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Comment by lzaaz | Hacker News Reader

This is fair. OTOH, you have the single European market (the EU forces games, apps, hardware, etc to be sold at the same price everywhere in the EU in practical terms), which has shafted poor countries-it's disgraceful that a Swedish costumer pays the same price for an iPhone than a Portuguese costumer while making several times as much money every month.

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> OTOH, you have the single European market (the EU forces games, apps, hardware, etc to be sold at the same price everywhere in the EU in practical terms),

That's not true, where are you imagining this from? Hardware certainly doesn't cost the same, at the very least there are different VAT levels, but also pricing is adapted to the local market (literally just checked, i can get an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for 300€ less in Bulgaria compared to France). Software I'm unsure how to check, but Netflix costs varies by county.

You can buy it directly from Bulgaria to save 300€ then. It would be illegal for the shop to tell you you have to pay more for buying from another country.

>Software I'm unsure how to check, but Netflix costs varies by county.

If it does (I don't think so, the minimal differences are because of VAT) you can subscribe from another European country (using a VPN or whatever) and Netflix can't ban you or block you from using it (like they would if you bought the subscription from a third world country for example)

Is it fair that both Finland and Italy pay 7.99€/month for the basic plan?

(This is why I said "in practical terms")

Netflix is kind of an exception to this because you're not buying the exact same service in each country, Show/Movie availability differs per country, but also some regional audio/subtitles availability differs per country (there's a language setting in your account settings but it doesn't have all the audio/subtitle languages netflix supports, even though the number of options has grown since last time I checked it...)

And thanks to another EU law if you subscribe to Netflix in one EU country, you get that country's Netflix Library everywhere in EU. So we can talk about "Swedish Netflix" and "Bulgarian Netflix" as two different services..

> i can get an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for 300€ less in Bulgaria compared to France

This is insane. What prevents grey market arbitrage? Why wouldn't hardware from the country where hardware is cheapest immediately get posted on the local equivalent of eBay in the country where it is most expensive?

In any case I had no idea hardware margins were so squishy. For software, yes, profits are maximized by reducing unit prices where incomes are lower (since otherwise you won't sell any), but that's enabled by the fact that the marginal cost of unit production is very nearly zero and you're still making money even if you sell it for 25% of the rich-country price. That's obviously not the case for a laptop

> This is insane. What prevents grey market arbitrage? Why wouldn't hardware from the country where hardware is cheapest immediately get posted on the local equivalent of eBay in the country where it is most expensive?

Few things - mostly support and localisation support (e.g. the keyboard layout is different in iirc literally every European country, and most people want their local layout they know).

Now I'm imagining keycap-replacement sweatshops :)

That's kinda messed up. ALL hardware?

No, they're mistaken, there is no such thing.

It’s not true. That guy doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

How can you fit that much misinformation into one comment? EU != Europe. Russia is not in the EU. Nor is it completely russian. Only a select number of countries in Europe is part of the EU.

And there is no such thing as consistent, EU-enforced pricing. Get out of here ...

Btw most of the Russia is not Europe even in geographical sense.

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