Hey, so I know Apple typically makes approximately 30% on most hardware (60 on iPhones) and then more when they've been around for a while and manufacturing costs go down. But I've noticed at least in Canada Apple hardware prices have gone through the room when our dollar fell relative to the US dollar. I know that a big chunk of the sales in China have sank because of their currency relative to the US dollar.
So my big question is, since the stock tends to depend more on the number of units shipped than by keeping the selling price up. Why not drop the international prices? I know that a big reason why they want to avoid selling too cheap of a device in one country is to avoid people from those countries exporting to others. But if they sold for only 100ish less than the US value, wouldn't that make the costs of reshipping devices from one country to another negligible enough to not matter?
I get the whole, "It's premium, keep the price up so that people will see it as valuable." bit. But to give you an idea, the entry level MacBook Pro, is 1550 in Canada! Just 5 years ago, I bought the highest end 13 inch MacBook Pro I could, with a 2.7 Ghz i7 processor. (I left the HDD at 500 gigs, and the RAM at 4 gigs since I planned to up that later myself.) Now for me to upgrade my MacBook Pro to another one similarly high end relative to the time I'd be looking at 2440 (and that's not including the 240 I'd need to bump up to 16 gigs of RAM. (Also is it just me or is charging 240 for 16 gigs of RAM in this day insane!?)
Seriously though, Apple probably isn't paying for a lot of the parts in USD, so why charge international users so much more?
Actually I just did the math, apparently each US dollar is worth 1.3 Canadian dollars. And I did the math and we do pay ever so slightly less relative to that.
So really ... I just hate the conservative government that tanked our economy.