pepita said:
"International pricing issues" do not affect other computer products in the same way, especially by other brands. Also, please define "international pricing issues". Extra taxes do not necessarily apply to computer products; perhaps the iPod is classified differently. But in any case, whatever external issues there are, they wouldn't alone justify a 90 Euro increase.
Here is what I meant by that:
Speaking as a person who's 'real job' is to produce a product in the US and then ship it to other countries where it is sold in country.
We run into tarriff, warehousing differences. For example in some areas of Europe there is some type of 'warehouse tax' where what you have 'in stock' is taxed, so no one carries inventory, if you have to carry inventory it's extremely expensive, and reflected in prices of the item In Brazil we have to put a plant in Brazil to build at least 60% of the unit otherwise it's subject to a 40% tax.
Also in some countries (not as many as used to be) the US Dollar is worth a lot more so the cost in country is higher because of the US based manufacturing (even if built in Mexico for example) That's what I was thinking when I wrote that.
Yes, and it's a great thing. It's perfectly fine for an iBook G4 to be more convenient than an early iBook G3, for instance.
What I see as a bit of a joke in the iPod new pricing is that they're not doing an upgrade of that kind. We're not talking of that kind of extra jump. More reasonable prices and more decent batteries should have been the basics in the earlier ipods too.
The challenge here to me is that hard drive costs don't usually drop, just the density increases. For example a 3.5" 80GB HDD costs $50, 100GB costs $59, and 120GB costs $66 (per pricewatch). Six months from now that'll be 100/120/160 or even worse. The mechanical costs can't go down but the density increases
Not sure why people tolerate that and support it. It's getting to the point now that a person at home could easily have half a terrabyte of storage with no real way to back it up. That seems to be one deficiency of the Mac platform - no real easy way to backup your data.
Yeah, like that's such an intelligent comment. No one's talking of never buying any Apple products ever again; no one said the iPod is crap; not everything produced by other brands is a "piece of junk"
You're right. I snapped and I shouldn't have, some days I type to fast to let my rational thought take over. I apologize for snapping at you, in my defense I'd been reading through multiple posts where various whines were coming about ridiculous 'this doesn't have so it sucks' posts and I lumped your comments into that one.
