26 Jun
2007
26 Jun
'07
3:03 p.m.
On 26/06/07, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Liam Proven wrote:
/OHHHHHHHHHH/ yes!
We knew, all right.
In the late 1980s, there were companies who, if you wanted a new Apple
Mac, sold them to order. The chap would go buy a return air ticket to
NYC, fly over, walk into a high street store and buy a Mac, go out for
dinner, then fly home with it sitting in the hold (minus packaging
etc. so it looked "used"), then deliver it to you.
Their prices were cheaper than buying from Apple UK, and including his
airfare and transport to/from the airport at both ends and the meal,
he could turn a decent profit.
And what really sucks is that the same sort of price differential
still holds on some kit and on a lot of software.
This is perhaps a reason why Linux and FOSS took off in Europe in a
way that it didn't in the USA. Here, if you were poor, once you'd
bought the PC, you had no money left for software!
Many of the big key bits of the modern Linux desktop came from the EU.
The Linux kernel itself is Finnish, SUSE, KDE and OpenOffice are
German, Mandriva French and so on.
--
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Well, the way it worked from when I was in my
teens (mid-1980s) until
fairly recently was, to convert a US price to a UK one, take off the $
sign and replace it with a ? sign. It still happens today.
Therefore, prices in UK were/are? 2 to 3 times the price in US.
For a UK kid with limited funds, that sucks.