The Site With the Lamp

May 18, 2006

Finally, after long last Apple has released a usable and affordable notebook. Sure the ibook was affordable in comparision to the other macs, heck it's even cheaper than powerbook desktop but heck it was obsolete for a long time.

In spite of that I nearly bought one early last year but fortunatley didn't, primarily because the salesman at the local mac dealership in Sri Lanka was pretty annoying. The new Macbook hasn't arrived in Sri Lanka just yet, they don't expect it to get hear until late June. Too bad, had it been available, I might have made an impulsive purchase yesterday, now that I have time to reflect I might not buy it after all.

The Macbook in US costs about Rs 113,000 at current exchange rates, the Apple Singapore has it for around Rs 124,000 (8 day wait), the local agents expect their selling price to be around Rs 150,000 thousand. If you add the cost of a return ticket to Singapore to the price of the Macbook in that country you can arrive at the 150k figure. It's almost like they have priced it to maximisze profit while while ensuring that people don't actually visit Sing, to buy it cheaper there.

So the only reason that I am reluctant to buy a Macbook is because I don't want someone to make an outrageous profit on it. Surely apple provides significant discounts to their dealersm it would be acceptable if they marked it up by a few thousand rupees but Rs 40,000? heck, you can buy a cheap desktop machine for that much.