Slashdot Mirror
Apple's Haves and Have Nots, Around the World
Rambo Tribble writes "As this story in the Economist notes, Apple's policies regarding international sales are often confusing and outdated. Apparently, Apple either hasn't been aware of political and social changes in the world over the last 20 years, or doesn't wish to acknowledge them."
Soulskill rightly notes that at least some of the complained-about policies boil down to Apple's adherence to local copyright and licensing laws.
That's interesting, do you mean to say laws differ from country to country, WOW!
If anyone has some more intelligent takes or even substantial information other than the article that was linked, please inform me and I will gladly read :)
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Apples website is generally a shambles. I'm trying to develop iPhone applications and it's useless and difficult to navigate.
Also try looking at the technical specifications of the iPhone - it's just a bulletpoint list of features- hardly 'technical'
Basically their website sucks, and the sucking doesn't stop there with Apple
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Different countries have different product availability? Hmm, fascinating...
The only interesting fact provided by this article is that the president of Estonia owned an Apple IIe
The only thing I managed to really garner from this article is this, it's about Apples country restrictions on music and movies.
If the economist did a bit more research independently they would see it's a rights management issue from the content generators. Music and film in both the US and UK tend to restrict certain things like to their respective countries on a belief it's the only way everyone gets their dues.
It's the reason the silly regional encoding exists for the encryption on almost every DVD; my Discovery Channel Living With Wolves DVD lacked any sort of encryption.
Partly the irrational fear that artists won't get their rightful dues, because of currency exchange rates. Piracy fears I think are the biggest concern on the media companies not letting stuff out of the country digitally.
Along with the fact they make probably loads licensing manufacturers in other countries to make them locally and get around tariffs.
Complaining about inequality in Western Europe? What do they think this is, socialism?
Slashdot: News for Apple, Apples that Matter
Apple is clearly infringing the Rome and the Maastricht treaty when they forbid a french customer to buy on belgian store. They may just follow the infingments from copyrights owner, but that goes against free travel of goods inside EU.
Sometimes when something sucks it's not them - it's you.
I guess the Global Village metaphor for the world we live in is apt after all. You have the haves, and the have nots.
I don't think we will ever have a global economy where everything is available to everyone everywhere.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
As an aside, wtf is up with the bizarre tone of the article? "What has Apple got against eastern Europe?" "Cold warriors"? WTF? Seems a rather strange take on disorganization inside a mega-corporation. Or is this all a giant case of projection, where journalists attribute their own undesirable feelings onto others?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
For those complaining that Apple screws over it's non-US customers, take a look at the apple store Japan. Despite the really strong yen most things in the Apple store in Japan cost about the same(esp. when you consider that the 5% tax is already included) as they do in the US store, while those in Europe tend to cost a lot more.
Obviously part a big part of the discrepancy is the sales tax, but doing business in Europe just plain costs more. Shipping from China(where most of Apples stuff is made) to Europe is obviously more expensive than shipping to Japan or the US(largely because there isn't really a direct sea route), but thats only part of the reason.
European consumers and employees tend to enjoy a lot more protections under the law then those in the US and Japan. For instance tt costs more to hire(and fire) the European workers that man the warehouses and shipping facilities, Apple is responsible for paying to properly dispose of all electronics it sells, European consumers can make Apple pay for a much wider range of repairs to products then can consumers in the US or Japan etc.
Not saying whether or not these protections are good or bad, but many Europeans don't seem to realize that they certainly aren't free. If you want these protections then you are going to have to be willing to pay for them, otherwise if you want them then stuff is going to cost more, end of story.
Monstar L
Presumably the author already knows that the UK listed prices are so high because VAT is included, since they're legally required to include VAT in the advertised price....right author?
The most obvious answer, from a quick look at the list is that the current list of countries reflects countries where Apple judges that it will make enough ROI to make it worthwhile investing the large sums of money it takes to make for an Apple "experience". For Apple that means translating all its documentation and website/store and also setting up local call centres and localising its products. Given that there are many small countries with small Apple brand recognition in Eastern Europe, I would think that that would be the most realistic answer.
Not that I really care all that much about Apple at the moment. I'm a Mac sys admin and I'm kind of burned about the shit that Apple calls a server OS and the related hardware.
