iPhone 12 Pro so costly in India, you can fly to Dubai to buy it and save money
indiatoday.in
indiatoday.in
TBH, I am a big fan of taxes, I am happy to pay even 50-60% in taxes if that means my fellow human is not left hungry or without healthcare or without a roof on their head. In India this is not the case, high taxes, with no benefits to anyone (except the government and their friends).
India has a massive welfare state. Just because it doesn't benefit iPhone 12 buyers doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Is the welfare state 100% effective? No. But it's disingenuous to say welfare doesn't play a role for millions of families.
This brings to light another problem - unlike the developed countries, in India the average citizen doesn't even know the specifics of things that can be improved because there are hardly any independent organizations which raise awareness about specific policies, or which publish easy to digest reports for the general public to become better informed.
This was a time of war and food-shortages; funding clearly is not the problem.
It is a sector that really needs an upgrade and much of it requires very little money but the attitude of teachers and curriculum.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_India
Is this not working out in practice, in your view?
Anyways, I do not want to be too critical of anyone. My knowledge is limited to a few families I know and the few cities I have lived in. India is huge and hard to describe in a few sentences.
Finally, to clarify, I am not the guy who would buy an iPhone or go to Dubai. I am a lowly programmer, happy with my $250 Android which I use for 2-3 years.
The above disempowerment of India's natives, their culture and languages, is the direct result of the Indian state continuing colonial policies of very unfairly advantaging the Anglicized elites, educationally, socially, politically and thus economically.
Now that the state has completely failed in its duties, yet again, it has passed a new RTE act, in which it further burdens private schools, targeting esp. those run by Hindus. The Indian state in all its 'secular' glory, decided also to favor the Christian missionary schools, the very ones that were instrumental in destroying the country (and China), by sparing them of the same burdens.
https://swarajyamag.com/magazine/the-evidence-is-compelling-...
https://swarajyamag.com/politics/rte-benefits-minority-schoo...
The Indian political estd. and the state is disgusting. Quite frankly, the British for all their faults, atleast knew how to keep a public-schooling and university system running. The 'Brown Babus' are little more than self-conceited idiots wearing fancy suits.
I hear this a lot but does it have to be so? AFAIK China, Japan, and South Korea also educate students in their native languages and that hasn't hindered their development.
So, the closest thing India has to a universal language is English. If you don't learn that, you won't be able to communicate with a significant population, even discounting international relations.
In comparison, China which started out it a much worse economic position (WWII, CCP..), and with a far more difficult writing system, has ended up today a >95% literacy rate.
I realize people like to downvote these pessimistic comments, just because 'India is the next superpower', the 'great hope of democracies' that will take PRC', but how this can happen without any groundwork is something I can't comprehend.
It takes a whole 20-25 years for a generation to grow up. The tiny sliver that is being reared are very good at servicing people by emigrating to other countries and this is how India (like Phillipines) earns much of its forex. How they can turn into a 'superpower' by turning themselves into a country of glorified serfs is beyond my understanding.
Worse yet, Indians themselves are sucked up to this drunken madness instead of focusing on real problems that have remained unsolved over the past ~80 years either due to political incompetence, or worse conscious decision-making.
1 Lakh = 100,000 1 USD = 73 Rs.
A mid-level manager / programmer would pay around 20-25% in taxes.
Plus, Current GST (VAT) rate in India is 18% for goods and services like most countries. There are reduced rates 0%, 5% and 12% for some goods and services, and 28% luxury rate for some items.
And finally, other tariffs on things like iPhone, computer parts, cars etc.
- Public schooling, unusable.
- Public health, unusable.
- Public infrastructure, unusable.
I have no clue where my taxes are going, but it sure as hell isn't being spent for "welfare".
The whole Indian railways network is massively subsidized but it's doubtful anyone on HN would travel by anything other than air conditioned if indeed they travel by train (eg. I've never travelled by train after i began working).
In many states, basic groceries are effectively free. The less well off folks buy from these, the "middle class" shops from private traders. However there's a massive number of the less well off.
Not saying there's no corruption, but the scale of the problem is massive.
India's food assistance programs, free education, and healthcare are amongst the most used on the planet.
