Having just bought a $2200 Macbook Pro, the mark-up is definitely hard to ignore (a Dell XPS laptop with equal or better specs comes out to $1400 - admittedly w

Having just bought a $2200 Macbook Pro, the mark-up is definitely hard to ignore (a Dell XPS laptop with equal or better specs comes out to $1400 - admittedly without the Mac OS). However, because they can command such a high mark-up, it's easier for them to charge more for upgrades, e.g. $200 to upgrade from 4GB to 8GB which would still be a 5x markup. It's likely that Apple knows that people who care about the price, e.g. tech people, are probably not going to pay much above the market rate for it. However, the people who aren't as tech-knowledgeable, e.g. aren't familiar with the going price, are far less sensitive to the price and therefore, they can charge substantially more.