Naiyas

timmillea said:   

What naive tosh! It is true that Apple sets prices in $US in the US. Overseas prices are based on the US prices plus local sales taxes plus a hefty margin for exchange rate variability, plus an extra profit margin, then rounded up to the next price point. 

The  example quoted by JP234 of the Mac Mini going from $699 to $599 in the US. That same Mac Mini M2 is £649 in the UK. At the current exchange rate of $1.2395/£ that is $804.43. 

Apple has always charged much higher prices outside of the US. For a high-end Mac, the difference in price will pay for a holiday to the US to buy it. 

Perhaps we should demonstrate the example drawn out above correctly as the comparative being drawn seems to imply that there is over $200 of additional profit on the UK price when it’s no where near that.

Base cost of mini: $599

This price includes no sales tax in the US. When the product comes to the UK pricing includes sales tax, but it also includes import duties. So what are these?

Import duty: ~10% adds ~$59.90

mr lizard said:

Parent hands child device with credit card linked to account, sets no child restrictions, then blames everyone and everything else when the child spends money. 

It’s Apple fault!
It’s TikTok’s fault!
It’s the TikTok creator’s fault!

It can’t possibly be my fault! 

But of course! In the age where personal responsibility has been replaced by a nanny state, it’s always someone else’s fault for not preventing your own actions from “hurting” you in some way.

And as education levels gradually fall we come ever closer to the crazy world created in the film Idiocracy.

I’m “technically” not opposed to this sort of action, forcing Apple (and by inference all others) to open up access to industry standard NFC technology to developers and other payment providers… however, there is potentially one critical flaw in the action.

It is only an antitrust violation if the NFC tech is actually industry standard. So far as I am aware, the NFC tech in an iPhone is integrated directly to the Secure Element in the SoC. It would therefore NOT be an industry standard implementation of NFC and by corollary not subject to antitrust violation legislation.

Either way, how it took 3 years to investigate something that could have been determined in less than a month tells you everything you need to know about the competency of the investigators. It is these needlessly long time lines that undermine public confidence in government of any sort.

rotateleftbyte said:

I see this as the carriers snooping on your internet activity is threatened by this. As they sell that data, they see a loss of revenue and want it banned. If that fails, they'll try increasing prices or throttling or something else.

I would tend to agree with this comment. I am based in the UK currently and my ISP is currently Vodafone. They require a user identifiable log in to access their broadband and it’s become abundantly clear over the last 6 months that they really do not like me running VPNs at all.

My employers laptop VPNs to the office - speed of the connection is capped (but not by my office or my router; I run a VPN network and I also have a few devices that will “relay” too, and I also select my own DNS servers at the connection level. All of these so called “enterprise level features” (as Vodafone support call them) result in speed / connectivity issues even on a “business line”. But use a device without any VPN / relay and the full bandwidth is available. So I’m 100% sure it’s Vodafone’s network and they will throttle any traffic that they cannot analyse and then sell the profile of to a third party.

Once my contract is up I’m moving to an ISP that doesn’t associate my connection with a username and password for access.

@OutdoorAppDeveloper ;
I recall reading that there was a drop in orders with suppliers for every iPhone in history around 3 months after initial release… it’s called the sales cycle and it happens every year.

I actually suspect, and am partially concerned, that certain APIs could become subject to usage commissions in future. There is already plenty of telemetry data that is sent to Apple from our devices and some of it is clearly around what APIs are used and how often so they know which ones to drop over time. It wouldn’t take much to modify this telemetry and add app ID information with it and merge this data into a billing system.

This would be largely transparent to the end user, just as the telemetry data is already today.