Examples from Wikipedia:
- The Indian public health sector encompasses 18% of total outpatient care and 44% of total inpatient care
- Free lunch programs for underprivileged children: "Serving 120,000,000 children in over 1,265,000 schools and Education Guarantee Scheme centres, it is the largest of its kind in the world"
- Universal healthcare targeted at underprivileged: "PMJAY and the e-card provide a coverage of Rs. 5 lakh ($ 6860) per family, per year, thus helping the economically disadvantaged obtain easy access to healthcare services."
- 550,000 ration shops providing subsidized food
Please do not generalize your own experience to that of 1 billion people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_distribution_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Programs_in_India
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-health-policy...
in the US paying 60% in taxes is equivalent to 'not contributing your fair share" which is why Biden wants to take it even higher. I'm surprised how US has some of the highest income taxes (especially in places like CA and NYC) but people still think it's a low tax place.
> However, despite the sky-rocketing prices, iPhone still sells best in India and the buyers give whatever price Apple asks them to pay. So for a business, that is not a bad deal at all.
Not really a good deal for Apple. More like an amazing deal for the Indian government.
I thought high taxes are the incentive to start manufacturing or assembly locally.
Not despite.
People don't understand the Apple brand.
How fortunate that we have you to explain it. They're probably just holding it wrong.
By comparison, I paid $92.04 in sales tax for my new iPhone, and I am currently in a geography that is considered low-tax.
The former are just having a laugh, and the latter are looking for things to be offended by.
I don't know which camp the GP falls into but I'll be charitable and assume they're just being silly.
Youessish. Like in British, English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish.
Youessan. Like in Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban.
Youessese. Asian American.
Youessian. Like Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Indian.
When I lived in Costa Rica for a time, I was only ever "Americano" and everyone from there were "ticos" or "costarricense." Though to be fair, Costa Rica has pretty much been spared of American meddling.
Now I'm used to it and don't mind it anymore and this is the first time I've heard of the term USAian and find it quite amousing but I don't think it will catch on.
America isn't a continent. We have North America and South America. We typically refer to the grouping of those two continents as 'The Americas', but not America. At least not that I've ever seen.
On a side note - maybe it depends on if you are taught a different number of continents? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent)
In the U.S. we do 7. Maybe in Venezuela or Brasil they do 5?
I guess that's one of the things that confuses me here. If you're from Europe you can be European because that's the continent you're from. If you're from Canada you can be Canadian or North American, but you can't be American because that's not a continent. I mean I guess you technically can, but it's a bit of a lossy term to use. It isn't specific enough. Do people from Bangladesh or Pakistan think of themselves as Asian, or Pakistani?
I guess as I see some of this discussion, it strikes me as very arbitrary and resentful, and also not very consistent.
> USAian and find it quite amousing but I don't think it will catch on.
Yea I saw it and had to do a double take because I thought it was USAsian. I think at least in English it won't catch on because it doesn't flow very well.
I’m sure Canadians and others get quite annoyed from that.
If you’re Canadian you’d say I’m from North America, not America. If you’re from Brazil you’d say you’re from South America. The same would be true of Americans. You’d say you’re from North America. That’s the continent. If you are going to go down that route.
Do Mexicans, Canadians, Brazilians, and others really consider themselves of the region of the Americas and not from one of the two continents? I just don’t get the organizational structure that’s used. You wouldn’t say you’re American, that’s for sure. You’d say you’re north or South American.
You acknowledge what America means when you use the English word "Americas" to refer to the regions within North and South America, because in English that is the word to use and has the other meaning.
The same logic applies to "football", btw. The vast majority of English speaking people refer to soccer as soccer. That people who speak other languages use a word in their language that sounds like "football" to refer to soccer does not give them standing to sound off on what Australians, Americans, and Canadians call soccer. There is room for the British to bicker about it, but they are a distinct minority among English speakers.
Isn't that word, "football"?
You are correct. I have only very rarely in my life given fig one about offending strangers.
1. https://madb.europa.eu/madb/euTariffs.htm?productCode=851712...
