What'so frickin special about Mac Memory modules?

A guy at work is looking for:

Apple Memory Module: 4GB 667MHz DDR2 FB DIMM ECC (2 x 2GB)

At the Mac store, that's $999.00

That cannot be right.

Not when I can get apparently the same thing here for $76.54

Now, I'm not a Mac guy, so am I totally missing something?

Steve's house ain't gonna rebuild itself.

Physically nothing apart from an Apple sticker. Everybody does the same thing. If you buy memory from Dell it'll cost you more than if you bought it from somebody else.

I buy my memory from Crucial, mainly because I always have. They also guarantee compatibility, I have 6Gb sat in this Mac Pro and the throughput benchmarks are a little better than the Apple units that shipped with it.

There is nothing special about Apple Modules apart from the price!

Cheers

Cris.

Yeah, it's ridiculous, although they've gotten better with the latest Mac Pro. The prices aren't nearly as insane as they used to be, but it's still a big markup.

Trevor: I'd make one correction. All the manufacturers do the same thing on their high-end machines. On the more budget computers (Dell Vostro, for example), you can still double and triple your RAM for reasonable amounts close to market rate. I'm not sure why these companies think that just because it's a high-end machine, people will pay ungodly amounts for RAM.

Cris: I'm happy to hear that you can just get normal Crucial memory. If people are still concerned, they can also go to someplace like macsales.com, which is where I hear a lot of people go to get Mac RAM, and it's only slightly more expensive than the stuff you can find on Newegg.

Still, I'm just glad that I could throw 6GB in the machine I just built for under $100.

They can't charge the same excessive prices because it'd be really obvious that they're gouging you on the memory. You're already paying a premium to get that high end flashy machine anyway. I know people that do buy the excessively overpriced memory from the manufacturer because they just don't want any hassle.

Do not buy generic off the shelf FB-DIMM memory for a Mac Pro (I'm assuming it's a 2007 or 2008 Mac Pro). If you do, odds are it won't have the proper heatsink, and the Mac Pro fans will go into full speed mode.

I'd recommend the people over at OWC for Mac Pro memory.

Also, I'm glad I have ECC memory. Seems one of the modules I bought off a friend when he was selling his Mac Pro went bad. OS X simply kept running fine, instead of introducing random stability problems due to 1 bit errors. Yeah, some RAM might be cheep, but I'll pay a little bit more to get a friendly "Hey, memory is going bad" error instead of having to spend time tracking down problems. Not going to pay insane OEM memory prices though.

Ok, so I'm not going to get in trouble telling his director that the 92% off ram is the same thing? Basically, the guy submitted the $999.00 quote to his boss, but I'm in IT, so I can trump him. When I questioned it, he sent the following snide little comment to his boss:




While I'm fairly certain I know as much as this guy about Macs, I'd really really hate to be wrong.

Well, from the looks of it, you can try ten times to get the right aftermarket stuff and still come out ahead.

You misunderstood. What I said was that I couldn't understand how they could charge the high prices on the higher-end machines when the low-end machines had the normal prices. Not the other way around. I understand why they can't gauge on the low end.