And I was working in the field in 1977. . . and agree with roadcat. You are wrong. You are posting the price of the cheapest commodity RAM, not the best RAM used by Apple, but even YOUR quotation was from July of 1978, and eight of those better than a year later at cost, represented almost one-fifth of the RETAIL PRICE of the Apple II. One component, the RAM, represented 20% of the Retail price. . . yet you are talking about a wholesale pricing.
That pricing does NOT include any of the control ICs or other circuitry required to mount those MK4116s (yet you discount the "add-on daughter boards" which do include those very necessary components to make those RAM chips work at all!). . . or the labor to mount them.
Trust me, I searched your magazine. I subscribed to Popular Electronics in that period. You say you were fourteen at that time, I was grown with children and owned my own business in the field by then. I found some companies in your magazine selling the MK4116 for as low as $22. . . but you do not understand the economics of putting those into a product. You demonstrate it by your comments about how Apple was ripping people off with the price of the Apple II. . . and claim as your idiotic proof that one can buy these chips for $220 in 1978 as though THAT proved something factual about Apple's overall value structure.
The PRICE of RAM was something people were willing to pay to get the benefit of the static RAM memory. How much did it cost to make that RAM workable. . . not as a bag of chips in your hand? There is an economic difference. Try putting those $220 worth of chips to work in any computer environment that anyone has to sell as a consumer product, and you will be at approximately $450-$500 to make them usable as RAM memory. Somebody has to design the circuitry that connects them together, then engineer the board they have to go on, somebody has to create the circuit mask to print the circuit board, or to be incorporated on the main logic board, then they have to be manufactured, so your $220 worth of individual chips can be plugged into the sockets that have to be purchased and mounted on all that. You seem to think all that is a trivial cost thing. It isn't. That totals a lot of component costs, time, and labor. . . which add to your $220. . . and that's not even talking the input/output, processor, keyboard, power supply, chassis, case, etc., and everything else that goes into making the Apple II, so that it, itself, can sell at a WHOLESALE price to suppliers making Apple a profit, who then sell it to retail stores at a markup providing them a profit, who then ALSO sell it to customers, also at a markup providing another profit, at its final retail price of $1298. . . GROW UP and learn a little economic theory and don't look at the world in terms of WHAT YOU CAN AFFORD and impute evil motives to the price, simply because it was too expensive for YOUR pocket!
That database I linked you to is accurate.
I AM an adult. . . and sane. I know how to evaluate facts. It is not based on anecdotal data which is what YOU are doing. You assume that because someone disagrees with you, they must be "nuts", but that is itself insane. People can disagree with YOU without being "nuts" especially when it is you that is quite wrong with your analysis. . . and keep posting inanities.
I quoted the MK4116, manufactured by Mostek, which according to Wikipedia:
In 1976 Mostek introduced the silicon-gate MK4027 (an improved version of the metal-gated MK4096), and the new MK4116 16kb double-poly silicon-gate DRAM. They were designed by Paul Schroeder, who later left Mostek to co-found Inmos. From this point until the late 1970s Mostek was a continual leader in the DRAM field, holding as much as 85% of the world market for DRAM. The MK4027 and MK4116 were reverse-engineered by Mosaid and successfully cloned by many companies.
I don't really see any point in further dialogue on this topic.