Local iPod prices disappoint

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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The price for Apple products is much higher in South Africa than in countries like the United States. The significant price difference was again highlighted when Apple released their latest iPod range.

Bringing equipment like iPods and iMacs into South Africa does incur additional costs like transport fees, import taxes and VAT, but does that add up to 50% more than the original price?

iPod price differences

An iPod shuffle is priced at USD 79-00 (R 554-00) in the US while it costs R 783-00 at the official Apple store in South Africa. The R 229-00 difference equates to a 41% increase over the standard price in America.

The situation is however worse with other iPods. The newly launched iPod touch 8 GB costs USD 299-00 (R 2096-00) in the US, but in South Africa it retails for R 3422-00. This means that the local price is 63% more expensive than in the US. The same goes for the 16 GB model which at R 4401-00 is R 1602-00 more expensive than the US price of USD 399-00 (R 2799-00).

Other Apple products

The situation is similar for other iPods and Apple products like Apple TV and the iMac range.

The 24’’ 2.4 GHz Apple iMac, for example, costs R18 586-00 locally while the US price is USD 1 799-00 (R 12 623-00). This R 5 963-00 price difference means that South Africans are paying 47% more.

Core Group

Core Group, a company representing brands such as Apple Computer, Adobe, and Filemaker in South Africa, imports and distributes Apple products locally.

MyBroadband called Core to find out what the reason is behind these vast price differences, but despite being sent to three different people the answer was the same every time – ‘we don’t know, you will have to speak to another person in the company’.

We were promised a call from Core’s PR division which unfortunately never materialized.

It is further noteworthy that all attempts to telephonically contact Apple’s official local online store, namely ZAStore, proved fruitless. This poor service caps off what can be described as a sad state of affairs for Apple in South Africa.

Look for yourself

For a full comparison between local and US iPod prices, you can view this table

The comparisons in this article between the official Apple stores in the US (http://store.apple.com/) and South Africa (http://www.zastore.co.za/) were used in conjunction with the currency converter XE (http://www.xe.com/)

For more information about this issue, Ben Kelly has written an excellent Blog on this same topic and it is a must read.

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