The USB-C passthroughs are nominally $9 each, so it's not $80 to fill out the bays. More importantly, they're also built into the price estimate already, so wh

The USB-C passthroughs are nominally $9 each, so it's not $80 to fill out the bays. More importantly, they're also built into the price estimate already, so when it says "$999" or whatever, that's including four $9 cards. It doesn't cost you any more to switch some of them for USB-A's instead, and other choices like HDMI, Micro SD, whatever, will be an upcharge. A more savvy (sneaky?) approach might be to say that 4 cards are included and then only quote the increase over the base price for the things like HDMI that cost more, but I suppose they wanted it to be seamless in terms of how the pricing appears if you want to order more than 4. Obviously there's a real sense in which engineering went into having this system and the things take up space, so there's a cost to having them, but I don't think calling them an upcharge is really legitimate; they're built in to the quoted prices.