Posted on Saturday 1st of December 2007 at 18:20 in Apple

Ask Apple: Why is a Macbook 30.8% more expensive in the UK than the US?

It's the festive season and everyone is geared up for some shopping. As it happens my old Pentium IV laptop isn't doing so well anymore so I felt inclined to purchase a more mobile computing solution; the Apple Macbook was the obvious choice. But what are Apple doing with their pricing structure?

The Macbook is an excellent piece of kit; the build quality alone is leagues ahead of most laptops and given I don't game on notebooks anymore it seems logical to accept a Mac as the most stable, high quality tool for my mobile computing needs. However upon shopping around the obvious price differences between the UK and US became more than an annoyance, they became insulting.

So I decided to write the Apple PR people an email
Rather than explain everything twice I've decided to just document the email here where all my readers can see it. I don't want to be fobbed off with a generic response but get a REAL answer from one of the biggest manufacturers in the world. The email went (largely) like this:

Kind people at Apple PR,

I've recently decided I'd like to purchase a Macbook after falling in love with the product. However there is one crucial question that I would like a definitive answer to:

Can someone explain why there is such an epic difference in price between the UK and US markets? As an example let's take the entry level Macbook:
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
1GB memory
80GB hard drive

The UK site lists this as £699 whereas the US site lists it as $1,099. Some mild calculations show that the UK market is being unfairly discriminated against. The current US dollar to British pound is 2.05669. Therefore that makes the US Macbook £534.35, which is around £165 more than we pay in the UK. This equates to roughly 30.8% extra, which you have to agree is a sizable margin.

So can someone at Apple please explain to me why the UK Macbook is 30% more expensive than the identical US Macbook?

Kind regards,
Steven York.

It's worth noting that I've edited out a couple of parts explaining that I'm using this for an article on the website. I really want an answer from Apple that justifies what they're doing.

30.8% more expensive in the UK - answers on a postcard
Adobe once said that the differences in price between markets for their products are because "it's more expensive to trade in Europe" but I fail to see how Apple could justify a 30.8% price hike; especially considering their manufacturing is done in China (or at least I believe it is, the iPhone appears to be).

If/when I get a response from Apple I'll blog it here. I love the product, the branding and the image - but I don't like the notion of purchasing from a company that seems to discriminate against users without clear justification. It's in their court now; pleasing me could mean a sale and my loyalty, offering no clarity on the situation is unlikely to result in me opening my wallet.

 

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