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Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

The pricing is ridiculous. In Germany it costs 120€. I really don't get why Google is constantly making their products so unaffordable here. That makes it slightly more expensive than the Intel Compute Stick with Win 8.1 which goes for 110€

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There's a 15-25% VAT in most European countries as far as I know while state sales tax is added on top of the purchase price here in the US. That brings it closer to parity.

Adjusting for 19% vat and one euro = usd 1.07 that would make the price EUR 95. It's annoying when the prices get jacked up. I guess they are probably giving a middle man some cut but it's unnecessary these days. Just sell direct and don't bother discriminating against non US persons.

For us prices add 7-9% sales tax to the $85.

I think there's a lot more involved in international sales and logistics than "discriminating against non US persons"

There is only one shop in DE that offers the Chromebit right now, I suppose it is imported. You should wait until Chromebit is officially announced in Germany before drawing conclusions regarding the price.

This here is an absurdly better deal: http://www.amazon.de/X8-Tablet-Desktop-Windows-Android/dp/B0... It comes with a touchscreen and all the ports you'd ever want.

You can get those Rockchip HDMI sticks for $50 on aliexpress, shipping included (RK3288 ones support 4K). They usually ship with Android 4.4 these days. But for $70-$80 you can get a stick with Atom Z3735F 2GB/32GB and have full desktop OS, Windows or Linux.

You will need to pay import tax + handling charge though. Don't know about the actual prices in Germany, but in UK this would cost you another ~$30 on top of the Aliexpress price.

You're right. That may ruin it for some. It differs a lot from country to country, I guess. Where I'm at the moment there is no import tax on <150 EUR items, and handling is 1 EUR.

Exactly, they are £90 here in the UK.

For £120 I could build a mITX machine that would destroy this. (http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/9LffwP) - Granted it's not as small, but who really cares?

For £200 I could buy a Chromebook, but instead I bought a ASUS X205TA for £85 from eBay on sale (I had vouchers etc, but even without them it would've been £130). Yes the trackpad isn't as good, but the build quality is okay and it runs Windows 10 absolutely fine for what I use it for.

>Granted it's not as small, but who really cares?

Isn't one of the primary points of this product the extreme size? It seems like an unreasonable comparison if you dismiss that.

Somehow either tech companies think we (europe) are made of money or something about our tax/import system is wrong.

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