I wish the article went into the cause of the price difference. Is it high import taxes/sales taxes/etc., restrictions that make the phone harder to produce or sell for the Indian market, or just Apple deciding to charge a sizably higher markup in India than elsewhere?
Its mostly taxes and duties, though Apple products are generically costlier in India. When Apple used to charge for OS updates, if you paid in Indian Rupees it would be somewhat more expensive than you would expect for exchange rate considerations.
Apple still does some ridiculous differential pricing cherades. As a developer, you don't get to set the price for your product and in app purchases for the global market, you give them a price in dollars for US, and Apple will adjust the price as they see fit for each market you pick.
If people were willing and able to fly, the free market would close this arbitrage by ... driving up the cost of flying to Dubai. The other prices are controlled.
people flying to dubai on different days across different flights to buy a couple iphones for themselves, or even as speculators, would not make a big enough dent
Apple will more likely correct the pricing discrepancy to sell more iphones in India themselves
The article assumes you will not be paying the import duty charged in India i.e. you're bringing an open box/you own the iPhone you bring from Dubai. If you were to start a business bringing in phones in bulk you would have to pay the import duty after transportation and logistics cost which would leave a negligible margin for you. It can only be viable if you choose not to pay the import duty in which case it's smuggling (if you're bringing in with intention to sell).
Since the article lists prices in INR: The price of the iPhone 12 Pro in India in USD today is $1,615.22, and the price in Dubai is $1,140.15. So it must be possible to fly round-trip to Dubai for less than about $475, which seems plausible.
There are actually quite a few regularly scheduled flights to Dubai from India that can be acquired cheaply - a not-insignificant amount of the area’s migrant workers originate from India.
The calculation is not as simple as that. Any imports above INR 50K (about USD 676), while traveling back to India by Indian citizens, attract import duties (of 35% or so, IIRC). So the $1140.15 device, when it lands in India, would attract a duty on the excess amount. Of course, people may not declare it at customs or may try to claim it's a used device (while not having any other phone), but this is the official law.
Similarly but without COVID-suppressed airline prices, I remember back before Creative Cloud reading that it was cheaper to fly from Australia to the US to buy Creative Suite
This goes for many products and services, because of different tax and import rates.
From Europe it is often still cheaper to fly to a different country to buy clothes, electronics, etc. Problem is that you still have to pay the import tax once you cross the border back into your own country.
Hence why many airline crew ran (run?) side hustles of buying and selling luxury goods, since they were (are?) rarely checked at the border of their home country.
Can't you just buy some electronics, throw away all receipts and such and simply claim to customs that you had it already for a while?
For example, when I bought my Audio Technica ATH-M50X in the US for about $100 (while in my country they were about twice as expensive) I just had it around my neck as I was listening music through it. No one asked a thing.
In all fairness, I went to the US for fun and got a chance to use them at a demo and was immediately sold.
illegal doesn't mean very much when customs is about shaking you down, stealing your stuff, and making you pay bribes. Every time I've traveled to Africa for example, I've had to give customs officers some stuff and money. It got so bad that I was buying Bluetooth speakers and duty free gin just for them.
Unless you are willing to get arrested or beat up, or worse, for your beliefs, then yes.
If you are not willing to play the game, you will not just be systematically disadvantaged, you will be crushed.
In such a situation, you play the game. You play it because you have no choice.
I've been kidnapped by the police, I've bribed perhaps dozens or even hundreds of people. I've paid off government officials, I've gotten offers to kill my enemies (haven't crossed that line fortunately), etc etc. When the inmates run the asylum, you have no choice in becoming crazy.
And then all those exorbitant taxes and duties will end up in hidden swiss banks and in the hands of lowly fascists that control India. It's a well-oiled machine if you ask me!
I came to say this, but since you already said, another information:
Some years ago a lawmaker calculated the taxes for game consoles and concluded they are 273% of the US price.
Also when Sony was heavily bashed for the price of Playstation 4 at launch, people claiming they were price gouging, Sony blamed taxes, so I went and calculated the taxes myself, as if my store would sell it (I own a store but sell other stuff). End result was that Sony wasn't lying, 71% of the final price was taxes.
