I was talking with a former Apple server division employee (from Cupertino) and was laughing at the insane RAM upgrade pricing costs compared to Crucial and oth

I was talking with a former Apple server division employee (from Cupertino) and was laughing at the insane RAM upgrade pricing costs compared to Crucial and other vendors. He acknowledged that they were pretty high, but said that this is because Apple is overly careful about vendor selection and testing of the RAM itself. This ensures that it'll work best when installed in Apple hardware and won't cause unexpected and subtle errors down the road (as cheap RAM can sometimes do). I still think Apple RAM is massively overpriced, but this makes sense to me. Also, if you upgrade from 4GB to 8GB when ordering a new build-to-order system the cost drops to $200 (from the $400 quoted here).