Um, dont forget that the US charges sales tax up and above the price of the Mac and it varies from state to state...so take off 14% on our prices if you wanna make a fair comparison! The prices are damn good!
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Question of the Day: How do you normally pay for purchases in stores?
Apple's 2010 MacBook Air range: SA pricing revealed
Professor Farnsworth
Well-Known Member
For a fraction of the price, you could build a much better PC running Ubuntu.
AlexA
Member
That is correct from our point of view. How much does Core pay for it, and what is their mark-up?
gregmcc
Honorary Master
Not bad prices compared to how much we were previously ripped of by, but still way overpriced. I'd still rather build up a PC which will be a) Upgradeable b) More powerful c) Cheaper
looxonline
Member
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Valid comparison but what you are paying for in the Air is a completely fresh and carefully engineered overall laptop design. These laptops in the comparison are more of a repackaging than a redesign. In the case of the air there is a substantial amount of design effort that goes into making the product so compact. This rings up some pretty intense NRE costs. Even compared to its predecessor the new air shows signs that the Apple engineers have been hard at work. Then there is the unibody aluminium chassis which does not come cheap but still allows a laptop this compact to be relatively robust.
WRT performance the folks at Apple realised that a laptop of this nature is not going to be used by pixel crunchers but rather by road warriors. The target market is most likely to limit their most probable use case to working in spreadsheets and documents etc... For these such applications the air is most likely to outperform all of the mentioned laptops because of its SSD. Apple have wisely analysed the most probable and restrictive bottleneck (given their target market) and widened it.
All things taken into consideration the honest truth is that you are paying a premium for Apple products (although the less compact MB pro range are quite reasonable and probably better suited to the above comparison). I have worked on an acer for the last 4 years and it does the job but there is nothing special about it that makes me enjoy working on it. Apple design their products to deliver an enjoyable user experience through the subtleties. Some people will be willing to pay for this and others won't. It's like comparing a 250kW Chinese vehicle to a 250kW German vehicle. Each man to his own. It brings to mind what jobs said to the shareholders in 2008 "We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of Junk".
Now for all the folk talking about importing directly...I'm sold, please point me in the direction of a website that will allow me to do this. I've tried Amazon but they only ship to the U.S. Any other suggestions? Ta.
Funny thing is I actually wouldn't mind paying the 'Apple premium'. However the problem is we pay BOTH an Apple premium AND a 'Core Group' premium, we get double-hit, and I refuse to pay both. I almost feel like it's 'OK' for Apple to charge a bit extra because of their focus on good engineering. But Core Group bring NO value to the table other than "heyeah we're a bunch of talentless middlemen who just happened to score a monopoly on distribution in SA, PAY UP suckers we gonna bleed u!!1!". They won't get my money.
Okinawaiso
Active Member
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If you had R8999 for option 1 and were shopping in the UK, you could buy a Acer Aspire 5741 (Core i3 330M 3GB 320GB DVD-SM 15.6" Windows 7 Home Premium 64) and still get R4350 change.