Apple makes just 1 of each product for the whole world in almost every case. The only difference between an iPhone bought in San Francisco and one bought anywhere else is the government in question. There are not "US editions" and "international editions." Apple does not even make proprietary Verizon or Sprint iPhones to serve the US cell market of 3 overlapping monopolies, they run on AT&T only in the US because it's the only US carrier that is compatible with the world. So not only are these criticisms of Apple misguided, they're entirely opposite. International customers should be praising Apple for providing them with the exact same product.
Apple even sells power adapters that are worldwide-compatible. They have a "World Travel Adapter Kit" which is simply a set of various international plugs. You simply pull the US plug off your MacBook, iPad, iPhone, or iPod adapter and plug on the correct plug for where you are and it just works.
Is there any other US corporation that is so internationally-minded?
"For Apple, the eastern half of Europe is still both terra incognita and non desiderata."
It's not about different laws in different countries, or higher taxes or costs. It's about not being able to select your country (in the drop-down list). And when you take a look at what countries you can select vs. countries you can't select, you will notice that it doesn't make any sense.
"Clearly the size of the market is not the determinant. China and Russia don’t appear, but Luxembourg does. It is not about prosperity: Iceland—which, believe it or not, is still one of the richer countries in the world—is out, whereas Vietnam is in. Political freedom or the rule of law are not the binding factors. The Philippines and Thailand are on the list, whereas impeccable democracies such as Slovenia are not."
There is this little thing called the "Black market". I'm In Cairo and the iPad is on display for sale at many stores. Anything can be had at most places in the world, if the price is right. Globalization transcends import laws, regional formats, and exchange rates.
Apple either hasn't been aware of political and social changes in the world over the last 20 years
Can you really blame them? MOST people are unaware of contemporary economic and social changes over the last 20 years. There seems to be no shortage of what people, despite their own best interest, fail to know or understand. For example, most people don't know that among many others corporations, Apple artificially inflates their market value by misrepresenting their risk. And that Apple's capital is actually worth half of its perceived value, along with most companies who directly or indirectly supported the incremental establishment of a parasitic shadow banking institution which has now compromised more than half of the WORLD market. But hey, Wall Street has never shown signs or publicly admitted the existence of a shadow banking system, so I guess that means I'm a whacko conspiracy theorist. Only when this parasite stops working in symbiosis with legitimate institutions and instead attacks its host in order to systematically consolidate power will people begin to believe the countless voices who warned against Wall St and the Fed to begin with(otherwise known as conspiracy theorists).
Oh well, I must be deranged to believe my eyes when I see the market spiral out of control, encountering practically no resistance, with such velocity that explosives must have been planted in the building..err I mean someone mistyped "b" instead of "m". Give me a break, this market short-circuiting "bug" was a staged event with which the bankers will leverage propagandized public opinion to steamroll over any semblance of free market, essentially dismantling U.S. sovereignty and leaving us, the American people, homeless on the continent our forefathers conquered.
Understand, the inception of the fed was over 100 years ago. Our economy has experienced relative stability during the course of most of that time. We gave the fed the right to artificially reduce interest rates, print fiat fake currency, and sell off massive portions of our debt to other nations as collateral. The cracks in the financial dam had accumulated en masse, though most were not aware of such weakness, the dam has COLLAPSED and the shadow banking system is EXPOSED. The same bankers who created this cluster fuck will swoop in and "punish the wicked"(buy small fish out) and consolidate the rest of the wealth. Meanwhile, the American and world populations believe that vengeance against the bankers will come in the form of "comprehensive financial reform." Again, while thats exactly the kind of reform we need, it is far from what we will get. The bankers are writing legislation to fix a problem they caused in the first place. Seriously, fool me once?
Apple will never replace Darwin with Linux.
As a New Zealander, living in a country of a voluminous FOUR million, it sucks being left out. Yes, the NZ release of the iPad has been announced...but its been a long time for many NZ Apple fans, I bet many worldwide have been annoyed.
:)
The first iPhone sold in NZ was the 3G. I imported an Original iPhone, it ended up costing me $790 NZD ($564 odd USD) all up, and I run it on a prepaid plan, no set monthly costs. The 3G iPhone would have cost over 1000 NZD new, so I saved A LOT of money, *AND* had a product months before it was released in my country. A Win Win situation!
