Dell has knocked Apple off one pedestal this week. Last year, we highlighted how an upgrade from 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM on the 17in MacBook Pro would cost a whopping £839 — over £200 a gigabyte.

Dell’s Mobile Precision M6500 manages to top that.

The mobile workstation is the first to offer 32GB of RAM in a laptop, an impressive feat. But the upgrade price from the 16GB to the 32GB edition is a whopping $8,053 (£5,274), or £330 per gigabyte.

To be fair, that last 16GB is where the bulk of the price jump kicks in. The cost difference between the base 2GB version and the epic 32GB edition is $9,234, which translates to a shade over £200 per gigabyte — a charge on a par with expensive Apple, at last year’s prices at least. However, a year on, Apple now charges £80 per gigabyte for that same RAM leap.

Perhaps the extra cost is an investment in the future, as Dell notes on its website: “Adding memory at the time of purchase can be more cost-effective and convenient than upgrading later.”

Convenience sure is expensive, though. Crucial’s 8GB kit rings in at just over £240 — about £30 a gigabyte, leaving £170 per gigabyte in cost for convenience’s sake — although it wouldn’t be possible to easily hit the heights of 32GB.