A $149 IntelliJ licence costs $176 including taxes + there is a 3.5% processing and currency conversion charges imposed by by credit card. Converting to INR I may have to shell out Rs. 3.5k to 4k extra which has dissuaded me going for an All Products Pack and settle for the Ultimate license.
We're talking logistics improvement, stable electric grid, infrastructure and training programs to get an educated workforce. Or is it just contributing to some bureaucrat's pension fund?
In the same vein, I 100% agree with fuel taxes and green taxes... if the government can demonstrate 100% of the tax goes to finance alternatives that are useful to me.
Depending on the costs of manufacturing, the price of might not go down by much however, or Apple might keep the difference.
I was not voicing an opinion on whether such protectionist policies actually work. (They seldom do).
In the case of the iPhone you might need to find a cheap flight to the US, but a Macbook will land you a couple days in Disney.
Some years ago a lawmaker calculated the taxes for game consoles and concluded they are 273% of the US price.
Also when Sony was heavily bashed for the price of Playstation 4 at launch, people claiming they were price gouging, Sony blamed taxes, so I went and calculated the taxes myself, as if my store would sell it (I own a store but sell other stuff). End result was that Sony wasn't lying, 71% of the final price was taxes.
The original justification was that it would spur domestic manufacture of computers, consoles, laptops, etc.
Obviously that hasn't happened. All it's done is make anything involving computing ridiculously expensive.
I truly don't understand why there isn't democratic pressure to repeal the insane import duties on electronics. It's like most people in Brazil have just accepted that's how domestic prices are without really questioning it. I don't get it.
As a thought experiment, you could take the concept of tariffs and apply it to an ever decreasing geographic area. Maybe my city should try to protect its jobs and industry and therefore levy a 100% tariff on goods made in other cities. Same for my neighborhood or city block.
Ultimately, it's also a tragically regressive tax. Wealthy families that regularly travel to Miami or New York don't suffer much from it -- they just buy their electronics there. They may even make some money by bringing some home and selling the goods for much more than they paid.
If you're poor and you need to buy a laptop or phone on your meager salary, you're screwed.
I grew up in Brazil near the border with Uruguay, and we’d always cross the border to buy our electronics at the duty free stores. It was massively cheaper than buying them in Brazil.
Are duty free stores only present in border areas?
There was a time when I was trying to run an actual journalistic quality blog about gamedev, and I interviewed a bunch of people, some of them almost slipped out stuff, and one talked to me off the record, basically he claimed a certain Brazillian company that has a license from a certain japanese company to manufacture some 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, lobbyed very hard for the tax increases on imported consoles (something that didn't helped them, most of their income come from Karaoke machines now).
And later on I found out that a lot of employees of that certain brazillian company have connections with the government, for example one of them worked for that company and worked for BNDS, and while still in both of their payrolls went on a speaking tour to explain how the government was being great for the local game industry by offering loans at low cost for game companies... when I went to check, the game companies or had government friends, or family (for example one of the "game companies" the government helped, that never made a game, had the son of the president as shareholder).
I also once foolishly helped an "activist" that was promising to represent Brazillian gamers to lower the taxes, I even printed the logo of his campaign on my own company t-shirts and promo materials, and printed his logo on an Arcade machine I built.
After he got inside the government and the negotiations started, then he immediately proposed a tax cut only for physical stores, and massive tax increases for online stores, specially Steam, this made people investigate his life, and then find out he was shareholder of physical game stores... Thankfully his effort failed (thankfully because what he was proposing would make overall taxes higher instead of lower, also it would result in censorship of a bunch of stuff).
Basically commas only separate 2 digits after the first group of three. TIL
1 Lakh: 10,00,000
1 Crore: 10,00,00,000Probably not. Just like the Japanese number system (as distinct from counters for objects) where 1000/10000 are special units.
Even in English, the counting was not consistent. Isn't billion supposed to be 1 million million in the UK ?
Lots of the urban population in India is adopting US millions and billions in everyday language too, so I'm sure the global American monoculture will eventually overwhelm the local counters at some point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
> American English adopted the short scale definition from the French.[3] The United Kingdom used the long scale billion until 1974, when the government officially switched to the short scale, but since the 1950s the short scale had already been increasingly used in technical writing and journalism; the long scale definition still enjoys some limited usage in the UK.[4]
For instance for an average developer the pay scale would be in lakhs and mortgage in crores.
