Apple's Yen Surcharge

It's always interesting to see what Apple comes up with for Japanese pricing. The yen's been strenghening against the dollar,and one always hopes for prices that reflect the current exchange rate. What prices reflect is a 13 to 14% premium across the MacBook line for Japanese consumers. The situation is a little better for education buyers, with the bargain being the 24" LCD display at 4 bucks off the U.S. retail price. The Apple Tax is a bunch of crap, especially in light of the Vista Tax or the MS Office Tax, but Apple is definitely sweetening its profit margins with what it makes off the dollar-yen exchange rate.

U.S - Japan Apple Store Price Comparisons (1 dollar - 101.40 yen)

Model	U.S.	Japan	Japan Edu.
MacBook 2.0 GHz	$1299	$1467	$1407
MacBook 2.4 GHz	$1599	$1822	$1702
MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz	$1999	$2254	$2157
MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz	$2499	$2846	$2611
24" LED Display	$899	$940	$ 895

Apple Goes Cheap

Dan Reisinger at CNET recently wrote about the possibility of Apple competing with PC makers on price with the rumored $800 MacBook. The truth is that Apple computers are just as cheap as their Windows counterparts when compared feature to feature. If you want to try this at home, head over to the Dell site and configure a notebook using the specs off the MacBook or MacBook Pro. Every time I've tried this the Apple computers come off about equal, or even cheaper, in price. 

What Apple hasn't done is compete in the lower-priced segment of the market. They don't have models to compare with anything in the sub-$1000 market, let alone the $350 to $500 netbooks like the  ASUS Eee PC, or the Dell Inspiron 9. The lure comparatively cheap notebook with OSX and the usual Apple good looks should make for increased notebook sales, albeit at slimmer profit margins.

I finally get a Mac

In the waning days of December I finally got around to replacing the light above our dining room table. It only took me a couple of months to get around to it. This required turning off the electricity and rewiring the fixture. I was careful to make sure that all computers were turned off and unplugged before I started flicking breaker switches to determine what breaker would cut off the electricity to the kitchen-dining area.

Putting up the new light fixture was easier than expected, but when I ran upstairs to plug in my wife's Mac Mini, and disaster hit. The Mini made a cheap, scratching sound, beeped 3 times, and played dead. I rebooted and got the same response--no reaction from the monitor and no soft whir from a spinning hard drive. I turned on the Windows computer and learned that the scratching sound was described as the sound of breaking glass, and that 3 beeps signified some sort of memory problem.

I didn't see how my electrical project could have deep-sized the Mini. My wife came home and told me that the Mini had failed to boot up when she had turned it on that morning. I put the computer back in its box and we headed on down to a computer store that specializes in Apple products. The service guy tried to boot up the Mini using various keyboard combinations and got the same results I had. He shook his head and told us he'd need time to diagnose the problem, and that if he couldn't figure out what was wrong, he'd send it to the Apple store in Osaka. It would all take time and possibly money. If it had to go to the Apple store, repairs would be expensive, and it might not cost that much more to buy a new, improved Mac Mini. My wife had wandered off and was looking at Macbooks. She really wanted a laptop, she told me. It would come in handy when we traveled and she could use it in different rooms in the house. She needed a computer.

It was Christmas. The Leopard release was not going to be announced at MacWorld. We drove down to Kojima Denki and priced the mid-range Macbook. The price they quoted was the same as I'd get at the online Apple store using my educational discount. And they threw in a 5-year guarantee. We took the Macbook home that night.

After waiting a couple of weeks, we called back to inquire about the Mac Mini. The service guy was out. He finally called the next day and said the Mini was fine. Dust had clogged up the interior and cooling ducts. Now the computer booted up just fine and we could pick it up any time for a repair charge of 500o yen. My wife told me I could have the Mac Mini. I asked the service guy to upgrade the memory to 1GB and looked forward to a Mac intensive 2007.

Update: My wife likes the 19 inch Samsung monitor that goes with the Mini, meaning I get my share of quality time with the Macbook. Tiger and the Intel Core 2 Duo do make a difference.

