The "Apple Tax" - Fact or Fiction? | Hacker News Reader

The "Apple Tax" - Fact or Fiction?

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11 pointsMojoKid16 comments

In my experience, there's certainly some truth to the Apple tax, especially here in New Zealand where Apple products are sold through third party distributors who want to add their margins to the retail price. Dell and HP will both sell directly to you, which can result in their prices being lower.

In saying that, what often gets overlooked is the "Apple rebate" that you get when you come to sell the machine. This would be difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy, but in my experience Apple products tend to hold their value for longer than Windows machines.

What about buying from the online Apple Store (http://store.apple.com/nz)? How do the prices compare then?

Those prices are the same as retail.

To give you an idea of the markup, a 15" MacBook Pro 2.66Ghz costs US$2199 on the American Apple site. If it were sold for the same price in New Zealand it would cost NZ$2870. It actually retails for NZ$3799 (nearly NZ$1000 more).

One reason: the US prices don't include any sales tax, while the NZ prices do.

This. Exactly this. I once looked into getting a friend to get a Macbook from the US for me; by the time taxes were taken into account it was going to be no cheaper at all – and if I took my GST write-off into account, the US import would have been more expensive.

Almost this.

$2870.00 * 1.15 = $3300.50 $3300.50 < $3799

(We have a 15% sales tax that also applies to items ordered from overseas over a certain threshold)

That's the sales tax, not the Apple tax. :)

Surely people here are technical enough to decide what's best for themselves without a flamebait article rehashing ages-old stuff. I am personally extremely anti-Apple, I know a lot of people here are pro-Apple and couldn't live without them. But I think one thing we can agree on is that we know what's best for our own work-flows and that this specific kind of article is just a pointless waste of everyone's time. That's the reason why I have flagged it.

Flamebait article? Hello? This piece actually takes time to look at the system configs, dollars and cents. This article is quite the antithesis of flamebait. Please read before judging.

A better comparison for the 13" category would have been the acer 3820TG with discrete graphics instead of the 3820T without.

http://acer.ca/acer/productv.do?LanguageISOCtxParam=en&k...

Still much cheaper than the macbook, the 3820TG has switchable graphics with an ati 5650 gpu (much faster than the nvidia 320M). The article also claims that the macbook battery is "far superior" to the 3820 battery, yet the macbook battery is a 63.5wh part where the acer has a 66.6wh battery. Both manufacturers claim "up to 10 hours" and while they say that the apple shows "7-8 hours" in real use they fail to note that the TimelineX turns in about the same in real world tests (I have the 4820TG with the same battery and consistently get ~7hours browsing the web with wifi on and the screen at 40%). And, as they note, it's 1lb lighter, has twice the ram, the 370M is a faster CPU and the 500G drive is larger. It's also a very well built machine.

The Asus UL35 is in there too. Similar config with NVIDIA GPU.

"Apple essentially has no consumer-level desktop outside of the iMac. For example, there's no "headless iMac" to select. "

I know they're expecting to compare a low-price tower, but I wonder why they didn't consider comparing the mac mini.

Mac mini would have been a good comparison for another SFF PC of some sort, agreed.

People on this site might forget other facts people consider when buying a computer.

I would have jumped on the apple bandwaggon years ago, if only I could buy one with Windows. I know about bootcamp, I have several unix machines, but for my personal computer Linux/Unix is not an option (yet).

Even if Apple computers would become cheaper. And I'm far from alone with this attitude. Hear I'm the minority. I love the Apple hardware, but "No Thanks" to MacOS.

What would happen if I could walk into an AppleStore, and buy a new MBAir with windows7 on it? What do you think? Would it outsell the MBAir with MacOS?

Would never happen. The genius bar/phone support would be full of people with who have a virus, malware, spyware, etc. That would cost Apple too much to deal with a product that isn't theirs.

See: Getting rid of Java and Flash.

That's weak argumentation. I don't see HP or Dell deal with viruses or malware. The package Apple(Hardware) + Windows(Software) could endanger MacOS ...

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