He's not wrong. The presenters kept saying slightly the wrong words and having to go back and correct themselves. The constant untucked-shirt comments were painful, and completely out of their usual presentation style.
The Mac Pro is absolutely hilarious in it's pricing. When converted back to USD, it's almost 30% more expensive in Australia for absolutely no understandable reason. The fact that it wasn't released is very strange too, along with it's very vague "December" date. Makes me feel like they expected to be releasing it but ran into problems with their process.
I readily agree that Australians generally pay high premiums for a lot of goods (having lived there myself at one point).
However, the cost of doing business in all countries is not the same. Doing business in Australia definitely costs more than the US. I know; I've done both.
There's also still the question of whether they would assemble the Mac Pros in the US and then ship them to Australia (if so, that would obviously cost more).
I understand the desire to have equivalent pricing, but that's choice by the company to eat additional costs or avoid market cannibalization.
I'm not claiming the 30% difference is entirely justified; but I suspect a 10-15% difference might be. In the end, if you believe it's not a fair price, don't buy it, or get your elected officials to fix it (which I believe they're looking into in general).
Everything in the history of Apple has been "30%" more expensive or more outside the US than inside. This is completely no surprise and in line with every other pricing strategy of Apple before.
I wouldn't say that, usually it's $100 or so, literally 30% is an incredibly markup for a $3000 USD device. Throw a 4K screen in, and it'll be cheaper to fly to the US and buy a setup there.
Technically there is duty owed when you bring something back worth more than $1,000...
At the moment the difference between the MacPros is $1,000. So if I bought it in the states after currency conversion I might save $750 or something. I would need to bring a lot of them back to cover my flight.
Plus then I might get stung at customs and owe 10% of the total value anyway.
10% more just for GST, some buffer for exchange rate fluctuations, and they also need extra to cover the more onerous warranty requirements in Australia. I'd expect all these costs to be around 25-30%.
Apple flat out ignores their legal obligations with warranty, so I don't see that as a factor. I had the logic board replaced in my year-and-a-bit-old MacBook and got a massive bill ($1400+), laughed and told them that the warranty was two years in Australia, and it was miraculously replaced with a $0 fee with no questions asked. If I'd not known and paid it, they'd have ripped me off for the value of the machine.
They attempt to avoid refund laws as well. Apple claim you can't get a refund on the App store. Although they have to provide one if an App you purchase does not do what was advertised. (This was brought up on The Chasers show "The Checkout")
I accidentally purchased a $5 app not too long ago (it was in the group of apps that were free for the 5th anniversary of the App Store). I selected the "Didn't mean to purchase this item" option in iTunes and got a refund immediately. No problem.
That might be import duty imposed by the Australian government your paying there. Everything being about %10-%20 more expensive in Canada compared to the US on average is partly because of that.
What exactly would you compare the new Mac Pro with? I can’t think of any other computer that is similar in size and features.
Even disregarding form factor, energy consumption, and ports like Thunderbolt 2: I just configured a HP Z820 on HP’s website to match it to the $4k Mac Pro. I couldn’t even get the same CPU & GPU specs, but the HP behemoth would cost over $8k.
The Mac Pro is absolutely hilarious in it's pricing. When converted back to USD, it's almost 30% more expensive in Australia for absolutely no understandable reason. The fact that it wasn't released is very strange too, along with it's very vague "December" date. Makes me feel like they expected to be releasing it but ran into problems with their process.