here you go. The official price of the X1 Carbon starts at $1589.

I eventually got used to the reversed Fn/Ctrl on my Thinkpad SL500, but now it’s a problem whenever I use another laptop. I always hate it when someone pointlessly decides to do their own thing against what everyone else does just to be different.

I will buy the notebook rather in US. For AUD$700 I can go on holidays.

If you stop buying it here the prices will go down.

Have a nice day.

Double shot espresso!

How come these laptops don’t cost $755 more than the US counterpart? It can’t be because the business support options cost more (which is an extra add-on in the configuration page on their site), you only get the basic warranty. I can probably pay a technician to disassemble and reassemble the thing, install all the operating systems (ALL of them) and give me a foot rub for that $755.

I was waiting for the Dell answer to the Mac Book Pro. Well, the Dell “answer”, as in something that had roughly the same specs that I could run Debian on has arrived in the form of the M4700. 10 hours battery life, 16Gb memory, not a retina display but a still very acceptable IPS 1920×1080 panel, and unlike the Apple heaps of expandability. In this now crazy world I wasn’t expecting it to get it for $2K, which is what a Mac Book Pro with 16Gb, quad core, 512Gb SSD sells for because in this new world order Apple makes the cheapest high end hardware, but neither was I expecting this:

For a Dell M4700, with a 2.6GHz i7-3720QM, 8Gb RAM, 500 Gb HDD, IPS 1920×1080 display, 3 yr warranty.

From http://www.dell.com.au: AUD$3600.

From http://www.dell.com: $1550.

That’s a 230% markup. Meanwhile Apple manages to sell the Macbook Pro at roughly the same price in both countries. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

A smaller market means you have a smaller margin of error. It is much harder to estimate demand when aggregate numbers are lower. Costs of variations (like custom configurations) and stock of spare parts are particularly sensitive to market size. It is not a simple linear equation and I am surprised you wave this away so dismissively. If this was easy then there would be no BI industry and SAP wouldn’t be the second-largest software maker in the world.

More stringent consumer protection laws increase the costs for manufacturers because they have to do things they don’t have to do in other jurisdictions. For example they have to provide ‘free’ hardware repairs for a longer period than in the US (at least most US states; some are similar to us) because the wording in our statutory warranty rights is stronger. But of course it’s not ‘free’ – that cost gets passed back to us through higher prices.

Apple have the best supply chain management of any company anywhere – in the future textbooks will cite Apple the way they cite Toyota. Also Apple specifically keep a simple product lineup to help facilitate this – a route that most other manufacturers don’t go down (for better or worse). Apple’s operations are as much a part of their success as anything else. In the same way that manufacturers have trouble keeping up with Apple’s design and engineering, so too do they have trouble keeping up with their supply chain excellence.

Look up the Ikea prices in the US. Or the price of a house in LA vs the price in Sydney. It’s not a Lenovo scam.

….

I need sleep.

Higher labour costs — what labor? Assembly is done offshore, and so can most support tasks. Locally it’s mainly just distribution (mainly handed by external distributors), some corporate sales, and some marketing and admin. Not a lot of overhead.

Much smaller population — so what? Just ship 100 pallets instead of 1,000 (for example), from China where they’re manufactured. Big deal? I don’t think so.

More stringent consumer protection laws — how does this come into it again?

And the biggest question of all … if Apple can harmonise local pricing, why can’t Lenovo? Lenovo would likely be pretty close to being as large in laptops as Apple is, when you consider how many corporations have massive ThinkPad fleets.