Yup. It's actually remarkable to me that the Brazilian government continues to add these taxes that, last I checked, were highest in the world.
The original justification was that it would spur domestic manufacture of computers, consoles, laptops, etc.
Obviously that hasn't happened. All it's done is make anything involving computing ridiculously expensive.
I truly don't understand why there isn't democratic pressure to repeal the insane import duties on electronics. It's like most people in Brazil have just accepted that's how domestic prices are without really questioning it. I don't get it.
Same in tiny Uruguay, but it's even more preposterous to say that they're trying to protect or incentivize a local consumer electronics manufacturing industry.
As a thought experiment, you could take the concept of tariffs and apply it to an ever decreasing geographic area. Maybe my city should try to protect its jobs and industry and therefore levy a 100% tariff on goods made in other cities. Same for my neighborhood or city block.
Ultimately, it's also a tragically regressive tax. Wealthy families that regularly travel to Miami or New York don't suffer much from it -- they just buy their electronics there. They may even make some money by bringing some home and selling the goods for much more than they paid.
If you're poor and you need to buy a laptop or phone on your meager salary, you're screwed.
I grew up in Brazil near the border with Uruguay, and we’d always cross the border to buy our electronics at the duty free stores. It was massively cheaper than buying them in Brazil.
Are duty free stores only present in border areas?
There was a time when I was trying to run an actual journalistic quality blog about gamedev, and I interviewed a bunch of people, some of them almost slipped out stuff, and one talked to me off the record, basically he claimed a certain Brazillian company that has a license from a certain japanese company to manufacture some 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, lobbyed very hard for the tax increases on imported consoles (something that didn't helped them, most of their income come from Karaoke machines now).
And later on I found out that a lot of employees of that certain brazillian company have connections with the government, for example one of them worked for that company and worked for BNDS, and while still in both of their payrolls went on a speaking tour to explain how the government was being great for the local game industry by offering loans at low cost for game companies... when I went to check, the game companies or had government friends, or family (for example one of the "game companies" the government helped, that never made a game, had the son of the president as shareholder).
I also once foolishly helped an "activist" that was promising to represent Brazillian gamers to lower the taxes, I even printed the logo of his campaign on my own company t-shirts and promo materials, and printed his logo on an Arcade machine I built.
After he got inside the government and the negotiations started, then he immediately proposed a tax cut only for physical stores, and massive tax increases for online stores, specially Steam, this made people investigate his life, and then find out he was shareholder of physical game stores... Thankfully his effort failed (thankfully because what he was proposing would make overall taxes higher instead of lower, also it would result in censorship of a bunch of stuff).
I wonder if this is the NES-clone company you're mentioning is the same one that also lobbied for imported cell-phones to be taxed harder, and of course tried to prevent Apple from selling the iPhone in Brazil by registering its trademark.
Tariffs and taxes are an addiction. Extremely easy to implement, difficult to repeal. That money collected is being used by someone and they will fight to continue receiving it.
Prices of electronics are insane in Brazil. I'm Polish, so we don't have as cheap electronics as US does, but still. I tried to find a laptop for my Brazilian friend and the prices were often double the prices of here too. Not only that, but they were the older models, e.g. a laptop here with SSD and GTX 1650 would have HDD and GTX 1050 there for twice the price.
Many stores in Orlando, Florida cater to just these middle-upper class Brazilians who takes these trips. In fact, it is not uncommon to speak/respond/switch between English/Spanish/Portguese in shopping malls.
This sort of thing is quite common in a lot of places.
Years ago I remember that I wanted to buy one of those Rock Band sets for Playstation that came with the whole band. But they were so expensive back in Brazil, that I did the math and it was the same price to fly to Miami, book a hotel for the weekend, buy the set, and come back.
The article excludes the cost of import duty, and other taxes (see daedalus's comment). It is a false argument to say that if I didn't pay tax things could be cheaper eg. if I break the law I can get a cheaper iPhone.
Getting caught for breaking the law is a stochastic system, but the expected value is lower than most people think.
