The pricing isn’t extortionate. It’s literally just them having to pass on the insane price of RAM (itself priced due to the massive demand and supply shortage).
And you’re right that Apple is hesitant to change prices on models. But that cuts both ways. Apple notably held off of bumping prices across their product line for a considerable amount of time, very plausibly eating the cost of RAM price increases.
It would definitely be atypical but given the unique and extreme nature of the current situation, I wouldn’t be shocked if they cut prices somewhat once the RAM situation relaxes.
Right up to the launch of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro in mid 2023, Apple would still happily charge you early 2019 prices for the 2019 Xeon processors in the previous edition, 2019 prices for memory and flash (I ordered mine with 32 and used OWC to go to 192GB, because for the exact same chips, spec, timings, OWC wanted $1,050 for 192GB, and Apple wanted $3,000 for 160GB, i.e. minus the 32GB already rolled into the price. Similar $1K to $3K margin for 8TB of SSD - I bought a PCIe card with 4x2TB Samsung Pro drives).
And you’re right that Apple is hesitant to change prices on models. But that cuts both ways. Apple notably held off of bumping prices across their product line for a considerable amount of time, very plausibly eating the cost of RAM price increases.
It would definitely be atypical but given the unique and extreme nature of the current situation, I wouldn’t be shocked if they cut prices somewhat once the RAM situation relaxes.