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Comment by elros | Hacker News Reader

The cheapest Macbook you can find with a retina display costs $3200 in Brazil. That's more than double the price you quote, and we're not even accounting for purchase-power differences in the currency itself.

To put it in perspective, the minimum wage is $300, and I don't know anyone making more than $1500 over there – including developers.

You could literally make a living off of buying Macbooks in the US and selling them in Brazil for double the price; it'd still be much cheaper than in the stores.

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What does this have to do with the article?

[Edit] I'll be less terse. Yes, I know computers are more expensive in some countries. Are you accusing the author of being, in some way, discriminatory towards people with lower incomes? Did he say they were only designing for Retina displays? (Or only for Apple hardware?) This response feels like an even larger straw man than the parent comment I responded to, and even less about the article itself.

I'm not accusing the author of anything, I'm accusing you of thinking retina Macbooks are somehow cheap and accessible.

I also dont't think the comment you were replying to was expressing a dislike of Apple.

Basically, I think you're not even wrong. :-)

When did he say they were cheap and accessible? He actually said, they were on par with similarly equipped PCs. Not at all the same thing.

He was replying to a post that matches the price of a computer to a car, with the implication that that's expensive. He replied saying that a rMBP "starts at $1299", and he was disagreeing with the post he was replying. Thus his implication was that this is a cheap price.

I'm willing to retract that entire line of thinking, because the author never ever actually said anything about designing for Retina hardware, so why are we talking about it in the first place? Their explicit approach was to make Medium's typography work on as many platforms and devices as possible, and this OS X (not Retina, just OS X) bug was an edge case that they missed.

Oh, I fully agree with you on this one!

Brazil's extremely high import tax is a large part of this, that's why it's not arbitraged away.

Apple don't bother arbitraging away taxes most places I've looked.

They also seem to have started doing USD<->Local Currency pricing 'adjustment' far more regularly than I would have expected. I have watched the base price for an App in Australia fluctuate between $0.99 and $1.29 over the last two years. They are always slower to change the price 'down' than 'up'. So I'm not surprised at the fact they would just 'pass on the full cost' to an entire country. I'm pretty sure even with the import tax they are probably adding a 'nuisance surcharge' to the price of the laptops, because of the 'costs of tax compliance' and other typical corporate excuses.

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