Edit: How far are people willing to take this? Should we share an article saying someone got a free iPhone by buying a machine gun and stealing a truck full of iPhones? Where is the efficient frontier of breaking the law vs cheaper goods?
Property is theft from the commons - and here this is doubly untrue: the taxes are a reasonable level on a global mega-corporation with millions of people in near-slave conditions.
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it"
I tried declaring a $3k server equipment once at Mumbai airport. Exceptionally difficult to pay the correct amount ($1k or so - it was 7 years ago so amount might be off) and get a receipt, they wanted me to pay $50.
True, but they often put stipulations on it. I know for Singapore, you had to have owned the item for at least 3 months. Otherwise it was considered to be a new item imported and duty needed to be paid.
I don't know what the actual rates are in India, but I remember some 10-15 years ago I bought a bunch of camera gear from the US because it was much cheaper than buying it locally in France.
The delivery was via UPS or Fedex so they handled the customs. In the end, paying VAT and taxes (which were levied on the whole price, including shipping!) it was still cheaper than buying locally.
One of the products was a heavy tripod and head. Another fun fact about this: the tripod was actually made in Italy by an Italian brand...
Not only healthcare costs, but also national pension costs. I remember a study was done a long time ago (20 years ago) and smokers were a net contributor to the gov't coffers.
They paid a lot in cigarette taxes (even when the taxes were lower).
Those that got lung cancer didn't cost that much to treat because, well, there weren't great treatments. Lung cancer progressed fast enough that they might spend their last week in the hospital, but that was it (versus say Alzheimers where they might require a handful of years of institutional care).
They contributed to their national pension their entire life and then either died before collecting it or died less than a decade in.
Cigarette taxes are overwhelmingly paid by the poor, and impact them disproportionately. They do not have a significant impact on the smoking rates (people who would have quit due to the price already have) and there’s no data on how that tax money is spent to offset the externalities.
Yes, perhaps raising the taxes wouldn't stop more people, but lowering the taxes may encourage more people. One could imagine that having no taxes may make it easier for teenagers to start smoking, for instance.
Not being specific to NY or the US. This is not good when illegal/fake cigarettes are readily available. With these cigarettes, none of the entities(tobacco farmers, the government, smokers) will benefit from smoking.
This piece of taxation engendered tidbit is getting too much attention in India. Now it’s on HN front page.
It’s seems unlikely but I wouldn’t put it past Apple.
OTOH I don’t mind these high taxes, for a country like India an iPhone is indeed a luxury, if only the tax money didn’t go directly to party funds and offshore accounts one way or the other.
US tariffs tend not to be on consumer goods though, right? Also, I'm curious how much that number has changed over the last 4 years. Were we also at the top in 2016?
> It is no secret that the taxes and duties that are applied to imported phones are highest in India. The taxes are so high that for an important iPhone that you will end up paying an average tax of Rs 24,000 for something like an iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 Mini.
> However, despite the sky-rocketing prices, iPhone still sells best in India and the buyers give whatever price Apple asks them to pay. So for a business, that is not a bad deal at all.
Not really a good deal for Apple. More like an amazing deal for the Indian government.
Certainly there is an inflection point where demand meets a taxed price that would cause Apple to build a factory in India. If Apple is not currently building a factory in India, then that point has not been reached and the result is just higher prices for Indians.
The tax isn't just designed to make Apple and others move to India, it's to give an advantage to local manufacturers over foreign ones. Now whether or not local phone companies are starting/growing in India as a result of this tax, I don't know
Price elasticity of demand isn't linear. Something that is a Giffen good at a lower price may well have negative marginal demand if the price rises too much.
It's a term people use to either be funny, or it's because they're somehow offended that people from USA use the demonym "American" even though there are other countries in the Americas, yet despite the fact that no one else in those countries seems to care because they have their own demonyms they use.
The former are just having a laugh, and the latter are looking for things to be offended by.
I don't know which camp the GP falls into but I'll be charitable and assume they're just being silly.
I don't think you know many people from Latin America. A lot of them will absolutely not like American to refer to the USA only. Especially as the USA imperialism has done so much damage in many places there. It is not as strong as say the Macedonian debate but it is very real.