The rich and middle class have workarounds for these duties by asking friends and family to bring them things from US, but its the poor who's children suffer the most. Poverty is not a problem in India, its a design feature, keep people poor and stupid, loot them all you want.
Most people who have the resources or skill to leave India are doing it anyway. Policies like these will only serve to expedite it. This country will likely be next Venezuela.
PS: This is not a political statement against the present government, every political party here has done and will continue with this stupidity.
Honest question: How do the poor (and their children) "suffer the most" from taxes on GPUs and iPhones?
Heck even top universities don't have good infrastructure in India.
Our maid's daughter wants to take up CS after high school, she saw us working on laptops from a young age I guess, but her mother cannot afford to pay for college fees + a laptop + broadband.
India's silicon valley, Bangalore, cannot provide its residents uninterrupted power 24x7 in 2020, villages are lucky to get 5 hours of power a day. Can you believe large tech parks in Bangalore run on Diesel generators ?
There are hardly a few datacenters and associated jobs in India, reason - hardware and bandwidth is prohibitively expensive, cause - taxation. Think of all the small jobs that would be created in the surrounding ecosystem (foodcarts, cafes)
When the govt only talks and doesn't walk the walk, most high skilled Indians leave country due to lack of opportunities, not only would their spending create jobs more importantly it drains the country of mentors for the young.
China is going head to head with the US in AI and world class software products, despite their handicap in English, where is India ?
India is ripe for electronics manufacturing and the government policy is inline with their goals.
I had a friend who was unemployed and really going through a shitty spell. Then the news that you could go to Miami buy a PS4 and resell here came up. He started doing this all the time, and then going to the parks and whatnot. Eventually he started living there and working in tourism. Finally, he arranged to bring the capital to open a tourism agency in Miami and stay there for good.
Last time there was a hurricane I texted him and he said "yeah, we boarded up the house; I'm living at a Disney hotel for the time being".
So that's what happens.
With the sales tax in Los Angeles at 10.25%, I’ve ended up queuing up large purchases together, buying a round trip ticket to Portland ($200-300) and hitting up the Apple Store, Target, Best Buy there. And get a free trip to Portland!
I’ve read the Christiana Mall in Delaware is especially popular for people living along the I-95 corridor for this very purpose.
To be clear, we wound up doing the upgrade in California where the aircraft was based.
It might be an urban legend now, but I've heard of a soon-to-be-married couple purchasing a wedding ring in Portland, OR, and making several trips from SF to Portland. They took photos of the ring at typical Portland attractions (Mt. Hood, Multnomah Falls, food carts), and did that for several months. Doing that, after adding up all the flight/hotel tickets, was still cheaper than buying the ring straight up in California.
Problem is, often they are not wrong, there is massive government corruption, and taxes are often used for unethical and wrong things, meanwhile actual services are often paid by the population themselves.
For example: my family pay all our business and whatnot taxes correctly, because we don't want to get dragged into a crime spree (if you are avoiding taxes you open yourself to extortion, and from extortion to other crimes...), yet my parents paid my education until I was 18, I paid my own education after that, the street in front of our house, we bought it, literally (was crazy expensive too since our house is in a corner). The phone lines? We also paid for that, when we moved in there was no phone in the neighbourhood, but since we had a business we needed phone, so we paid people to install the cables for us. Deliveries? All done with private companies, the public service is crap. Police? We often pay private security, all times we had to call emergency, it didn't work (in one egregious case: we told the cop someone broken in violently in a neighbour house, the cop replied on the phone, literally: oh sorry, my shift today has few people, and we don't want to risk our lives, so we won't go), fire? Same shit, calling for the firefighters worked ONCE for me, and was because the road itself was on fire, all otehr attempts failed, many they didn't even picked up, my parents house did got damaged because of it (someone tried to burn trash in a field behind the house, it burned our backyard that was full of fruit trees, and burned a neighbour house down, and damaged a ton of other houses). Health? Well, that is one thing that works more or less right... still most of my healthcare I paid for it, the government healthcare is prone to make stupid mistakes and kill people for stupid reasons (for example the hospital nearest my house killed a guy by giving him insulin AFTER he warned them he was allergic, they didn't believed him and though he was some kind of conspiracy anti-vaccer nut and was using allergy as excuse).
