Never understood why they don’t just offer RAM at closer-to-market prices instead of giving you a 4GB stick that will get tossed or sit in a drawer unused. Surely they’d rather make $20 on RAM instead of $0? It’s not like they refuse warranty service for unrelated parts because you’ve installed aftermarket RAM. I’d bet they could even get preferential pricing on qty purchases, so in theory it should be cheaper to get RAM / SSD upgrades through the mfg vs aftermarket…
Not everyone's tech savvy enough to order and install their own RAM. For every person buying 4GB of RAM to upgrade later there's probably 10 buying 16GB RAM at 100+% markup.
I'd guess most people buying mobile workstations would be savvy enough. But if your company requires the laptop is bought from and gets service from Dell why wouldn't they just pay the premium price?
Having worked in a start-up where everyone 'got their way' with respect to hardware (company culture thing) it was impossible to centrally organise things like repairs - nobody but the dev knew where stuff was ordered so technical defects took up lots of dev time which costs more than just paying a few $100 extra for peace of mind.
They'd like to make some margin selling computers. The cheaper base model machines are very competitively priced between manufacturers. Much easier to make your profit on options.
