Thinking about buying an SSD as about the best possible upgrade to any computer? I certainly am, so imagine my delight when I compare the differences in price of buying the drive in, say, Japan, and my wonderful Australia!
Japan: ¥45,885 (AUD$550)
Australia: around $800
A nice $250 Australia Tax there.
Excited about the new Mac Pro ‘09? You will be if you live in Australia, where Apple offers the thrilling possibility of paying almost $6,000 for the base 8-core model:
But that’s the lowest speed CPU option, with two 2.26GHz CPUs. How about if we want the faster option, with 2.93GHz processors? Let’s configure that:
Over $10,000 dollars. No extra RAM, HD or indeed anything else – this is the emptiest box you can buy with the high-speed CPUs. And in fact a prudent buyer would expect it to be about $11,000 once he upgraded to the sweetest nearby spot, getting rid of the useless 1GB DIMMs which come with the “base” model, and adding a couple of other necessary items best factory installed, like a wireless card.
How many people do you know who spend $11k, or indeed even $6k, on a computer, in 2009?
Wow. The MacBook Air looks sweet – I want one! I wonder how much it is in australia?
US Price: USD $1799
AU Price: AUD $2499
Exchange rate as of right now: 1 AUD = 0.8861 USD
US Price in AUD: $2,030
Glad to see the ARAT (Apple Regional Assfuck Tax) is still in full effect down under. What do I get for my AUD$469 donation to the worthless lazy fucks at Apple Australia? That’s right – nothing!
UPDATE: Japanese price comparisons
JP Price: JPY ¥229,800
Exchange rate right now: 1 AUD = 97.1920588 JPY
JP Price in AUD: AUD $2,364
Sigh. You’d think with the USD headed downwards, prices outside the USA would go down, not up.
I have a pair of the fantastic Mackie HR824 MKI monitor speakers. They’re great, easily the best midprice monitor speaker on the market, in my opinion.
So naturally I was interested when the MKII was announced, especially since my MKIs are sitting thousands of kilometres away! And with the , surely the price would be reasonable, right?
WRONG!
Price in America: USD$599 = AUD$625.23 each = AUD$1,350.46 for a pair.
Price in Australia: AUD$2,999 for a pair.
The speakers are identical save the localised power cable. Voltage is switchable on the back. The Australian price is 220% of the American for the exact same fucking thing.
Fuck you, Australian distributors. The only way I’d pay you more than double the proper market price for a pair of these is if it included a free kick right in your useless, greedy faces.
UPDATE: annoyingly, on the mk2 the voltage is NOT switchable on the back, locking us into the Euro or AU model. I don’t know any good EU online stores but the list price is EUR€599, about AUD$995 each. I wonder what they cost in China – where all this stuff is made.
Anyway, the price difference with the US model would easily cover a huge stepdown transformer.
It infuriates me that these power compatibility issues even exist! It all just gets turned into DC internally anyway. Why isn’t there a range of standard interchangeable transformer modules on all electronics? Then they could just make the same thing a million times, and slot the module in as required. Methinks the savings gained by doing that would be outweighed by the arbitrage-style profits lost by being able to segment the markets, DVD Region style.