Interestingly, when looking for numbers to use below, I figured the 14” MBP would be a good middle-of-the-road example. Turns out the “base storage” for the 14” is 512GB making the OP even more risible.
My "hypothetical" consumer would love to buy the product. The problem is my "hypothetical" consumer can't buy the product because they can't install it. Apple has artificially locked out the ability to use the equivalent aftermarket product on Apple laptops.
The aftermarket product is equivalent in every way to what Apple provides - the limitation is with Apple's hardware, not the aftermarket product.
No. People aren't asking for anything for free. People are just asking to not feel like they are being fleeced for buying what is supposed to be a "premium" product. Again - people calling this "consumer greed" in light of all the progressive consumer-adverse design choices Apple has made in the past decade is just so incredibly sad.
Just pulling some numbers from the web:
14” MBP w/ 512GB: $2000
14” MBP w/ 8TB: $4400
Difference: $2200
Corsair 512GB: $100
Corsair 8TB: $1200
Difference: $1100
You seem to be suggesting that the higher end Mac should cost $3100 rather than that the the lower end Mac is a relative bargain because it should cost $3300. Neither of these things are completely true, though the latter is closer to the truth. The truth is that the target customer for each puts a different value on their Macs and Apple differentiates these customers by storage (among a few other things). If Apple charged for storage upgrades at cost, the price of the bottom end Macs would go up.
You’re confusing commodity component pricing with system pricing. A Mac isn’t a collection of components and a little ingot of gold that all sum up to a selling price. It is a collection of components, a cost of engineering and operations, and a profit that rewards investment in past development and fuels future development.
Because I’m sure people are going to cry about the fact that I’m defending profits, let me make this clear: profit is a measure of the value added by the company. A product costs a certain amount to make, and a customer is willing to pay a certain amount for it. The difference in those two numbers is the value a customer sees in the product above and beyond the value of a paper bag full of the same components. A customer willing to pay more for a Mac than a Dell indicates that Apple has added more value to that bag of components than Dell has. If you think Apple should cut their profits below the value they add to the product then you’re asking for something for free.
Look at a Mac. Do you sell just one variant for everyone? That probably isn’t the right approach because you will have mismatched people’s needs and their willingness to pay. You could only sell the low end model, but the power users will be disappointed by the lack of capability. You could only sell the high end model but that would price out the casual user. So you provide a range of products to choose from.
The engineering and operations costs are shared across that product range, so to minimize the cost of the range it’s best to maintain as much commonality between products in the range as possible. You could make specialized designs for granny, schoolkid, author, coder, data scientist, nuclear simulation, but then the cost of every one of those machines goes up substantially. Better to make a common design and differentiate in ways that minimize impact on the overall system.
Now, think of the product as Mac+storage. Apple differentiates their products in a few ways (processor, RAM, storage, mostly) but let’s simplify the discussion to just storage the way the early iPhones were differentiated. Looking at the numbers above, let’s look at the customer cost of the Mac part:
512GB Mac+storage: $2000 - $100 (storage)= $1900 Mac cost
8TB Mac+storage: $4400 - $1200 (storage) = $3200 Mac cost
The question then is “Is the Mac worth $1900 to the customer, or is it worth $3200 to the customer?” and the answer is “Yes”. They are different customers and no customer will pay more for something than it is worth to them. The customer buying the 8TB Mac values it more than the customer buying the 512GB Mac (or the second customer is getting an extraordinary deal).
Looking at the other half of the transaction: what’s it worth to Apple? Apple doesn’t just make a product and hope to earn money, they decide whether a product is worth making based on what they believe they can sell it for. I have no idea what that number is, but let’s say it’s $2550. If Apple refused to sell a Mac for less than $2550, what we get is this:
512GB Mac: $2550 + $100 (storage) = $2650 Mac+storage
8TB Mac: $2550 + $1200 (storage) = $3750 Mac+storage
Based on this Apple could make the high end Mac cheaper if they look at it in isolation, but it would force them to raise the price of the low end Mac above some budget customers’ willingness to pay meaning less sales for Apple and customers who would like a Mac but can’t afford one. That’s probably the wrong choice because the current pricing proves that high end customers are willing to pay more because they value it more.
So the solution is for Apple to look at the average selling price of a product range in aggregate. If they assume they have equal numbers of budget customers and power users they’ll sell equal numbers of 512GB Macs and 8TB Macs. If they sell one Mac for $1900+storage and one for $3200+storage, then on average they sold two Macs for $2550. Everyone is satisfied. Apple is selling at a price they can justify, Budget-guy was willing to sacrifice storage for price and Power-guy was willing to sacrifice price for storage.
So while “happy” might not be the way to describe everyone in these two transactions, they’re all satisfied and we know that because the transactions cleared.