That may be the case, you're not wrong about what the US has done in Latin America. That said, I've never in my life heard anyone from Latin America call themselves American. Now that's just my experience, so I'm open to being proven wrong.
When I lived in Costa Rica for a time, I was only ever "Americano" and everyone from there were "ticos" or "costarricense." Though to be fair, Costa Rica has pretty much been spared of American meddling.
Well I for one (born in Venezuela and moved to Italy) used to be mildly annoyed when italians used the term "americano" to refer people from USA, and used to tell them "I'm also american". In Venezuela I used "estadounidense" [1] and in italian it would be "statunintense" the proper form, but almost nobody uses it.
Now I'm used to it and don't mind it anymore and this is the first time I've heard of the term USAian and find it quite amousing but I don't think it will catch on.
America isn't a continent. We have North America and South America. We typically refer to the grouping of those two continents as 'The Americas', but not America. At least not that I've ever seen.
In the U.S. we do 7. Maybe in Venezuela or Brasil they do 5?
I guess that's one of the things that confuses me here. If you're from Europe you can be European because that's the continent you're from. If you're from Canada you can be Canadian or North American, but you can't be American because that's not a continent. I mean I guess you technically can, but it's a bit of a lossy term to use. It isn't specific enough. Do people from Bangladesh or Pakistan think of themselves as Asian, or Pakistani?
I guess as I see some of this discussion, it strikes me as very arbitrary and resentful, and also not very consistent.
> USAian and find it quite amousing but I don't think it will catch on.
Yea I saw it and had to do a double take because I thought it was USAsian. I think at least in English it won't catch on because it doesn't flow very well.
In East Asia, but especially in Taiwan, Japan and China, people from the USA are usually called American. Normally, when asked, I state I’m from California or the US.
I think it’s just a language thing here. It’s easier to say America than it is to say USA or United States.
I’m sure Canadians and others get quite annoyed from that.
I usually say the same. I’m from X or I’m from the United States.
If you’re Canadian you’d say I’m from North America, not America. If you’re from Brazil you’d say you’re from South America. The same would be true of Americans. You’d say you’re from North America. That’s the continent. If you are going to go down that route.
Do Mexicans, Canadians, Brazilians, and others really consider themselves of the region of the Americas and not from one of the two continents? I just don’t get the organizational structure that’s used. You wouldn’t say you’re American, that’s for sure. You’d say you’re north or South American.
Yes, in my Latam country they taught us there were 5 continents: America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. However, we call ourselves latinos or something else, really.
You and the people of Latin America are making a language category error though. The people of Latin America speak Spanish (and perhaps Portugese), and the Spanish word "America" means what it does in Spanish. But in English, the word "America" refers to the USA. It doesn't make sense to complain about words in other languages that you don't speak.
You acknowledge what America means when you use the English word "Americas" to refer to the regions within North and South America, because in English that is the word to use and has the other meaning.
The same logic applies to "football", btw. The vast majority of English speaking people refer to soccer as soccer. That people who speak other languages use a word in their language that sounds like "football" to refer to soccer does not give them standing to sound off on what Australians, Americans, and Canadians call soccer. There is room for the British to bicker about it, but they are a distinct minority among English speakers.
In Brazil is usual to hear in more educated circles the denomination "estadunidense", which is essentially the same thing as USAian. Or north-americans, when talking about the culture from the standpoint of Brazilians.
It's far from true that no one cares.
A $149 IntelliJ licence costs $176 including taxes + there is a 3.5% processing and currency conversion charges imposed by by credit card. Converting to INR I may have to shell out Rs. 3.5k to 4k extra which has dissuaded me going for an All Products Pack and settle for the Ultimate license.
I doubt that the taxes from import of electronics is significant enough for it to be a 'great deal' for the Indian Government. I think their intended purpose is to promote/protect local manufacturing.
I get the protectionist aspect, but are they re-investing the money from this tax to make manufacturing desirable in the country?
We're talking logistics improvement, stable electric grid, infrastructure and training programs to get an educated workforce. Or is it just contributing to some bureaucrat's pension fund?
