Apple’s competitive edge: Why their upgrade prices are no longer exclusionary amidst surging RAM costs
Apple is becoming more competitive and less expensive as rising RAM and SSD costs due to AI demands make their consistent upgrade prices more attractive compared to the industry’s skyrocketing prices. Picture: Apple
Image: Apple
Apple has always been known for producing premium products, with the caveat that the prices are also premium. That’s slowly changing though.
While Apple products— their laptops in particular— are by no means cheap, the fact that RAM (memory) and SSD storage costs have skyrocketed over the last six months has played right into the tech giants’ hands.
This is chiefly due to the requirements of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which demands more RAM and more SSD space than ever before, and it’s only going to get worse.
For Apple though, the fact that their upgrade prices for RAM and SSD storage have typically always been expensive is not what matters. What does matter is that those upgrades are generally set at consistent prices, as Apple manufactures their own RAM and SSDs.
RAM Prices Surge: Impact on AI Task Performance and Consumer Costs
No longer are their upgrade prices sky-high compared to the competition; they are no longer industry standard and are fast approaching the point where they will even be cheaper by comparison.
The amount of RAM in a computer determines how much work it can do at once, and the CPU-intensive nature of completing AI tasks means it requires more memory just to keep pace.
The majority of budget PCs still ship with 8GB RAM, and in rare cases, less.
No longer will a bottom-of-the-range laptop be able to run the complicated AI apps that are becoming commonplace in the average workflow.
Hardware manufacturers have been quick to capitalise on this area, which is set to be in even greater demand in the future, and have radically increased the price of RAM. Apple though, seems to be mostly unaffected by this increase.
It’s also a case of many factories simply not being able to keep up with the demand.
It means that standard desktop/laptop memory is now much more expensive and difficult to source. Manufacturers might pass increased component costs onto consumers—leading to higher prices for PCs, laptops, and pre-built systems.
According to resellcalendar.com, RAM prices have risen by 171% in the third quarter of 2025 alone.