I’m not surprised at all about the price point Apple selected for TV programmes on iTunes Music Store. (If you didn’t know yet, Apple just opened TV programmes section; £1.89 per episode compared to $1.99 in the US.)
There are two main reasons for this:
1) Average person in the UK earns hell of a lot more than average person in the US. I mean, just look at the minimum wages: $5.85 compared to £5.35. (see footnote on the conspiracy minimum wage)
2) We in the UK have been waiting for this for years and are likely to go mad from finally being able to pay for downloadable TV shows. We’re going to flock to the iTMS and click buy Buy BUY. In order for the tubes to carry this mass of information across the Atlantic, they (the tubes) had to be cooled to near 0 degrees Kelvin. That was really expensive. This may, or may not, have been the reason for lack of trust in the US mortgage market in the recent weeks. Too many men moving to work on ships off the coast, thus abandoning their families inland.
Surprised? I’m not. The Americans have every right and reason to fuck us over for goods coming from there to here. After all, we did fuck them over few hundreds of years ago.
–kristian
footnote: If you take the UK minimum wage (5.35) and divide it with the US minimum wage (5.85)you’ll get get 0.91. If you now multiply that with US TV show price (1.99), you’ll get 1.81, which is quite close to the UK TV show price, rounded up, nothing else. Funnily enough, this works with the Adobe CS3 Design Premium pricing, too. Take the US price 1684.99, multiply with 0.91. And what do you get? 1533.34! Which, again, is really close to the UK price of £1594.00. Freaky.
[...] Then again, they couldn’t have sent the invites earlier as that would have taken away from the other little event they had last week. Some people, other than only yours truly, might have also then figured out the real reason behind Apple’s decision on dropping the iPhone price in the U.S. Do you want to know what the reason was? If they hadn’t dropped the price last week, U.S. customers would have gotten pissed off for the fact that you’ll be able to get it for less than £150 (300 buckaroos) in the U.K in two months time. I’m definite that this will be the case. Don’t try to argue. This, of course, totally reverse of the trend they have with other pricing points they use (as you can see here). [...]