iPad UK Pricing Confirmed; Apple UK Tax Applied

The iPad will be available in the UK and eight other countries from 28 May 2010; both models will be available for pre-order on 10 May. Reader marcopolo007uk adds a note from iPad-Review.co.uk with pricing: "WiFi Models: 16GB / 32GB / 64GB — £429 / £499 / £599. 3G versions: 16GB / 32GB / 64GB — £529 / £599 / £699. These are a little higher than some had guessed... The Apple Tax stings the UK consumer again." At the current exchange rate, these prices are right around 150% of those offered in the US.

Yay!

[Pojut]

Another flamebait iPad post! Another chance for me to say iPads are a waste of money!

"Su-su-suck it, bitch!" -Jimmy [wikipedia.org]

Re:The OP forgot VAT.

[tk77]

What's the problem again?

VAT

And how is this Apple's problem?

Re:The OP forgot VAT.

[dunkelfalke]

How is a difference of £75 ($110) "really close"?

Re:The OP forgot VAT.

[fredrik70]

and so they should! We like our public servies

Re:The OP forgot VAT.

[dougmwne]

At least in the UK you're getting a better return for your tax pounds. You spend a smaller percentage of your GDP on military and you get nationalized healthcare.

Re:£429? ... Ouch

[dintech]

Steve Jobs is writing a new story. "The Emperors New Computing Device"

I'm quite sure

[spleen_blender]

Apple is glad to see such free advertising! This is consumerism crap, not slashdot-worthy "stuff that matters" content...

Re:The OP forgot VAT.

[Neoprofin]

And free houses for all the Chavs. I'll take my nano-tech, space laser, military-industrial complex.

Re:Yay!

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

the exchange rate is 1 USD to 1.5 GBP

£429 = ~$630 USD.

Can I mod an article down as "flamebait"?

[gnasher719]

It's not 150%, it's 126%. And the UK price includes 17.5% VAT which Apple would have to send straight to Gordon Brown's tax collectors if he hadn't just been thrown out (I think he is refusing to leave, but thank heavens he will), whereas the US price doesn't include US sales tax.

Re:The OP forgot VAT.

[Space cowboy]

I disagree with you. This is a quote from a post I made late last year:

I've recently had very bad news in my family - in the space of two weeks, my uncle has been told he needs heart surgery, and my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. My uncle has been scheduled for surgery on 15th of this month, and my mother has put off her appointment (originally on the 11th) because I'm getting married on the 12th. She'll be going under the knife on 19th instead. My uncle will be missing the wedding, but we're going to stream it live so he can watch it in the UK, even if it is at midnight over there :)

I thank my lucky stars we're from the UK, because there's just no way our family could afford their treatment over here in the USA - my uncle's heart surgery would cost [cnn.com] circa $175,000, my mother's cancer treatment and subsequent costs [repec.org] could come to circa $100,000. We've never had money - I was the first kid in our family to go to college for example, and I had to pay my way through that. We've always scraped-by and made-do, mother and father working, grandmother looking after the kids etc. Over here, I'm lucky in that I have an excellent medical insurance plan from my company, but my fiancee didn't have medical insurance until we met. She used to try not to visit a doctor, to self-medicate via a drugstore if something was wrong. I was horrified that someone would even consider that. Seriously and truthfully - I was aghast that a visit to the doctors wasn't just "what you'd do if you're not feeling well". It's just a no-brainer from my (and anyone from the UK, I suspect) perspective.

For her part, my mother gets personal visits in her home from the MacMillan [wikipedia.org] nurse (cancer specialist nurses, there to answer any questions, give advice, as well as do the nursing stuff), and she has one of the best surgical teams in the country ready to operate when she gets back to the UK. All of this is standard-stuff, she pays her dues (in her taxes / national insurance contributions), and she has the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing she has access to excellent health-care whenever she wants it, without being suddenly landed with huge bills, and without any worry of 'recission' by a financially-orientated insurance company.

