Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Apples and Inflation

Why yes, it is cider season in Virginia, funny you should ask.

But no, this post isn't about them apples. It's about Apple computers and their price in Canada.

Wired magazine - which seems to have a grudge against Steve Jobs and Apple, for some reason - reports how Macs are still more expensive in Canada than in the U.S. (by $150 or so). Considering how the Canadian dollar is now actually stronger than its American counterpart, that's adding insult to injury.

However, they also mention a pretty credible speculation that Apple adjusts its international prices annually, sometimes winning and other times losing on currency fluctuations. And remember, the U.S. dollar is "doing a post-modernist impression of the last minutes of the Titanic" (as the GeekCulture forum poster put it so aptly). That's got to be the best visual description of inflation I've ever come across, by the way.

Canadians have a solution to this conundrum; they can head south of the border and load up on cheaper Apple stuff. If only Americans had a similarly simple way of compensating for the depredations of Empire...

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