Two Rules

Buying a MacBook, however pleasurable, would have violated two of my computer-purchasing rules. Rules that were hard-learned, and go against my natural inclination to chase after whatever enhancement or upgrade that comes down the line. Rule No. 1, of course, is to never upgrade--don't even think about it--until you absolutely have to. What is cutting edge today will not be so tomorrow. Even as I was eying that MacBook at Yamada Denki, a small voice was saying, "Wait for the Core 2 Duo version." Yes, I thought, and might the next version include a larger hard drive, or SuperDrives in all models? This brought to mind Rule No. 2: Never ever upgrade when a new OS version is about to be released. OK, "about" is a relative term, but Leopard should be here by spring, and I'd rather have it pre-installed in my new Mac rather than having to shell out extra yen for an upgrade. So I'll wait and use the Mac Mini when I can pry it away from wife and child.

Need more rules for deciding when to Apple products? Here's 10 more from iLounge.

I almost buy a MacBook

We have about 4 cleanup actvities in our neighborhood each year which revolve around pulling weeds, cleaning ditches, and reclaiming the park from the forces of nature. These are common in Japan, and in theory I'm all for it. What's not to like about getting together with the neighbors to clean things up in a spirit of shared responisibility? In practice, though, there's never a good time for neighborhood cleaning. Yesterday's road-cleanup event was no excepton. Since I work Saturdays, I was loathe to drag my ass out of bed early Sunday and join the work gang in front of the community center building at 8 a.m. My wife offered to go, but one of her old friends was in town from Kyoto, so I told her I'd go and started praying for rain, major rain, as the farmers our area seem to work in anything short of a full-bore typhoon.

So what does this have to with a MacBook? My prayers were answered with a torrential thunderstorm; cleanup was cancelled; I went back to bed, had a leisurely breakfast of apple pancakes and soon found myself at Yamada Denki, an electronics chain, where I roamed the aisles in search of a USB wireless network adaptor. My old adapter had gone belly-up, and I wanted to get my computer back on our home network and connected to the Internet.

I was just about to pick up a replacement, when my wife came up and excitedly told me that a massive computer sale was in progress--why waste money on an adapter when we could save big and replace my aging computer with one with built-in wireless networking? She led me past some of the latest offerings from Sony and Fujitsu and lo, Yamada Denki was selling Apple computers again. There was an iMac next to a couple of MacBooks. Stranger still, one of the MacBooks was running Windows XP. Pamphlets explaining how to use Bootcamp were available in quantity.

Here's the deal. The good folks at Yamada Denki were selling the MacBook for the same price as the Japanese Apple Store, but Yahoo! BB (broadband to you and me), would give you a 25,000 yen discount if you switched to them for your Internet provider. Throw in Yamada Denki's liberal trade-in offer and it looked like we could jettison the old computer and take a new MacBook home for something south of 100,000 yen.

My wife, in her role of Minister of Finance, gazed at the MacBook. She evaluated its sleek white form and the 13.1 inch screen. She had wanted something with a built-in TV tuner. I explained that it was half the weight of my present laptop, that it could travel with us, that I could use it at work and home. It would join her Mac Mini on our home network and all would be sweetness and light.

My wife had bigger plans, the consolidation of Internet, TV and telephony under the Yahoo! Japan banner. Yes the MacBook was an attractive machine, and the price was right, but Yamada Denki would take our old computer, saving us the 3000 yen recycling fee. We could dump NTT and use Yahoo! BB for our provider. Yahoo! BB also offered TV over IP and VOIP; we could get Internet access, the phone, and TV all through the fiber cable and save additional yen by dumping SkyPerfect, satellite TV service. Once we were hooked up with Yahoo, we could call fellow Yahoo! BB members all over Japan for free. Most of people my wife calls are on Yahoo! BB.

All that was left to do was to run downstairs, talk to the Yahoo rep, and confirm that we could be hooked up and I would be going home with a new MacBook. She made a quick call. I took my son the the bathroom. When I got back my wife was in the midst of a long talk with the woman representing Yahoo! Japan. Alas, we were outside the Yahoo! area. Only barely--by two blocks, but the we'll bring cable to your doorstep campaign was over. Yahoo had no plans to head up the hill towards our house. She advised us to wait patiently and call back regularly to see when Yahoo! would absorb us into the network.

So, I went home without a MacBook, but I didn't feel too bad about it. In the next post I'll tell you why.