There's a lot I like (even prefer) about the USA, but the healthcare system is (from an outsiders perspective) a badge of shame. Everyone gets sick eventually, and everyone dies eventually. Any civilised country ought to recognise and cope with that such that people don't fall through the cracks. The NHS in the UK isn't perfect - you'll frequently hear Brits complaining about it - but it's head, shoulders, and torso above the system over here. I still pay my 'national insurance' in the UK, even though I live in the US - the cost is minimal (about £15/month), and I don't mind helping fund something today that I (or, say, a member of my family) might make use of tomorrow. To me, it's beyond belief that people in the USA fight *against* a similar system, but hey, each to their own. I don't get to vote over here so it's not as though I can do anything about it...

Bottom line: In the UK, health follows an almost burger-king like mantra - "you need it? You got it!" whereas in the USA, you're trusting your health and possibly your life to the same sort of company that screws you over if someone hits your car - an insurance company that has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders. After the last few weeks, I'm pretty darn certain which of the two models I prefer.

From our perspective, the good news is that my mother pulled through, both her and my uncle are on medicines for the rest of her life (free, of course) and my mother has just finished the chemotherapy, so she's feeling a little fragile atm, but she made it; anything else is irrelevant.

Simon.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Worst iPad better than "best" netbook

[Petron]

Worse storage, Worse flexibility, Worse software selection, Worse productivity, there isn't anything on the ipad you can't do on a netbook, but there are a lot of things you can do on a netbook that you can't do on an ipad. The ipad isn't a tablet. Tablets have been out for years. Tablets are computers with a touch interface, mostly without keyboards. The ipad is a presentation device. It isn't made for computing. Writing a paper on an ipad would just be painful. It's made to view web pages, watch a movie, listen to music, or play some light-weight games/apps. It's not a good design for a creative platform.

Re:They're expensive here too.

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPad is built from the ground up to be what it is.

Yeah! Cummon guys, listen to him! I don't know of any other tablet on the market that was created by making a phone bigger and taking away the phone call capability!

Re:They're expensive here too.

[aztracker1]

It's a Giant iPod Touch... it's got the iPod Touch guts, bolted into a big screen.. no ground up here... no ground breaking OS enhancements... I'm not saying it's overpriced, but it was emphatically built to be a large iPod Touch.

Re:The OP forgot VAT.

[shilly]

1) There's plenty of people who would struggle to get $5k together
2) He also paid insurance premiums, and the premiums may go up and the exclusions may become more significant because of his history now
3) In the UK, he'd have paid £0 at point of need, not $2.5k or 5k
4) How do you know for sure that Duke provides better treatment? What do you mean: better outcomes? better experience? safer? all three? Where's the evidence for your assertion?

Re:But your U.S. prices do not include tax

[dangitman]

I always consider sales tax in the US to be a bit of a non-issue on things like this, since (unless I'm mistaken) avoiding it is pretty trivial, by ordering online from a distributor in another state.

Which is why pricing in the US is such an insidious trap. Displaying shelf prices as tax-free amounts to deception. And the whole "easy to avoid by buying out-of-state" is almost criminally inefficient. It encourages waste by having items shipped across the country for no good reason, resulting in more pollution.

It would be nice to see some tax reform, but I doubt that will ever happen, as people would rather exploit the loopholes than have an honest system that might cost a few bucks more (but also save a few bucks elsewhere).

Re:Prove it

[DangerFace]

From the wiki on life expectancy [wikipedia.org]:

Average lifespan at birth in the UK: 79.4 years

Average lifespan at birth in the US: 78.2 years

So, minor win for the UK's far inferior system there. Now, from the wiki on infant mortality rates [wikipedia.org]:

Infant deaths per 1000 live births / under 5's deaths per 1000 live births in the UK: 4.8 / 6.0

Infant deaths per 1000 live births / under 5's deaths per 1000 live births in the US: 6.3 / 7.8

Another one called for the Kingdom, there. Again, not a huge difference, but pretty significant if you're a parent of 1.8 out of 1000 children. So, the question seems to boil down to a choice between expensive good care or cheap effective care.