The great iPhone price gouge?

Welcome to the UK, happy land where consumer electronics cost more than almost anywhere else. It's been a feature of computers and tech that the price of an item in teh UK will not so much reflect the current GBP/USD exchange rate, as be a direct pound for dollar exchange. You pay $99 in the US, we pay £99 in the UK. So far so rippy.

Now that we are all used to this stage of affairs companies have started loading the UK price on top of this, citing exchange fluctuations and other excuses. it's a fact of life. Here are some examples, taken from one of the worst offenders, Apple that illustrate the point. Exchange rates as of today (24th July 2009 are in brackets)

iPod touch 8GB - $229 (£139) UK price £165
Mac Mini 2.0 - $599 (£364) UK price £499
MacBook - $799 (£485) UK price £749

You see how it goes. However even this sort of free cash looks small compared to the price gulf we in the UK face when looking at the new iPhones.

The iPhone 3G is now available in the US for $99. Pretty cool yes. That's a £ price of 60. Who wouldn't want one at that price. Apple would clean up. Except, here in the UK we don't pay £60. We don't even pay double the equivalent price in pounds. We don't even pay TRIPLE!! We pay £342.50 a massive hike over the US price. The 3GS fares little better, US iPhone fans pay $199 for their new phones, that's £121 british pounds. I suppose we should be thankful that we only have to pay just under 3 times this for our phones.

The current 3G is obviously just an excersie in stock clearnace and will probably not be with us for too much longer (certainly in the US). However in the UK it may be some time before Apple clear these, certainly while they insist on fleecing their UK customers to such an unforgivable extent.

That's Digital Quality

Listen to those funny old recordings of old music on those 78rpm records. laugh at how tinny they sound. Recently recordings have been unearthed of the oldest recorded sound known, from 1860.

click to hear sound

From this point on the quality of recording human sounds has increased in leaps and bounds. In the same fashion the quality of our recorded images has also improved substantially, from the early blurred and faded images through to colour taking in moving images along the way. from 186o onwards we have added colour, sound and movement, stereo, 3D, IMAX, HD TV, multi mega pixel cameras. The history of human recording is a long upward path of ever better quality. Until now that is, and strangely the death of quality is part of the modern digital age.

When the CD was introduced in the 80's audiophiles waxed long and hard over the supposed reduction in sound quality compared to their beloved LP's. In truth they had a point, but a marginal one. CD's offered audio quality that was acceptable to the vast majority of music and lovers and sales of both CD's and audio systems boomed. But can the same be said of our modern equivalent, the downloaded mp3 file.

The vast majority of mp3's come direct from the internet and, in order to speed up download times, the rate at which they are recorded is truncated. The original iTunes standard of 128Kbps (kilobits per second) has been increased to 256Kbps but both are a long way short of CD quality (320Kbps). In addition most mp3 content in consumed on portable devices via cheap headphones, while on the go.

While flat screen HD screens are becoming the norm in homes, younger consumers of video content are just s likely to watch on smaller screens, attached to laptops or even portable video devices. Streaming video content via YouTube and others is compressed to allow for download even HD movies from iTunes suffer from compression artifacts. Meanwhile back in the old fashioned word of traditional broadcasting, digital TV promises more and more channels, until bad weather cuts the signal off, resulting in freezes and drop outs in the signal that good old fashioned analogue never suffered from.

And what about photography? Surely modern mega pixel digital cameras offer good solid increases in quality. Well again, many photographers would beg to differ. Digital is certainly more convenient but it has taken until only very recently for the latest 40Mp and better digita backs to rival medium format film. Most amateur photographers will save their snaps as jpeg images, without thinking they are throwing away vast swathes of digital information and dumbing down their images. More savvy snappers may keep files in RAW format, but again loose quality when they convert to 16bit in photoshop, and that's before we look at uploading files to Flickr and similar for sharing.

The merging of TV and internet looks like it will only increase the move to lower quality content. While most people automatically equate the word digital with quality, what they actually mean is convenience. The digital age has resulted in an explosion of content and the ability to share this content and view it anywhere and any time. But almost always at a severe price in terms of quality. Digital content is not so much high quality, or even good quality but almost always good enough quality. Content trumps quality pretty much ever time, especially for younger consumers.

Many years useful service

Mac users can often be heard to remark how reliable their Macs can be, and how much longer a Mac can last doing useful work compared to a PC. Certainly I see a significant number of clients that are quite happy with their older hardware. Mostly this translates into G4 towers, which are the Abrams tanks of the Mac world; heavy but basically indestructible. They may not set the world alight but they get the job ( mostly dtp in publishing) done. As well as G4 towers I see plenty of G4 laptops as well as a smattering of G3's including a couple of clamshell iBooks that their owners wouldn't swap for anything else.

Software seems to get upgraded more regularly, well it does cost less than a new Mac. It's rare that I see anything older than 10.4, and on the rare occasions I come across machines running 10.3, we soon get that sorted.

Sometimes however somethng comes along out of the blue. On Friday I got a call from a local engineering company whose Mac was playing up. Expecting to find an office iMac I was surprised to be ushered into the main workshop and pointed towards a large sheet metal machine (a Strippet to be exact). Next to the machine was a control station, and upon opening it up, the Mac controlling it was revealed. A Mac IIcx, running System 6. Happy in it's isolated existance this Mac had been controlling the Strippet every day for over 20 years before finally sucumbing to a logic board fault that caused it to shut down after 5 minutes.

The control software for the Strippet was written specifically for System 6, so no upgrade is possible. As a result the hunt is on for a replacement IIcx.



While diagnosing the fault it became apparent that System 6, while ancient, exhibited one major advantage over OS X. From pressing the power key to the Strippet software being up and running was less than 10 seconds. With multiple restarts, testing under OS X would have been tedious in the extreme. OK so the whole OS was contained within 2Mb of RAM (the Mac had 5Mb in total), but the black and white icons of System 6 were a real trip down memory lane.



Next time I'm tempted to wish my current MacBook Pro into an early grave I will remember all those tired old IIcx's around the world, still giving excellent serice as they approach 25 years of age.