This is a key part of our product value prop. Our memory and storage upgrade pricing is much lower than most other laptop makers, and you can find your own on the open market for even less. Other laptop makers can preserve their overall margin by overcharging on those upgrades, which lets them price their base SKUs more aggressively. We accepted the tradeoff of not gouging on upgrades.
I got my wife an entire-ass Framework 13 7840U /and/ put 32GB RAM and a 2TB SSD in it for less than the cost of the uplift to go from base RAM to 32GB and base SSD to 2TB from Apple at time of preorder. That was the day I stopped being an Apple customer. Maybe for the $300 Walmart laptop folks it's too expensive, but hardly for Mac refugees.
