The blogosphere and twitterverse have been dominated today by Steve Job's Macworld Keynote. Lots of speculation and anticipation beforehand, including several versions of the leaked speech. The event itself was more notable (to me anyway) for the traffic it generated, causing several well known blogs to creak and splutter under the load, and Twitter essentially went down for a few hours as it failed to cope with the pressure.
Anyhoo - the big news for me was the announcement of the Macbook Air - a lovely and incredibly thin laptop. Unfortunately, with tech hotness comes an associated price - starting at $1799 in the US and £1199 inc VAT here in the UK. Sharp intakes of breath as Macheads struggled to reconcile tech-lust with a price that was several hundred of dollars higher than the pre-keynote rumours. The pricing differential between the US and UK also came up in quite a few conversations - so I decided to work out what the cost difference really was.
Google Spreadsheets came to my aid - so here's a table showing the true cost difference - which for me means stripping out UK VAT - in the US sales tax is never mentioned or shown - it's like the dirty secret of American retail that only bites you when you come to pay at the cash till !
So - as can be seen - there isn't actually that much of a difference - if, and it's a big if, you're VAT registered. Add in the US sales tax, and the chances are that you'd actually pay more in the US than you would in the UK.
Leave a comment