Why Pay More?

The Australian government is finalising the terms of an inquiry which will look at why we seem to pay more for hardware, software and downloads than other parts of the world. Even taking into account the relative strength of the Australian Dollar against its US counterpart, we pay around 10% more for Apple hardware, for example, 67% more for some iTunes downloads and a whopping 75% more for some versions of the Windows operating system.

The aim of the inquiry is to force companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Adobe to explain why their global pricing strategy leaves Australians paying more for their products than people in the US or UK. There are suggestions that it is due to Australia being a small, isolated market, which would certainly cover physical products to some extent, but it doesn't really account for the cost of downloads which can, and should be, mostly unaffected by geography.

You can read more about it HERE

Business IT did a 'shopping basket' comparison a couple of months ago, and you can read the results HERE.