That's one of my least favorite things about Apple as well. They have always been able to leverage the fact that they are the only maker of Macs, and now they

That's one of my least favorite things about Apple as well. They have always been able to leverage the fact that they are the only maker of Macs, and now they additionally have these more closed designs with RAM, storage, and batteries that are difficult to impossible for users to replace. That said, Apple is not the only offender, nor are they the worst; I checked out the Lenovo online store, and they charge $160 extra to go from 4GB to 8GB of RAM on the laptop I looked at. Apple, despite the soldered-in RAM on the new MBP, now charges $200 to go from 8GB to 16GB.