In the same vein, I 100% agree with fuel taxes and green taxes... if the government can demonstrate 100% of the tax goes to finance alternatives that are useful to me.
So does this mean that presumably, going forward, when the factory starts working at full capacity, the taxes imposed will be lower, and hence Apple products will be cheaper in India?
It's cheaper, but not by much. I checked apple's canadian and US site, and iPhone 12 128GB unlocked is only ~$40 cheaper when factoring in currency rates. That advantage probably evaporates once you factor in currency conversion costs, customs brokerage costs, and shipping costs.
Which country? My friend just told me that the stuff they ordered in bulk from China to Europe entered the customs area in Hungary. In theory the customs rules are the same wherever you enter the EU, but I guess these companies have found a "port" where the checks are more lenient or less rigorous (saving time and money, not go to around the law).
From anecdotes only, German customs are thorough, they check every parcel, and this is not the case all across the EU.
You have an allowance for "personal goods", such as a phone [0]. In this case it's probably borderline illegal (IANAL), but I suppose people would throw away the box and everything while abroad.
Whenever I flew in France from outside the EU no one asked me where I bought my phone, laptop or camera. Anecdotally, several times I was carrying camera gear bought from the US because it was cheaper to pay for shipping + VAT + taxes than buying locally...
At least with Brazil, in practice you're allowed a single personal computer and phone. If you come back to the country with both your old phone and new phone you'll have problems. But if you leave without a phone or laptop, and come back with both, without packaging, with apps and files loaded and everything, and claim you'd brought them in Brazil originally, you're fine. So that's what people do.
If you have a legitimate need to bring multiple devices to and fro, at one point there was a form you'd fill out at the airport when leaving where you'd put down serial numbers and they'd verify on return.
With something like a PS4 it might be a little riskier, but you could probably spin some kind of story they'd accept, as long as it appears similarly used and not in packaging. ("I was visiting family and my nephew wanted to play PS4 so I brought mine for the week!")
>With something like a PS4 it might be a little riskier, but you could probably spin some kind of story they'd accept, as long as it appears similarly used and not in packaging. ("I was visiting family and my nephew wanted to play PS4 so I brought mine for the week!")
Or you could say that you run Linux on that PS4 and that's your main PC.
I'm sorry but other than brand value, what do Apple products get Indian users that simply cannot be got from other companies?
If the price from a trillion dollar company is this costly, then vote with your wallets for god's sake. Simply don't buy. There are (fortunately) plenty of viable alternatives to Apple that are more reasonably priced.
I had a friend who was unemployed and really going through a shitty spell. Then the news that you could go to Miami buy a PS4 and resell here came up. He started doing this all the time, and then going to the parks and whatnot. Eventually he started living there and working in tourism. Finally, he arranged to bring the capital to open a tourism agency in Miami and stay there for good.
Last time there was a hurricane I texted him and he said "yeah, we boarded up the house; I'm living at a Disney hotel for the time being".
I don’t understand the difference in the pricing between the base iPhone and iPhone pro. It’s 50000 Rupees which is about $700, although in the US it’s only $300.
Even $300 is a big premium for what you get. Basically just an extra camera and a LIDAR sensor that nobody knows what to do with yet. Oh, and a shiny stainless-steel band around the edge.
I think what Apple has realized is that a certain subset of their customers will always want the best model, no matter how little sense the price makes compared to the regular model. For some people, it will always be a status symbol (or an enthusiast's obsession). Or they're of the economic class where $300 just doesn't even register on their budget. As one reviewer put it, the 12 Pro is "the shiny one", and for some people that's all it takes.
What this amounts to is that these whales can subsidize things like the $400 SE model, which is an incredible value. And I'm completely fine with that arrangement personally.
I would add to that a brighter screen, the base has twice the storage and the pro has better camera capabilities (that could actually be claimed to be 'pro'). When you equalise the storage, the price differential is about $200.
258 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadpeople flying to dubai on different days across different flights to buy a couple iphones for themselves, or even as speculators, would not make a big enough dent
Apple will more likely correct the pricing discrepancy to sell more iphones in India themselves
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/nothing-to-decla...
