Rixstep
 About | ACP | Buy | Industry Watch | Learning Curve | News | Products | Search | Substack
Home » Industry Watch » The Technological » Hall of Monkeys

Life Inside the Honeycomb

There's been a bit of an accident. Get to work and clean it up.


Get It

Try It

What a dilemma. You gaze, gawk, drool over the new MacBook Pro, see what a great price it has, almost accept the fact you'll not get that great price anywhere but in the US or on Hong Kong, you're still intent on getting one - and then the cold shower comes. The water turns icy cold. A complete turnoff.

The Apple maniacs hit again.

For all Apple can do - and it's quite a lot - they can never quite make up for the negative effect of their fanboy idiots. Steve Jobs reputedly hates them. The Apple fanboy idiots turn more switchers off about the platform than all the good marketing and planning at Apple can turn them on. No one with a mind wants to be part of a sick cult like that.

Buzz buzz buzz.

I'd like to take Apple to task for a very bad business practice. I went to price a decked out Mac Pro and was surprised to find Apple adding an extra $500 onto the price of the least expensive Mac Pro and a staggering $1000 for the 3.2GHz model for their Japanese customers. There are no extra tariffs or taxes that Apple must roll into their prices as is the case with Europe and it appears that the company is just using confusion over exchange rates to get extra profit.

One of the biggest things Apple is doing wrong is not realising that businesses generally get to write off any purchase that's less than 300,000 yen in the current year and by setting the cheapest Mac Pro at 349,000 (when it should cost 285,000 by the current rate) they're missing out on a huge number of purchases they could be making to companies looking to save on their taxes. As a shareholder and as a customer I'd like to see Apple be aggressive in its second most important market - not try to profit unfairly from it.

Am I missing something here?

  1. Apple set their prices for each country by whatever logic they decide (taxes, tariffs, greed).

  2. The prices customers in those respective countries have to pay are translated into USD already accounting for fluctuations in currency values.
We can safely assume Apple have already figured all taxes, tariffs, etc. into the up-front price in the same way they determined a MBP over here to be $1699. Within the EU you can see the slight differences in price accounting for the taxes.

Apple are profiting quite handsomely off of those too stupid to do the math.

And it's not just the marked up prices of the MBP - it's about legacy (and fully functional) Apple hardware turning obsolescent with seven years to go on depreciation. The G5 quads are great machines - perhaps the most powerful Apple ever introduced - but they're PPC-based and 10.6 Snow Leopard isn't. Will 10.6 run on these great machines? Forget it.

I really feel sorry for those who bought G5 Quads. Those machines are STILL faster than many dual core Intels for many activities today and they get their support tossed in a little over 3 years.

And for those who say Leopard will still support them: you must remember that those making software for Snow Leopard will have no need to make universal binaries anymore. In fact it'll be at odds with not wanting to maintain separate support for newer features versus older architectures tied to older operating systems.

And so I think most companies will simply inevitably stop making universal binaries and that will then completely kill off the PowerPC machines regardless of how well they still run etc. In effect I believe Apple has just killed support for nearly half their user base. Good job Apple. You just shrunk your user base from 9% to 4-5%. (You seem to like it there for some reason.) But that's right - now you count iPhone and iPod Touch sales as OS X sales. LOL. As if they were the same thing.

The real problem with OS X versus say WindowsXP/Vista/7 is that even if you don't upgrade XP to Vista, almost all new software will continue to work in XP and that will probably be true when Windows7 comes out as well. In fact, software designed for Windows95 will probably still work in XP fifteen years later.

It just gives me one more reason to build a Hackintosh next time instead of buying from Apple. They don't care about their customers, only their bottom line. Most of the people praising the move don't have PPC machines anymore and like Apple don't give a flying fig about other users, only themselves (surprise surprise).

They mistakenly think removing PPC support will make their machines significantly faster, which is just total technical nonsense. It'll save a little bit of hard drive space (compared to the size of today's hard drive, it's literally nothing) and that's it.

But hey that's great if you don't care about nearly half the installed Mac user base. Apple probably think they'll all now be forced to buy new hardware from them but the truth is some may very well go buy a PC or make a Hackintosh instead either out of financial necessity or because they're sick of Apple dropping support for older machines.

I use OS X because I like it better than Windows. But that's certainly not a given over time. I prefer having good hardware choices and competitive prices. At some stage OS X isn't worth it anymore.

Publishing a collated price list to show people what Apple boxen actually cost in the thirty-some stores is tantamount to sedition according to this fabulous crew. Prices should be adjusted so as to not imply any wrongdoing on the part of holy Apple. Do the purchasers really care who's responsible for the markup? Not much.

What they do care about is that $1699 isn't $1699 where they live.

The article in question did the extraordinary in visiting each and every one of the Apple online stores, quoting the price of the MBP at these stores, converting these prices into good old greenbacks, and then calculating the differences - according to the day's exchange rates.

Should a Norwegian be impressed by Apple's new move to sell a dazzling (and it really is dazzling) MBP $400 cheaper than before then said Norwegian is going to have a cold shower when visiting the local Apple store in Norway - the price is over $600 higher.

Said Norwegian doesn't care why the price is higher. But said Norwegian is turned off by the higher price and even more turned off by the mindless 'think different' fanboys who don't think one should even whisper the fact there's such a diff to begin with.

The snooty arrogance of these vermin knows no bounds and let it be a lesson to anyone contemplating a switch: you might still want to take the plunge but you should be aware there are psychological aberrants out there.

Regarding your article on the new MacBook Pro and international pricing:

your use of the term 'markup' is clearly misguided, implying higher profits by the amount of the markup. But the fact is every nation imposes various duties, tariffs, other taxes, and overhead costs (distribution) to goods in a way that seems arbitrary to outsiders. (Yes the US does the same thing to imports.) I don't have facts (per nation) in front of me, but your article is remiss in not mentioning the effect of import barriers on retail pricing.

Oh yeah.

In 1995 I paid over $3000 for my Power Mac 7500/100MHz and I just got a 2.8GHz 8 Core Mac Pro that is a probably a thousand times faster for $2800! Macs are more affordable than ever!!1!

Yup - a $200 savings over a period of 15 years is nothing short of sensational.

I know the New Zealand price includes tax of 12.5% so to get the relative price that should probably be removed first which [sic] at nearly $400NZ makes the mark up much more reasonable.

Relative price? No mentally healthy New Zealander cares about a relative price. When you're out $400 do you console yourself by saying 'hey but that's only relative'? Or do you have a Rent-A-Fanboy™ service sending over an idiot to whisper in your ear as you do your household banking and bookkeeping?

Fanboys are mentally deranged. They're the one greatest negative marketing factor on Apple sales after the highly priced dongle. As such they're impeding evolution on the Internet and in the world of homo sapiens. Every potential switcher these idiots turn off is another victory for Microsoft.

Greet your new taskmaster, rent-boys. Oh - bad news: she had diarrhea this morning. So the cage you share's a bit messy.



Clean it up.

'I tend to think the Mac platform has more shallow people per capita than Windows or Linux to be honest with you. You don't see much talk of things like 'fanboys' on forums for those operating systems. You're only 'cool' if you're current and ONLY if you agree with everything so-and-so person has to say. Otherwise they attack and insult even if they don't know the first thing about computers and probably don't care either or else they might resent Apple taking advantage of them at every possible turn.'
 - 'MagnusVonMagnum'

About | ACP | Buy | Industry Watch | Learning Curve | News | Products | Search | Substack
Copyright © Rixstep. All rights reserved.