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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writes "As this story in the Economist notes, Apple's policies regarding international sales are often confusing and outdated.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
Partly the irrational fear that artists won't get their rightful dues, because of currency exchange rates.
Are you insinuating that artists currently DO get their rightful dues?
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?
Sorry, this is just plain prejudice. For business purposes EU is one big country. OK, certain countries are well known sources for fraud. My country is not one of them. There is no problem with doing business here. Dell and HP have support centers here that support users all over Europe. IBM has a sales/purchasing center here, they handle accounts all over the world. SAP has a software developer center here, too.
Maybe Apple has some IP related reasons why they can sell media only in certain countries, but most other cases when shops do not ship to eastern Europe are just a result of prejudice and lazyness. The person who fills list of countries into the shop can either investigate which countries to include, or he can just decide to include western Europe "since they are OK" and ignore the rest.
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.
Sadly, this is what a few people here actually believe.
I hear ya on that one AC, Apple users need to spend less time defending their favored product and more time on outlining its advantages. I'm happy to hear about whats good about Apple and in many cases agree with them. IMHO Apples products are tailored to a specific type of person, that's someone who wants something out-of-the-box and easy to use.
The critical issue for me is flexibility and no Mac person can give a good rebuttal against it. When you buy a Mac you're pretty much stuck with what you've got, they don't make good long term upgradable solutions like the other brands out there in the same marketplace.
The issue with Flash and how it is slow, its slow because of the API restrictions. This whole debacle came into the light about Flash after Apple made it an issue, before that nobody really cared and was happy to develop for it. Now Apple says Flash is crap so does everyone else. Well lets try not to use the power of FUD to always lean on the easy way out here, lets all be a bit more critical, even of your own loved product. Why not see the short coming and advantages from every POV not just one source.
iPad, is it going to replace Netbooks? no you simply can do too much with Netbooks, iPad works great for media and eBooks but lacks in its overall versatility, why? because the same problems the iPhone is presently trumped with. Apple wants to hammer down its App Store and stop flash from circumventing it. Does it mean the iPad is shit? for a lot of people its a very useful tool. What separates the market is geek/nerd/IT enthusiast vs the general computer user that has no intention of flipping the hood and is satisfied with what they have.
Apple people love to try and turn you, first they mod you down to buggery, then they try to say things like "Apple does more in-house development and hardware manufacturing then ever before" the flipside of that is, no they haven't they've outsourced a lot of it and turned themselves into more of an assembly line like dell rather then a vendor, they've become a much larger company so therefore what they do manufacture has expanded. Trying to tell to me that in the past they made a large portion of their own chipsets but now use Intel, ATI, nVidia, etc, however now they make their own cases and batteries, I'm like sheesh how can that compare. It's starting to brimming into a whole brainwashing exercise for me, i think its just sad.
Personally for me, Microsoft is a nasty business in some of its dealings but if we were to turn back the clock at those pivotal years and "powers to be" favored Mac at the time the IT industry we have today would be far less free, it would be suppressed by the control features Apple puts in their products and we would be years behind where we are today.
Sorry, this is just plain prejudice. For business purposes EU is one big country.
No it is not. While there are few trade barriers, there are different monetary units (not everyone who is part of the EU has the same currency) as well as different levels of taxation and different intellectual property rights. At best, it is a free trade and labour zone among its members, of last time I checked, the United States was not one of them.
Why do people treat private commercial entities as some sort of pseudo-government entity that is obliged to do business universally?
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.