From Europe it is often still cheaper to fly to a different country to buy clothes, electronics, etc. Problem is that you still have to pay the import tax once you cross the border back into your own country.
Hence why many airline crew ran (run?) side hustles of buying and selling luxury goods, since they were (are?) rarely checked at the border of their home country.
For example, when I bought my Audio Technica ATH-M50X in the US for about $100 (while in my country they were about twice as expensive) I just had it around my neck as I was listening music through it. No one asked a thing.
In all fairness, I went to the US for fun and got a chance to use them at a demo and was immediately sold.
You can also simply hold a knife to a stranger and ask them to empty their wallet.
Both happen to be illegal, however.
If you are not willing to play the game, you will not just be systematically disadvantaged, you will be crushed.
In such a situation, you play the game. You play it because you have no choice.
I've been kidnapped by the police, I've bribed perhaps dozens or even hundreds of people. I've paid off government officials, I've gotten offers to kill my enemies (haven't crossed that line fortunately), etc etc. When the inmates run the asylum, you have no choice in becoming crazy.
Of course, if you claim the 50 iphones in your bag are "for personal use" it might not work as well.
In the case of the iPhone you might need to find a cheap flight to the US, but a Macbook will land you a couple days in Disney.
Some years ago a lawmaker calculated the taxes for game consoles and concluded they are 273% of the US price.
Also when Sony was heavily bashed for the price of Playstation 4 at launch, people claiming they were price gouging, Sony blamed taxes, so I went and calculated the taxes myself, as if my store would sell it (I own a store but sell other stuff). End result was that Sony wasn't lying, 71% of the final price was taxes.
The original justification was that it would spur domestic manufacture of computers, consoles, laptops, etc.
Obviously that hasn't happened. All it's done is make anything involving computing ridiculously expensive.
I truly don't understand why there isn't democratic pressure to repeal the insane import duties on electronics. It's like most people in Brazil have just accepted that's how domestic prices are without really questioning it. I don't get it.
As a thought experiment, you could take the concept of tariffs and apply it to an ever decreasing geographic area. Maybe my city should try to protect its jobs and industry and therefore levy a 100% tariff on goods made in other cities. Same for my neighborhood or city block.
Ultimately, it's also a tragically regressive tax. Wealthy families that regularly travel to Miami or New York don't suffer much from it -- they just buy their electronics there. They may even make some money by bringing some home and selling the goods for much more than they paid.
If you're poor and you need to buy a laptop or phone on your meager salary, you're screwed.
I grew up in Brazil near the border with Uruguay, and we’d always cross the border to buy our electronics at the duty free stores. It was massively cheaper than buying them in Brazil.
Are duty free stores only present in border areas?
There was a time when I was trying to run an actual journalistic quality blog about gamedev, and I interviewed a bunch of people, some of them almost slipped out stuff, and one talked to me off the record, basically he claimed a certain Brazillian company that has a license from a certain japanese company to manufacture some 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, lobbyed very hard for the tax increases on imported consoles (something that didn't helped them, most of their income come from Karaoke machines now).
And later on I found out that a lot of employees of that certain brazillian company have connections with the government, for example one of them worked for that company and worked for BNDS, and while still in both of their payrolls went on a speaking tour to explain how the government was being great for the local game industry by offering loans at low cost for game companies... when I went to check, the game companies or had government friends, or family (for example one of the "game companies" the government helped, that never made a game, had the son of the president as shareholder).
I also once foolishly helped an "activist" that was promising to represent Brazillian gamers to lower the taxes, I even printed the logo of his campaign on my own company t-shirts and promo materials, and printed his logo on an Arcade machine I built.
After he got inside the government and the negotiations started, then he immediately proposed a tax cut only for physical stores, and massive tax increases for online stores, specially Steam, this made people investigate his life, and then find out he was shareholder of physical game stores... Thankfully his effort failed (thankfully because what he was proposing would make overall taxes higher instead of lower, also it would result in censorship of a bunch of stuff).
Years ago I remember that I wanted to buy one of those Rock Band sets for Playstation that came with the whole band. But they were so expensive back in Brazil, that I did the math and it was the same price to fly to Miami, book a hotel for the weekend, buy the set, and come back.
