Google Nexus 4 Sells Out In Less Than An Hour (in Australia)
gizmodo.com.au
gizmodo.com.au
Though unlike Nexus 7, the Nexus 4 pricing is competitive to the US price - the AUD is worth more than the USD and the Australian price is only $50 more (most of which is accounted by the 10% GST tax.)
Australia still has to pay a little more than the US than justified by tax differences, but it's better than the huge price differences it normally has.
Also, unless you're planning to peg the price to currency fluctuations, may as well round up to cover that.
They will say when they are supply constrained, but that's during their quarterly calls when being supply constrained is properly interpreted as a more negative than positive thing.
For a brief period of time the 16gb model showed as being available, but a very buggy shopping cart meant that it was nigh on impossible to actually checkout.
Now it's showing as "coming soon" again.
Edit: And now I've just received the email saying that it's available... oh no it's not.
Of all the people, you would have expected Google to be able to handle the traffic.
"We're sorry, there was an error. Please try again later."
They simply cannot handle this kind of event on their own.
If I try to check out, I also get this:
"An error occurred while processing your purchase. Please try again later."
Purchased from:
Google Commerce Ltd
Gordon House, Barrow Street
Dublin 4
+353 (1) 436 1001
(Thats an Irish address, but it's not on sale in Ireland)
Google in the UK had sales of £2.5bn. It has a group wide profit margin of 33% so let's assume profits of £800m and yet paid £3.4m in corporation tax (as opposed to the £220m you'd expect at standard corporation tax rates).
As someone who does pay tax at the full rate in the UK, I'd quite like it if they did too.
But the fact that this product isn't profitable doesn't excuse it. We're always told that Android drives the Google ecosystem which drives profits.
This phone in of itself may not be profitable but it drives other Google services which are and on which tax is avoided.
For purchases that included a VAT component, ( and that is or should be all orders ), the amount paid to VAT is deducted. If the balance is positive, the entity pays HMRC. If the balance is negative ( for instance, when making a loss on expenditures vs income ), HMRC pays you.
In other words, it's entirely possible that HMRC pays Google. Customers, ( or those not VAT registered ) always pay the tax.
The exact specifics of VAT accounting don't matter to the question of whether selling Nexus 4 to the UK from Ireland is sleazy tax optimization or not. I think it clearly isn't, and have argued why not. If you disagree, could you perhaps address that point rather than bicker about the exact VAT semantics?
This is important to clarify. There seems to be an idea here and elsewhere that VAT forms part of a companies liability. It doesn't.
As to arranging a lower tax rate on what are liabilities, then I will agree in the main. Ethics as pertaining to corporations are codified. They are a little subtle, but generally they resolve around the best interests of the company. This doesn't imply, as I'm sure you know, that the only consideration is profit. Shareholders are or should be also interested in larger concepts of value.
The fact is that the tax code in the UK provides for decisions that lead to the, in my view, somewhat hypocritical criticisms from these companies interrogators. It is grandstanding on well established and ordinary mechanisms of accounting. It ignores the history of the British isles in allowing tax havens like Jersey to prosper, and completely discounts the philanthropic activities of some of these companies, in particular Google.
Sorry if you thought I was having a go. It wasn't my intention.
The order that visibly went through was redirected to the full Wallet site. I say "visibly" cause apparently one of the popup ones went through as well. Oh, well, I'm sure one of my friends would appreciate it.
DC-HSDPA is great but the lack of uplink speed upgrade to go with it seems to be an issue, IMO. I've seen a few situations where I can pull a few megabits/s on 3G but now the uplink is seriously congested, so interactive applications become very poor.
edit: It's gone now, so that was about 15 minutes. I got mine, yay! It's funny how even Google can't properly plan for huge traffic spikes.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/13/psa-us-customers-you...
Fun to see that even Google can't sometimes handle load.
Oh well, time to go to work :)
I'm surprised Google didn't manage this better.
This launch was a big fail and especially if the shortage was planned, this will backfire at Google. You cant announce a big product launch (at a bargaining price) and then just have a few thousand units available (it cant be more, i was quite succesful in the Touchpad fire sales last year which lasted longer). Additionally the 9am launch (on a working day) wasnt even announced beforehand and google should have known (at least from E-Mail notification subscriptions) that demand outstrips supply by far.
Anyway, hope they can handle my scraping traffic now, waiting for new ones ;).
The thought of putting Ubuntu on that, with that screen, is much too much to pass up.
Not very impressive!
If the Nexus 10 is successful, somebody will make a keyboard dock for it. I'm almost confident enough of that to buy a Nexus 10 today and use my bluetooth keyboard for the time being.
While I'm confident somebody will make a keyboard dock, I'm not as confident that it will be a GOOD dock. So I'm going to wait for a bit.
Sadly nobody seems to have those numbers available.
This is one of the cynical things that makes me wonder if sites ever actually have time to review new devices. Their "one job" should be to see through the marketing-speak ("Super AMOLED", "IPS", "retina display") and tell us what A) looks better, and B) uses less power at a given nits.
I've had an iPhone 4 for 2 years now, and can't really stomach going to one of those poorer screens. The Optimus G is beautiful, and that's why I'm going to snag a Nexus.
Any one else manage to bag one?