and there’s a part of me that’s convinced that their move to soldered RAM was to stop people upgrading after the fact more than it was about SOC efficiencies.
Which happens to be the one I have… :D
I do periodically look up their prices on eBay, but because of that weird aberration they’ve retained their value pretty well.
Well I think my Christmas gift to myself this year is now a RAM upgrade instead of a new Mac then. And I’ll add 12TB of storage to my media server.