Getting caught for breaking the law is a stochastic system, but the expected value is lower than most people think.
Edit: How far are people willing to take this? Should we share an article saying someone got a free iPhone by buying a machine gun and stealing a truck full of iPhones? Where is the efficient frontier of breaking the law vs cheaper goods?
what else...
Free oxygen is communism!
Freedom is theft!
so legally this is fine
I have no idea how that was actually enforced.
The delivery was via UPS or Fedex so they handled the customs. In the end, paying VAT and taxes (which were levied on the whole price, including shipping!) it was still cheaper than buying locally.
One of the products was a heavy tripod and head. Another fun fact about this: the tripod was actually made in Italy by an Italian brand...
Thank God I quit smoking in 1980.
A pack of cigarettes in New York costs about $15, in some stores, and no less than $10, outside of the local Native American facilities/reservations.
That's almost all taxes.
I mean, that’s a good thing, right? Smokers should pay for the externalities their habit has on society as a whole.
I think they should be banned altogether in locations where non smokers might be. Putting a price on this seems the odd way to go.
"complete smoking cessation would produce a net increase in health care costs"
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199710093371506
They paid a lot in cigarette taxes (even when the taxes were lower).
Those that got lung cancer didn't cost that much to treat because, well, there weren't great treatments. Lung cancer progressed fast enough that they might spend their last week in the hospital, but that was it (versus say Alzheimers where they might require a handful of years of institutional care).
They contributed to their national pension their entire life and then either died before collecting it or died less than a decade in.
Some info: https://priceonomics.com/how-cigarettes-tax-the-poor/
TL;DR cigarette taxes feel fair to non smokers because it appears to discourage a habit with bad outcomes, but economically they aren’t effective.
Not being specific to NY or the US. This is not good when illegal/fake cigarettes are readily available. With these cigarettes, none of the entities(tobacco farmers, the government, smokers) will benefit from smoking.
https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/alert-you-are-buyi...
It’s seems unlikely but I wouldn’t put it past Apple.
OTOH I don’t mind these high taxes, for a country like India an iPhone is indeed a luxury, if only the tax money didn’t go directly to party funds and offshore accounts one way or the other.
> However, despite the sky-rocketing prices, iPhone still sells best in India and the buyers give whatever price Apple asks them to pay. So for a business, that is not a bad deal at all.
Not really a good deal for Apple. More like an amazing deal for the Indian government.
I thought high taxes are the incentive to start manufacturing or assembly locally.
Not despite.
People don't understand the Apple brand.
How fortunate that we have you to explain it. They're probably just holding it wrong.
By comparison, I paid $92.04 in sales tax for my new iPhone, and I am currently in a geography that is considered low-tax.
The former are just having a laugh, and the latter are looking for things to be offended by.
I don't know which camp the GP falls into but I'll be charitable and assume they're just being silly.
Youessish. Like in British, English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish.
Youessan. Like in Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban.
Youessese. Asian American.
Youessian. Like Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Indian.
When I lived in Costa Rica for a time, I was only ever "Americano" and everyone from there were "ticos" or "costarricense." Though to be fair, Costa Rica has pretty much been spared of American meddling.
Now I'm used to it and don't mind it anymore and this is the first time I've heard of the term USAian and find it quite amousing but I don't think it will catch on.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/estadounidense
America isn't a continent. We have North America and South America. We typically refer to the grouping of those two continents as 'The Americas', but not America. At least not that I've ever seen.
On a side note - maybe it depends on if you are taught a different number of continents? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent)
In the U.S. we do 7. Maybe in Venezuela or Brasil they do 5?
I guess that's one of the things that confuses me here. If you're from Europe you can be European because that's the continent you're from. If you're from Canada you can be Canadian or North American, but you can't be American because that's not a continent. I mean I guess you technically can, but it's a bit of a lossy term to use. It isn't specific enough. Do people from Bangladesh or Pakistan think of themselves as Asian, or Pakistani?
I guess as I see some of this discussion, it strikes me as very arbitrary and resentful, and also not very consistent.
> USAian and find it quite amousing but I don't think it will catch on.
