On Friday, Apple (along with Microsoft and Adobe) will front the Federal Australian Parliament’s inquiry into IT Pricing. You may recall that after failing to voluntarily appear, the committee in February of this year summonsed the three, effectively forcing them to appear. Given Apple’s appearance, I wanted to take a closer look to see what Apple actually charges for their products (both hardware and media from their iTunes and App Stores) and see how it compares to the US.

Methodology

Doing this kind of analysis can be fairly contentious given there are a few ways to do it, various assumptions you have to make, and different ways of presenting the information. To be clear, here is how I have constructed the data presented in the graphs in this article.

• I collected from Apple’s website, the Australian and US prices of all their key products and main models (but not built-to-order models).
• GST is removed from Australian price: The Australian price includes a 10% GST (goods and services tax), so I removed that from the Australian price because US prices do not include a sales tax, that is added at checkout based on which US state the customer is from (sales taxes varies across US states).
• Now that both prices don’t include sales taxes, I convert the Australian price from Australian dollars (AUD) to US dollars (USD). I use a 3 month average of the exchange rate. The 3 month average smoothes out any temporary peaks or troughs in the exchange rate and gives Apple a fairly lengthy period of time to alter prices if there was a significant change in the exchange rate.
• This now gives me the price of the Australian good in USD and without GST, a figure that can now be compared with the US price. So I calculate the percentage markup of the Australian price based on the original US price.
• NOTE: Methodology for the Media calculations do vary a bit, read the notes I include with them.
• I encourage you to scrutinise my calculations by taking a look at the Excel document I created, linked below.

Apple has on three seperate occasions announced that the iPhone 5 will have the fastest international rollout of any iPhone ever – at the announcement keynote, during the Q4 earnings call, and in their press release announcing opening weekend sales of the iPhone 5 in China. The claim was, no doubt, meant to impress investors, press and the general public, but I was curious as to how fast it really was compared to previous iPhone rollouts. So I decided to track down the launch schedules of all the iPhones to date and then again with the iPad. In the end I found a few trends, some oddities and that Apple’s claim was (mostly) true.

iPhone 5 will be available in more than 100 countries by the end of December, making it the fastest iPhone rollout ever.

- Apple Press Release

(more…)

With a press release, Apple has just announced that the iPhone 4S will be launching in 15 additional countries on November 11, including Hong Kong and South Korea. The iPhone 4S launched in seven initial countries on October 14th, followed by 22 other countries on October 28th. The full list of November 11 launch countries includes Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania and South Korea, and Apple has once again confirmed that the device will be available in 70 countries by the end of 2011.

Apple today announced that iPhone® 4S, the most amazing iPhone yet, will be available in Hong Kong, South Korea and 13 additional countries on Friday, November 11. Customers will be able to pre-order iPhone 4S beginning on Friday, November 4.*

iPhone 4S is packed with incredible new features including Apple’s dual-core A5 chip for blazing fast performance and stunning graphics; an all new camera with advanced optics; full 1080p HD resolution video recording; and Siri™, an intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.

Beginning Friday, November 11, iPhone 4S will be available in Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania and South Korea. iPhone 4S is available today in 29 countries around the world and will be available in more than 70 countries by the end of the year.

iPhone 4S comes in either black or white for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 16GB model, $299 (US) for the 32GB model and $399 (US) for the new 64GB model.** iPhone 4S is sold through the Apple Online Store, Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers. iPhone 4 is available for just $99 (US) and iPhone 3GS is available for free with a two year contract from participating carriers.

*Pre-orders not available in Albania, El Salvador, Guatemala, Malta, Montenegro and Panama.

The iPhone 4S has been a sales success for Apple so far, generating over 4 million sales in the first three days of availability with several Apple Stores sold out of units both in the United States and Europe. At the Q4 2011 earnings call, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said they were extremely pleased with the initial reaction of the iPhone 4S, noting that the company has enough supply to meet demand for the holiday quarter, which Apple expects to be its biggest quarter ever.

Nearly eight months after 90-second song previews started rolling out on the US  iTunes Store, Apple have today started transitioning a number of international iTunes stores over to the 90-second previews, a vast improvement on the 30-second previews. Currently we’ve noticed that the iTunes stores in Australia, UK, Canada, New Zealand and France and a handful of other European stores.

However, despite the beginning of this international rollout there are still a lot of songs that haven’t transitioned to 90-second previews – looking at the top 10 songs on iTunes in Australia found just half now have the longer preview period. For comparison all top 10 songs in the US have the 90-second preview, although keep in mind that not all the 10 songs were the same in the two stores.

That difference could just be because Apple has only just started to transition to 90-second previews in the international stores or because licensing deals are (as is very typical) delaying the transition to longer previews.  Nonetheless international iTunes users will no doubt welcome this change that has been awaited for quite some time.

[Via MacRumors, 9to5 Mac]

Last month we reported that the BBC was preparing to launch its iPad video-on-demand service iPlayer internationally for a fee under $10 by the end of the year. That day has come with the BBC today (Thursday, July 28) launching the iPlayer iPad app in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.

Some iPlayer content will be available for free, but for full access users will need to pay either €6.99 a month or €49.99 a year. The program’s director spoke with The Guardian about the launch and reinforced previous statements by noting that the international version of iPlayer is a video-on-demand service, not a catch-up service as it is in the UK (primarily). The catalogue will include popular shows such as Top Gear and Doctor Who but will also offer a deep catalogue of shows that the BBC has aired over the past decades. At launch that catalogue is roughly contains roughly 1,500 hours of content – the BBC says it aims to add another 100 hours to that each week.

“What we’re trying to test in the pilot is the ability to drive exploration and discovery through a programming approach rather than an algorithm-based approach,” said Bradley-Jones. “We’re not trying to compete against a Netflix or a Hulu. This has to be tailored and hand-crafted, so we can create a tone of voice.”

