You are ignorant. I've put together Apple II boards. The only thing necessary to put additional memory in them are those MK4116 memory chips. All the support circuitry is already built into the motherboards.
Here's a schematic if you are knowledgeable enough to understand it. (I am. I can tell you what every single component does. I could build one from components if I was so inclined. )
Now stop mouthing back at me with your ignorant opinions.
Whoop-te-do! You added a few memory chips and call it putting together Apple II boards! Like that muslim kid who took the guts out of a store-bought clock, placed them in a pencil box and said he invented a clock. Wow, what an accomplishment!
Well, I've assembled bare Apple II motherboards with all components. And way back then in the 1970s on the earliest revision motherboards there was a experimental breadboard section for hobbyists to add their own circuitry, which I did add for tweaking color graphics (to create many more color combinations). I also did other mods to the motherboard for lower-case and new commands, and ability to use eproms instead of factory roms. I coded and burned my own personal eproms to have custom fonts, and a custom bootstrap to run my own utilities burned in the eproms.
You know nothing about what went into these machines, akin to someone changing tires on a car and thinking they're a mechanic. Whoop-te-do!
What part of "I was one of 100 High School Students in the United States in the mid 60s selected by Bell Labs to participate in some of their projects such as making our own transistors. . . and then later participate in voice creation via electronics." did you fail to grasp? Were you so selected? I doubt it.
My point is seems to have been beyond your grasp that the RETAIL PRICE of $1298 which YOU were complaining about as being too expensive is INCLUSIVE of that board plus your $220 of DRAM chips. . . try counting all those components you claim to know what they do, add the cost of acquiring all of them, plus the sockets for the socketed ones, then add in the printing of a double sided circuit board, add design costs, add manufacturing costs including labor, overhead, advertising, and whole host of costs you don't seem to have a clue about, including federal licensing from a bunch of regulatory agencies who have to sign-off on several things, and state and federal taxes, and then YOU tell me if it is too expensive or not. I think they did a remarkable thing in building it in the USA for as low a cost as they did.
And, yes, Steve Wozniak did a phenomenal job, with help, in designing that board and everything else. But Steve Jobs did another phenomenal job of all the rest in making it come together to get the PRODUCT made. . . and frankly, all-in-all, that was probably the harder job.