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theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,880
3,059
People complain about the cost of Apple RAM upgrades because they compare it to PC RAM. This is wrong. You should compare Apple's RAM cost to Nvidia's RAM cost. What does a 64GB Nvidia GPU cost? VRAM is expensive and all Apple RAM can be used as VRAM.

Try and price out a PC with 128GB of VRAM.
I see what you're saying, but I disagree for two reasons:

1) If we compare RAM based on OEM price, then we should be looking at PC RAM, since that's what Apple is using. I.e, they are using LPDDR, not the GDDR NVIDIA employs.

And, regardless, I don't think Apple's retail upcharge for its LPDDR, or NVIDIA's upcharge for its GDDR, are at all reflective what they are paying. I.e., you can't argue Apple's pricing is modest by comparing it to another company known to be entirely immodest. It's like saying that what BMW charges for replacement parts is reasonable by comparing it to what Mercedes does.

Plus I'm not sure if the OEM price difference between LPDDR and GDDR is all that much. Now if Apple were instead using HBM RAM, I think you'd have a better argument.

In sum, we all know why Apple and NVIDIA charge a lot for RAM upgrades: It's a key component of how they maintain their profit margins. That's not a criticism, that's just an observation.

2) If we instead compare RAM prices based on functional usage (which, I believe, was your approach), note that a lot of folks who need a lot of RAM aren't doing GPU computing. Thus when they're buying a lot of RAM, they're doing if for CPU usage, and thus NVIDIA's VRAM upgrade pricing wouldn't be relevant. For instance, when I need more RAM to do a calculation with Mathematica, that's a CPU computation, not a GPU computation. And according to Puget Systems, serious Photoshop work can require >64 GB of CPU RAM, but rarely needs more than 4 GB VRAM:

 
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