Unlike the UK version of the app that was released earlier this year, the international version allows users to stream shows over 3G and even pre-download (cache) shows that they want to watch later, helpful for downloading a bunch of shows for a trip. For that feature they worked closely with Apple due to problems with iPad’s auto-sleep functionality interrupting downloads – ultimately Apple was happy with the app disabling the iPad’s ability to sleep whilst downloading shows.

If you don’t live in one of those 11 Western European countries that today got access, don’t stress because the BBC is going to continue to launch the iPlayer iPad app in further countries this year. In particular, Australia, Canada and the United States (the BBC notes it will probably charge around $7.99, roughly comparable with Hulu and Netflix) will see the iPlayer iPad app by the end of the year.

[The Guardian via The Next Web]

We reported earlier today on news that Apple is preparing to undertake maintenance work on iTunes Connect today from 9am to 4pm PDT. Although we cannot confirm anything, we think there is (strong) reason to believe that this maintenance is being undertaken to rebalance iTunes prices internationally which over the past year have (to be quite honest) spiralled out of control. The above diagram illustrates this fact quite clearly and it also exists for Apps and other iTunes content. Yes, that’s right, there is an 81% surcharge for an Australian buying the same song as an American and those in Switzerland have to pay more than double at a 105% surcharge.

My thinking of this occurring started last Friday when Australian politician, Ed Husic, tweeted that Apple will “be getting back to me in mid July” regarding issues he had raised about (Australian) Apple pricing in Federal Parliament back in March. Now whilst he did (mostly) focus on hardware disparities in his speech, I still felt (on Friday) that Apple’s response could be about “re-calibrating” the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ – mostly because the Australian dollar has been sitting around US$1.03 whereas the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ expects it to average at US$0.60.

Fast-forward to today’s news that iTunes Connect is facing maintenance. If you read the notice, it makes it clear that something is happening to the price mechanism, as the letter reads: “pricing changes made between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. PDT will cause the app to become unavailable for purchase until maintenance is complete”.

Whilst that alone doesn’t suggest much, the fact that the notice explicitly mentions that customers may not be able to purchase content from iTunes if in Mexico, U.K., Australia, Switzerland, Japan or Norway really stood out to me. Because (with the exception of Mexico), those mentioned are (mostly) the worst affected regions of the iTunes price disparity – just look at the above or below graphs. Whilst Mexico is the opposite, they have actually been able to purchase content at cheaper than US customers.

To be absolutely clear, I re-iterate that we have no inside knowledge that this is the definite reason for the maintenance today. But the dots (if you will) just all connect: disparity has gotten ridiculous, Ed Husic’s tweet, it being mid-July, the affected portions of iTunes Connect and the regions affected. Nonetheless if by the end of today there isn’t a change, I think it’s still safe to say that Apple will inevitably act and I think that will be sooner than later.

You can read more about this global iTunes price disparity in this article we published in January.

When I reviewed the first version of Shine, a simple weather app for the iPhone, I noted how it was backed by a beautiful interface design but full international support was nowhere to be seen. The app looked great, but I couldn’t get forecasts and wind speeds to display correctly in Italy. Most of the times, they just weren’t there — clearly, Shine was aimed at US iPhone users looking for a neat weather solution.

After the release of iOS 5 beta and the introduction of the weather widget in Notification Center, I didn’t stop looking for great weather apps that would keep me updated on my favorite locations for the summer. After all, my town is only 45 minutes away from the beach and I like to check on weather conditions before I drive there. Shine 2.0, released today, finally allows me to use the app in a reliable way thanks to proper support for international countries. I can’t check on every single country in Europe (or worldwide, for that matter) but I can say that it seems to be working just fine in Italy. I can see current conditions, forecasts (whose UI has been tweaked to offer more detailed info) and wind speeds; data matches with weather info provided by other Italian websites and weather services.

Shine 2.0 won’t change anything if you’ve been using the app in the United States, but it finally allows people overseas to check on weather using this beautiful app they bought last month. You can download Shine at $0.99 from the App Store.

In what is a big morning for Apple Press Releases, Apple has additionally confirmed that the WiFi editions of the iPad 2 will be launching in 12 more countries this week including Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore. Japan will begin this next phase of the iPad 2 international launches, after being delayed for a month, launching the iPad 2 tomorrow on April 28.

The other eleven countries, including Hong Kong, India, Israel, Korea, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and UAE will begin selling the WiFi editions of the iPad 2 starting on April 29, this Friday. China will also get the WiFi iPad 2s next week starting May 6th. In all the countries it will be available, as always, in Apple Retail stores, Authorised resellers and online (starting at 1AM).

There is no word on why it is only the WiFi editions of the iPad 2 launching but one would suspect supply constraints, and Apple is promising further international launches of the iPad 2 in the future.

This morning we noticed the Apple TV was finally available in Italy and Switzerland. As noted by 9to5mac, though, the device will likely launch soon in seven more countries, maybe even tomorrow, as international Apple Stores are returning the same errors the Italian and Swiss ones were returning when the Apple TV wasn’t available last night:

We checked out all the Apple online stores to replicate what happened in Italy and Switzerland and sure enough Taiwan, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Portugal, The Netherlands and Belgium are all displaying the same error message. What does this mean? It means that Apple’s second-generation Apple TV will be launching in those countries very soon, probably tomorrow, and maybe some HD movie rentals in iTunes as well.

We don’t know if the Apple Tv is ready just yet to appear in more countries, but surely the Apple online store suggests something’s moving, and fast. The Apple TV is doing great in the US thanks to its aggressive pricing and small form factor, although the promised AirPlay streaming functionality is still nowhere to be seen.