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Comment by relix | Hacker News Reader

These articles take the wrong perspective - it's not that Australia is much more expensive in tech matters, it's that the US is much more cheap. I don't know where the recent Australia-specific articles are coming from, but it's been like this since as long as I can remember - that the US is much more cheap than any other country I'm familiar with for tech stuff, including Australia, but also almost every other country.

For example in Europe, the same suite mentioned in the article costs USD 4552.14, or $200 more expensive even than Australia.

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Australia is extremely expensive for a lot of stuff. Europe is too, but less so (having lived in both).

Part of this is that the AUD has appreciated in value so much over the last few years, and retailers are just not willing to drop their prices in line with the new purchasing power of the dollar. They also haven't caught up with the modern world in a lot of ways, considering that they still have a captive audience that can't just order off the 'net.

Part of this is down to protectivist legislation, for instance the price of books over there is huge and that is in part due to measures put in place to protect local authors and publishers. The net result though is that bookshops go out of business because people just get stuff online, delivered from other parts of the world. There are also weird legally-backed 'exclusive importer' agreements that result in the same phenomenon with other goods.

Part of the problem is retail rental rates are so high that traditional retailers have to have high prices, and in Oz the online services are usually run by the same folks. So again, business goes abroad.

Part of the problem is that some foreign businesses (Blizzard, I'm looking at you) just gouge Australians. Starcraft II was a hundred bucks to buy online from Australia!

So there's a whole culture of stuff just being expensive over there. The government needs to clean up their own act, but looking at what the private sector tries to pull is also interesting.

Incidentally Apple seemed to me to be one of the few organisations that were not overpriced over there, comparing US and AU prices on their store it was always pretty even (when tax was accounted for)

Apple stuff is still about 10-20% more expensive and the refurbs are about 10% and older versions.

Really?

Because price difference was always effectively a rounding error when I calculated US price + Australian GST vs Australian price. I haven't looked for a while though, having moved back to the UK last year.

The UK is pretty much in line with the US, but here in Ireland (where their European distribution centre is :s) it's a fair bit higher. Taking the iMac 21.5":

US $1299 UK £1099 - 20% tax = £879 = $1368 IE €1399 - 23% tax = €1077 = $1452

when i looked six months ago it was

Yeah, the few I checked seem fine, although Apple does like to round up to the nearest 49 or 99. Apple doesn't like to reprice products though, so if there are is significant currency movement in the 6 months since something came out, it is probably not reflected in the price.

And Australia is cheaper than New Zealand for Apple stuff (by a couple of hundred NZD last time I calculated on a 13 MBA with 8 gigs of ram).

Part of this is that the AUD has appreciated in value so much over the last few years

Yep, many other countries have had economic downturns lately, a lot of australian economy is based off mining, which is going OK. Ergo, currency appreciates.

Part of the problem is retail rental rates are so high

DANGER WILL ROBINSON! That's partially a sign that the property market is in a bubble or inflated. Many other countries have been wrecked when the property bubble pops. It might happen in Australia.

I did start to wonder, when a coworker said he had made some sort of investment in a long term retail let that they were then short-term subletting, if this was entirely normal.

Property bubble has been predicted in Australia for years now. I was waiting for a market crash for years too, but now I'm not entirely convinced. With high urban sprawl, poor transport options, growing population and generally high income, I'm not surprised property costs as much as it does now.

Once upon a time, the Australian dollar was worth about 50 US cents, so things in Australia cost about double what it cost in the US. Then the Australian economy started booming, and now the AUD is stronger than the USD. But everyone who sells stuff in Australia thought "wait a minute, these guys are used to paying double, so what incentive do we have to change?".

So now you have retarded pricing, like some places expecting you to pay $110 US dollars for a single video game. Don't even get me started on the price of food. Unless Australian retailers change their tactics, they will slowly go out of business, because an entire generation of computer literate people realize you can get 2-3x more out of your money just by buying from online stores.

> Unless Australian retailers change their tactics, they will slowly go out of business, because an entire generation of computer literate people realize you can get 2-3x more out of your money just by buying from online stores.

Buying online from overseas only works until the government put in place laws to prevent circumvention of technical rights protection measures. Like the DMCA in the US, or " European Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the council of May 22, 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society." in EU.

That means that turning your DVD into a region free player is illegal; chipping a console so it can play region locked games is illegal; etc.

It feels like a big scam.

Australian law explicitly allows for consumers to circumvent region locking. Of course, this doesn't mean this can't change, but at least there's explicit precedent allowing it.

Quote from the Attorney General's department:

“An access control TPM specifically excludes TPMs which control geographic market segmentation. This means that consumers will be able to circumvent the region coding TPMs on legitimate DVDs purchased overseas. It also allows for the continued availability of region-free DVD players.”

TPM is a term from the US/Australian Free-Trade Agreement.

More information: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/blogs/gadgets-o...

It can't cost more than $10 to ship a video game from the US to Australia, if you ship in bulk.

So make a startup that buys video games at retail, in bulk, in the US, ships them to Australia, and retails them there.

Everybody'll buy from you because you're so much cheaper, but you'll still have enough margin to make a good profit.

>I don't know where the recent Australia-specific articles are coming from

I think they are coming from the inquiry into overblown prices that the Australian government is currently pursuing: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/16114230/tech-gian...

X > Y.

Whether you interpret it as X being expensive or Y being cheap, it is still the same: X is greater than Y.

You missed the point of my comment. It makes more sense to single out the US if they are the only one with much lower prices than everything else, instead of talking about every country where it is more expensive - in this case, most if not all countries in the world.

It's the exception to the rule that is interesting, and in this case, the exception is the US.

I travelled around Australia for a few weeks and have been to many European countries (EU & non EU). Australia is expensive (in general). It's in the same price league as Switzerland. Which is bad.

I think you forgot to subtract VAT (which you'd not pay if you're using this as a pro). The price on Adobe Belgium is EUR 3386.79, which without VAT comes to EUR 2799, or about $3770.

Still a huge difference with the US.

Not only software, also hardware, cars, brand clothing etc.

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