There are generally lower-cost alternatives for sourcing the third-party products they carry. Their first-party products are usually more expensive, but they're of higher quality than the competition and come with better documentation and guides.
1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US, largely due to the availability of cheap labour (attributed by economists to foreign students)[2].
I heard one economist on the ABC give the example of carwashes[2]. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, car washes in Australia were largely automated and hand-wash car washes were relatively uncommon. However, the abundance of cheap labour has since led to a proliferation of hand-wash car washes.