And the list goes on, and on, and on.
Whenever I argue against taxes, people reply with a list of: "Oh, you don't use X?" and then I reply: "Yes, I use it, and pay it as a private service" the only thing I don't pay a private service for, is the military.
Guess that's tax wasted too.
In California it's gotten so ridiculous that almost every city has its own sales tax [0]. This leads to some mild arbitrage where if I live on the border of LA County, I can go over to any city in Orange/Ventura/San Bernardino County and immediately save 3% off the purchase price.
To expect every taxpayer to keep track of where they've purchased items and pay a use tax so that taxes are going to the right places should not be on the burden of the tax payer. I'm a happy taxpayer and willingly will do so to fund our civic services and public goods, but not when the sale never occurred in the area where I purchased the item. People will find and exploit loopholes the minute they are revealed.
California (and some other states) have already gotten around this by requiring new cars registered to pay a tax adjustment if it was previously registered from another state. I don't think the state government just has the time or resources to do that for all purchases.
Part of the reason why Apple is protecting its Services Revenue.
In Argentina, pre pandemic there were people that actually went shopping to Miami, because getting anything Apple - be it an iPhone or a laptop - was cheaper that way.
The iPhone 12 is not for sale here, but let's use the iPhone 11 as an example. In the only "official" store I could find it [0], the price is 184.299 pesos (yes, 184 thousand). If you check the "official" US dolar rate [1] it is around 80 pesos.
But hear me out: The country has so little reserves, that officially buying dollars is limited to 200 dollars per person per month. If you buy something using your credit card outside of the country - be it online or in person - this limit does not apply, but in both cases you have "extra" taxes to pay (Buying or spending dollars is called "dolar turista"). the final rate for this is around 137 pesos (again, [1])
Let's use 140 as the CC rate, for rounding. Considering the same iPhone 11 is around 630 dollars in Amazon, the price in "dolar turista" is 88.060 pesos.
that still leave us around one hundred thousand pesos left to the current street price of the phone. considering I can currently get tickets to Los Angeles [2] for around 60K pesos, that more or less gives me ample room for having a short US holiday when getting the phone (Supposing I can get the VISA to enter the country ;) ).
BTW the reason for this phone to be so expensive is that there's a black market rate for the US dollar (Called the "blue" dollar) and it's rate is currently around 180 pesos. Using this rate, plus the normal taxes and stuff when importing things, we get close to the street price.
[0] https://tienda.personal.com.ar/iphone
[2] https://promociones-aereas.com.ar/2020/10/los-angeles-flexib...
[0] https://www.infobae.com/economia/2020/10/23/compras-en-chile...
And a foreign reserves crisis doesn't help either.
From living in Chicago these forms of taxes seem so counter-productive. The pattern seems to be that a budget needs to be balanced, so they come up with a new consumption tax that conveniently assumes that the level of consumption stays the same with the new tax in place, but it never ever does.
It's so frustrating because once a tax gets extreme enough that almost no one pays it, lowering/removing it would benefit everyone including the government. It's one of those rare things that can be fixed instantly at no effort/cost with only positive results, yet it won't get done.
Besides that there's a huge discussions since a lot of years ago, because the amount of money you have to earn in order to start paying taxes is rather low, and they don't get updated often. Add to that inflation and the end result is a lot of people paying a lot of taxes (And the government being very lazy catching up updating those taxes).
- Some shops operate at the "blue dollar" value, out of necessity because they buy the products they sell at that rate, or trying to obtain a bigger profit from the things they bought at the official rate.
- Some shops operate at the official rate, but their products just get crazy high taxes (cars, for example).
- Some shops operate at the official rate and sell their products at that rate approximately. Some big tech manufacturers fall under this category, Apple products being the biggest exception as shown above (but there are many others). Fun fact: the inflation and the option to pay these products in no-interest instalments sometimes make products cheaper than in the US, accounting for the future devaluation of the peso.