Sadly my iPad will have cost me more than if I had waited, but I stick by my decision to buy an import when I did. I've had my iPad for a couple weeks now, and an extra hundred odd dollars is worth it to me. I remember going slowly insane over the NZ iPhone wait...hearing every single blog on the internet (even the gardening sites!) talk talk talk about the iPhone...how great it is, how wonderful, who needs Jesus when we have this wonderful iPhone....I'd rather pay a couple hundred more than have to put up with that for months, especially when the dates are "to be confirmed".
But hey, if the worst thing you have to whine about in life is that you have to wait a couple months for the latest gadget....perhaps I shouldnt be complaining
---
those in Europe tend to cost a lot more.
Not really:
499$ = 391€
391 X 1,19* = 465€
+15€** = 480€
With 514 € that's a 34 € markup. That's 6,6%. Nothing to get your pants in a bunch about. The 499 € in France and Italy show clearly that they use psychological pricing, if people pay 480 €, they'll as likely pay 499 €.
And I actually don't know if there's some kind of custom duty, computers are normally free in Europe, but who knows ...
*19% german VAT (Mehrwertsteuer) which by law HAS to be included in the price when selling to private customers.
** German copyright "tax" (Urheberrechtsabgabe)
All the computers are shipped from China via the Netherlands anyway, so having business in each country seems like a bad idea. Why not have a single EU store and headquarters, much like in the US? Besides, because of free trade within the EU, a swedish customer can just order one from Germany - and pay German taxes - no swedish VAT added, for example.
Google is even worse in this regard, you can't buy applications on the android market if you are not from a few select countries.
Thankfully most apps are free, and if one really wants to buy something, it can be done elsewhere - no single app market limitation like with the iph*ne. It's also easy to install MarketEnabler hack on rooted phones (makes google think you're in the US). But I really fail to understand why no-evil Google is doing that
If we're talking about media, let's take the Fox Network as an example. Because of licensing, Fox doesn't have any rights to The Simpsons once you go north of the border. Once you do, The Simpsons belongs to Global TV.
Licensing the main reason why the available medias in each and every iTunes Store around the world is different. Too bad for the media companies, however, because sometimes the individual markets of each country is too small to even bother, but all added up could mean from 5 to 50% more sales. All they had to do was to keep their licenses to themselves so they would be able to sell their content on all the iTunes Stores around the world.
Most media companies are stuck with contracts, however, so they can't do that just yet.
The article showed a setup window for iTunes for Windows. It seems to imply that there was a lack of languages. Is this a limitation on the Windows version? For languages, I can see far more options on OS X than listed in the article. Furthermore are they limitations on Windows?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
apple better look out as mac os x can not be locked to apple hardware all over the World and PearPC likely will win in court.
Soulskill rightly notes that at least some of the complained-about policies boil down to Apple's adherence to local copyright and licensing laws.
And who is that? Why should I care what they think? I thought at first that it might be a Slashdot commenter, but that name doesn't show up on this post.
God Slashdot summaries suck.
Comment of the year
I wonder if there's a correlation with the countries' attitudes - social and legal - towards homosexuality?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wow. Despite Yandex web spider consuming gigabytes of my bandwidth every month despite explicitly excluding them in robots.txt, your post is the first time I've ever seen them referenced.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If the problem is "Apple's adherence to local copyright and licensing laws", maybe Apple should spend some pocket change to lobby to have such stupid 'intellectual property' laws abolished. But given how much Apple loves to abuse such laws for its own benefit I'm not holding my breath.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
And you obviously failed the reading test, I was, now I know you are only in 3rd grade but I think you can handle this word, CONTRASTING Apple's prices in Japan and Europe. Now I know its your naptime, so please try to think of this word and remember, always READ before you POST!
Monstar L
[NSForehead slapWith:[NSHand defaultHand]];
You see, your mistake is that you ignored that with any language that has a vast foundation library, you aren't usually doing that much typing.
Now if we were a race of octopi and had to pull hands out of an NSArray (make that a race of octopi with hands), then you might see some verbosity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...an Apple "have not and don't want".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.