Yeah, the “Mac Tax” on that is insane!
Stuff like this turned me off from Macs for a long time as I could build something just as fast for a fraction of the price. That changed with the Silicon Macs which are extremely fast, and honestly not that expensive for a basic setup. Obviously they gouge you with RAM and storage.
$2,160 for 8TB of storage, while you can get a Samsung 4TB 990 Pro for $299! Get two of the Samsungs M.2s, put them in a Thunderbolt housing, and save over $1K. As I mentioned earlier, I have 14TB of M.2 drives in an OWC Express 4M2 housing that I use for all my files, VSTs, etc. All my programs are on the internal 2TB drive, of which I’ve only filled about 800GB. (Two of the 4TB M.2 drives have over 3.5TB each, so I’m gonna have to shuffle things around fairly soon. The other 4TB only has 2.1TB on it.)