Getting caught for breaking the law is a stochastic system, but the expected value is lower than most people think.
Edit: How far are people willing to take this? Should we share an article saying someone got a free iPhone by buying a machine gun and stealing a truck full of iPhones? Where is the efficient frontier of breaking the law vs cheaper goods?
what else...
Free oxygen is communism!
Freedom is theft!
so legally this is fine
I have no idea how that was actually enforced.
The delivery was via UPS or Fedex so they handled the customs. In the end, paying VAT and taxes (which were levied on the whole price, including shipping!) it was still cheaper than buying locally.
One of the products was a heavy tripod and head. Another fun fact about this: the tripod was actually made in Italy by an Italian brand...
(btw you can only buy a SIM that's linked to our national identity card, so the sim will just not work. There is a six months grace period for foreign visitors)
This means that device options are very limited and prices are absurd. You can buy a small car for the price of an iPhone, for example. We easily pay atleast 20%-50% premium on the same device from india, despite having similar economics.
IMEI registration do not require any ID, but a tax money.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/nothing-to-decla...
Really the government’s fault for imposing such high duties and taxes. I just don’t understand it from a morality perspective .
It never occurred to me that you can fly somewhere, buy big stuff and have them checked in as your baggage. It's not something I ever saw in Europe's airports.
(Not sure if reason was more the price, or lack of availability of goods; probably a mix of the two.)
From Europe it is often still cheaper to fly to a different country to buy clothes, electronics, etc. Problem is that you still have to pay the import tax once you cross the border back into your own country.
Hence why many airline crew ran (run?) side hustles of buying and selling luxury goods, since they were (are?) rarely checked at the border of their home country.
For example, when I bought my Audio Technica ATH-M50X in the US for about $100 (while in my country they were about twice as expensive) I just had it around my neck as I was listening music through it. No one asked a thing.
In all fairness, I went to the US for fun and got a chance to use them at a demo and was immediately sold.
You can also simply hold a knife to a stranger and ask them to empty their wallet.
Both happen to be illegal, however.
If you are not willing to play the game, you will not just be systematically disadvantaged, you will be crushed.
In such a situation, you play the game. You play it because you have no choice.
I've been kidnapped by the police, I've bribed perhaps dozens or even hundreds of people. I've paid off government officials, I've gotten offers to kill my enemies (haven't crossed that line fortunately), etc etc. When the inmates run the asylum, you have no choice in becoming crazy.
Of course, if you claim the 50 iphones in your bag are "for personal use" it might not work as well.
To describe how bad it is: Recently a popular politican tweeted Playstation 5 costs 8299₺ in Turkey, which is more expensive than booking a flight to Bulgaria, having a modest stay and buying Playstation there. This is a country where minimum wage is 2300₺ ($290) and around half the country is being paid that amount. iPhone 12 Pro? Base model rumored to be $1900.
Oh, and cars cost around 4 times more expensive, so a second hand 2007 Ford Fiesta costs around 15 times the minimum wage.
But hey, voters were happy and they've been happily voting for the same guy for 20 years. There must be some 'folk wisdom' there but I certainly missed what it is.
iPhone 12 Pro 128GB (base) model is $999 in USA, rumored to be 15000₺ ($1900) in Turkey.
iPhone 11 Pro 64GB doesn't seem to be offered in USA anymore (by Apple or Amazon), it's $1410 in Turkey.
iPhone 11 64GB is $599 in USA, $929 in Turkey.
Turkish prices gathered from Hepsiburada.com, one of the largest retailers in Turkey.
All in all it seems like there's 1.5x to 2x price difference depending on the model.
Trivia: There's also a government-enforced IMEI blocking scheme there, to prevent people from evading the taxes by buying it somewhere else.
Years ago I remember that I wanted to buy one of those Rock Band sets for Playstation that came with the whole band. But they were so expensive back in Brazil, that I did the math and it was the same price to fly to Miami, book a hotel for the weekend, buy the set, and come back.
See https://www.cbic.gov.in/resources/htdocs-cbec/guide_for_trav...