Yea I saw it and had to do a double take because I thought it was USAsian. I think at least in English it won't catch on because it doesn't flow very well.
I’m sure Canadians and others get quite annoyed from that.
If you’re Canadian you’d say I’m from North America, not America. If you’re from Brazil you’d say you’re from South America. The same would be true of Americans. You’d say you’re from North America. That’s the continent. If you are going to go down that route.
Do Mexicans, Canadians, Brazilians, and others really consider themselves of the region of the Americas and not from one of the two continents? I just don’t get the organizational structure that’s used. You wouldn’t say you’re American, that’s for sure. You’d say you’re north or South American.
You acknowledge what America means when you use the English word "Americas" to refer to the regions within North and South America, because in English that is the word to use and has the other meaning.
The same logic applies to "football", btw. The vast majority of English speaking people refer to soccer as soccer. That people who speak other languages use a word in their language that sounds like "football" to refer to soccer does not give them standing to sound off on what Australians, Americans, and Canadians call soccer. There is room for the British to bicker about it, but they are a distinct minority among English speakers.
Isn't that word, "football"?
You are correct. I have only very rarely in my life given fig one about offending strangers.
1. https://madb.europa.eu/madb/euTariffs.htm?productCode=851712...
A $149 IntelliJ licence costs $176 including taxes + there is a 3.5% processing and currency conversion charges imposed by by credit card. Converting to INR I may have to shell out Rs. 3.5k to 4k extra which has dissuaded me going for an All Products Pack and settle for the Ultimate license.
We're talking logistics improvement, stable electric grid, infrastructure and training programs to get an educated workforce. Or is it just contributing to some bureaucrat's pension fund?
In the same vein, I 100% agree with fuel taxes and green taxes... if the government can demonstrate 100% of the tax goes to finance alternatives that are useful to me.
Depending on the costs of manufacturing, the price of might not go down by much however, or Apple might keep the difference.
I was not voicing an opinion on whether such protectionist policies actually work. (They seldom do).
Electronics is cheaper in US but every time I fly back to Europe they check my bags.
From anecdotes only, German customs are thorough, they check every parcel, and this is not the case all across the EU.
In theory both the US and HK should be taxed the same.
The most annoying thing is the Post Office charging a handling fee on top of any tax due...
Whenever I flew in France from outside the EU no one asked me where I bought my phone, laptop or camera. Anecdotally, several times I was carrying camera gear bought from the US because it was cheaper to pay for shipping + VAT + taxes than buying locally...
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=legissum...
If you have a legitimate need to bring multiple devices to and fro, at one point there was a form you'd fill out at the airport when leaving where you'd put down serial numbers and they'd verify on return.
With something like a PS4 it might be a little riskier, but you could probably spin some kind of story they'd accept, as long as it appears similarly used and not in packaging. ("I was visiting family and my nephew wanted to play PS4 so I brought mine for the week!")
Or you could say that you run Linux on that PS4 and that's your main PC.
If the price from a trillion dollar company is this costly, then vote with your wallets for god's sake. Simply don't buy. There are (fortunately) plenty of viable alternatives to Apple that are more reasonably priced.
Why don't you use something cheaper instead?
iPhones are the best product on the market, and not everyone is price-conscious.
I had a friend who was unemployed and really going through a shitty spell. Then the news that you could go to Miami buy a PS4 and resell here came up. He started doing this all the time, and then going to the parks and whatnot. Eventually he started living there and working in tourism. Finally, he arranged to bring the capital to open a tourism agency in Miami and stay there for good.
Last time there was a hurricane I texted him and he said "yeah, we boarded up the house; I'm living at a Disney hotel for the time being".
So that's what happens.
I think what Apple has realized is that a certain subset of their customers will always want the best model, no matter how little sense the price makes compared to the regular model. For some people, it will always be a status symbol (or an enthusiast's obsession). Or they're of the economic class where $300 just doesn't even register on their budget. As one reviewer put it, the 12 Pro is "the shiny one", and for some people that's all it takes.
What this amounts to is that these whales can subsidize things like the $400 SE model, which is an incredible value. And I'm completely fine with that arrangement personally.