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That makes for a change. In the UK Adobe CS3 sells for £1000 more than the US. It's possible to fly to New York from London for £230-280.
by danw 17y ago
That makes for a change. In the UK Adobe CS3 sells for £1000 more than the US. It's possible to fly to New York from London for £230-280.
- nailer 17y agoMacs are similarly much more expensive in the UK. Perhaps the difference is the UK has a greater percentage of the population involved in the creative industries (particularly ad agencies and visual effects companies) than the US?
- jodrellblank 17y agoIt's often because $1 ~= £0.65, but prices transfer at $1 -> £1, so prices end up 50% higher than a currency exchange would lead you to expect. Dell monitors do this too - a good 24" LCD is $550 (=£357) in the USA but £550 here (=$846).
- nailer 17y agoSure, but the question I'm wondering about is why they transfer at $1 -> £1, when this isn't the exchange rate.
- adw 17y agoIt's not quite so simple: don't US prices exclude sales tax? VAT in the UK's 17.5%.
- danw 17y agoVAT is currently 15%, will rise to 17.5% again in January 2010
- adw 17y agoDoh, yeah, right you are. Forgot about that cut.
- nailer 17y agoUS retail prices for Apple products generally include taxes. Compare apple.com to apple.co.uk (or .co.ie, or .com.au, or any other country).
- rbanffy 17y ago15% and soon to be 17.5% is also not the exchange rate. And mind you, those boxes are not being shipped over from Redmond.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoIt has been the exchange rate, it might again. Part of the issue is that the exchange rate changes over time.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoI very much doubt it, you'd think they would have chosen a rate close to the minimum boundary rather than completely outside of it. In Sept 2008 the rate was about $2(USD) =£1 (GBP) and had been reasonably stable for a time. A divisor of $1.5 (USD), so a $75 music player would be £50 would then still have been more profit (sales taxes excluded).
- bd 17y agoCouldn't it be because of different default configurations of notebooks in US vs EU? I noticed this recently when buying Thinkpad. At the first sight, EU prices looked crazy high compared to US, but when I tried to configure exactly the same specs, the price difference was minimal (~10% more in EU). The trick was that US default configurations were much worse than few preconfigured EU models.