I'm talking about import duties payable in India for goods above a certain value, even if they're brought in person by someone who has traveled abroad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/943iql/i_think_the_u...
Thank God I quit smoking in 1980.
A pack of cigarettes in New York costs about $15, in some stores, and no less than $10, outside of the local Native American facilities/reservations.
That's almost all taxes.
I mean, that’s a good thing, right? Smokers should pay for the externalities their habit has on society as a whole.
I think they should be banned altogether in locations where non smokers might be. Putting a price on this seems the odd way to go.
"complete smoking cessation would produce a net increase in health care costs"
They paid a lot in cigarette taxes (even when the taxes were lower).
Those that got lung cancer didn't cost that much to treat because, well, there weren't great treatments. Lung cancer progressed fast enough that they might spend their last week in the hospital, but that was it (versus say Alzheimers where they might require a handful of years of institutional care).
They contributed to their national pension their entire life and then either died before collecting it or died less than a decade in.
Some info: https://priceonomics.com/how-cigarettes-tax-the-poor/
TL;DR cigarette taxes feel fair to non smokers because it appears to discourage a habit with bad outcomes, but economically they aren’t effective.
Not being specific to NY or the US. This is not good when illegal/fake cigarettes are readily available. With these cigarettes, none of the entities(tobacco farmers, the government, smokers) will benefit from smoking.
https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/alert-you-are-buyi...
Enabling the populace to acquire computing resources cheaply will help if the powers that be want to establish a knowledge economy.
I think what Apple has realized is that a certain subset of their customers will always want the best model, no matter how little sense the price makes compared to the regular model. For some people, it will always be a status symbol (or an enthusiast's obsession). Or they're of the economic class where $300 just doesn't even register on their budget. As one reviewer put it, the 12 Pro is "the shiny one", and for some people that's all it takes.
What this amounts to is that these whales can subsidize things like the $400 SE model, which is an incredible value. And I'm completely fine with that arrangement personally.
And on the other hand, other countries tend to have higher corporate taxes and higher cost of doing business, and that gets passed on to customers in the form of higher prices.
Note that the UAE restricts most VoIP, so devices purchased in Dubai will not have FaceTime.
It’s seems unlikely but I wouldn’t put it past Apple.
OTOH I don’t mind these high taxes, for a country like India an iPhone is indeed a luxury, if only the tax money didn’t go directly to party funds and offshore accounts one way or the other.
Contrary to common belief things are pretty expensive in China, even i they are made in China.
people flying to dubai on different days across different flights to buy a couple iphones for themselves, or even as speculators, would not make a big enough dent
Apple will more likely correct the pricing discrepancy to sell more iphones in India themselves
I am also open for a laptop, which one do you recommend? Has to be small enough to go everywhere with. (no more than 1.5k €/$)
The price difference for a high spec machine could easily pay for a return ticket to the states.
It’s not that uncommon
Electronics is cheaper in US but every time I fly back to Europe they check my bags.
From anecdotes only, German customs are thorough, they check every parcel, and this is not the case all across the EU.
In theory both the US and HK should be taxed the same.
The most annoying thing is the Post Office charging a handling fee on top of any tax due...
Whenever I flew in France from outside the EU no one asked me where I bought my phone, laptop or camera. Anecdotally, several times I was carrying camera gear bought from the US because it was cheaper to pay for shipping + VAT + taxes than buying locally...
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=legissum...
If you have a legitimate need to bring multiple devices to and fro, at one point there was a form you'd fill out at the airport when leaving where you'd put down serial numbers and they'd verify on return.
With something like a PS4 it might be a little riskier, but you could probably spin some kind of story they'd accept, as long as it appears similarly used and not in packaging. ("I was visiting family and my nephew wanted to play PS4 so I brought mine for the week!")
Or you could say that you run Linux on that PS4 and that's your main PC.
If the price from a trillion dollar company is this costly, then vote with your wallets for god's sake. Simply don't buy. There are (fortunately) plenty of viable alternatives to Apple that are more reasonably priced.
Why don't you use something cheaper instead?
iPhones are the best product on the market, and not everyone is price-conscious.