Why on earth is Apple gear so expensive in Europe

[Asher Kelman]

Georg Baumann just pointed me to the U.K. Apple website.

I was surprised to find a hefty ~ 15% extra price before tax for the MacBook Pro 17" and $1,000 extra for a modestly equipped** 8 core Tower with 4GB RAM, an Airport card and AppleCare! That comes to 21% surcharge on U.S. products?

Now is it more expensive to ship/fly the Chinese-assembled Macs to Europe versus the USA or is it that wages, employment taxes, and fringe benefits of personel make it more expensive for Apple to even just warehouse and ship Macs to customers in the U.K. and presumably in the rest of Europe.

Here are the prices of this modestly configered great machine:

• Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• 4GB (4 x 1GB)
• 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI)
• One 16x SuperDrive
• Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse - U.S. English
• Mac OS X - U.S. English
• 1-year basic membership

U.S. Price:.......................................$4,765.95 USA (Apple Store Price without any state tax!)

U.K. Price........................................$5,765.78 (in US $ as of today, £2,840.00 U.K. price*** no VAT)

"Surcharge" for U.K.......................$999.83

Per Cent Surcharge for U.K...........21%

So is this the reason why we have such a lot of tourists flocking to the USA: stuff is so cheap or is it that Europe's taxation drives up the cost of doing business. OTOH, what other reasons could explain this huge price differential?


Asher

** I figured just 4GB RAM gets one going as does only one hard drive. New, less expensive, highest quality hard drives are so easy to install, a caveman could do it! Aslo one can add less expensive RAM to 16GB.

*** VAT: £497.00, out of the door price, with VAT is £3,337.0 U.K.

 

[KrisCarnmarker]

Good question Asher, but not reserved for Apple. Check out the difference in price on Adobe CS3, for instance, or Canon gear. Almost everything is much more expensive in Europe. I have even seen products made in the EU that are cheaper to buy in the US. Tack on VAT and we are talking some major differences.

Currently the USD is quite weak, but the difference is large even when the USD is strong.

 

[Michael Fontana]

Probably, they think we might have a bigger udder.

I found the tax-argument to be most of the time unvalid; as here in Switzerland, with 7.6 % of taxes, we often pay still 20 - 30% over the EU-prize, even they tax for 19%, as in Germany.

Kris pointed out, that apple isn't the only one.
Years ago, the localisation of software was used to explain the higher prize; but if you look at LR, one might think that babblefish made the translation.

 

[Georg R. Baumann]

Currently it would be cheaper to

1. Fly to Big Apple and back
2. Purchase CS3 Extended
3. Pay import duty and tax on return

You still spare € 79 compared with the UK price, how crazy is that? I spare you the official adobe blah blah why there is up to 190% price difference to the USA.

I think Asher is right, now that MAC is not limitted to proprietary hardware, you could buy the basic CPU/RAM/HD configuration and spice it as as you see fit. However, I have no idea how that would effect warranty if you would purchase a 3 years apple care plan on top.

Personally, since I have XP and a dedicated internet/mail PC, I did not have any trouble, no blue screens of death or similiar since 2001. Really can not complain on that front.

The only reason for me to look into a MAC is more RAM, however, I know that Photoshop can adress max of 3 Gig, for me it would be very interesting in terms of music (large sample libraries just love RAM!)

Having seen OSX Tiger, no doubt, I would prefer that, much more sexy to open a UNIX console on demand and so on. Leopard around the corner looks promising. To my impression over all, the much better Operating system in deed. No drivers? I really had to laugh, how cool is that, just a flippin plist. Installing and deinstalling, talk about a humongous registry in windows which is a totally overblown database.

My guess is, particulary with that VISTA crap, if Apple would have more competitive prices compared to PC's if one could configure a MAC with more hardware options in a MAC store, talk about RAM, HD's, Grafics and so on, they would have eaten a huge chunk from the PC segment.

I just configured a PC here in Ireland for 1595 Euro including 3 years warranty that has

ASUS P5N-E
2x Quad 2.66 Ghz with 8MB cache, (8X not 4X like on the MAC below )
4 Gig Ram, 1x 10,000 rpm WD Raptor 150 Gig 16 MB cache ( System and Programs)
Ge Force 7600 GT 256 MB
1 x 750 Gig with 32 MB chache
DVD Burner

Now going to apple store and I was offered to start a config for

Start building your Mac Pro with our suggested configuration:
Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" processors
1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMM)
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 256MB memory
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive1
16x double-layer SuperDrive
Eur 2,539.00

....and that's not with 3 years warranty. The MAC costs 1.000 more here with 3 Gig less, let aside the larger and better specified HD's. For that difference alone I add a 21" Eizo TFT and still would have to dish out for a modern monitor on the MAC.

Given what you get for your money, hard to justify in my book. Frankly I don't care what lies beneath as long as photoshop and my music stuff works.

 

[Ray West]

Hi Asher,

It's very simple. Exactly the same reason as the price of everything - it's what they think the market will stand. In the hardware side of things, maybe even software, they will stitch you up with after sales support/warranty not being honoured. It is a big mistake to ever think that these companies have the customer's interest at heart, they exist for one reason, to take as much money from you in the quickest way possible, repeatedly.

Best wishes,

Ray

 

[Georg R. Baumann]

they exist for one reason, to take as much money from you in the quickest way possible, repeatedly.

Amen!

The "quarterly prayer" .... <grins>