Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday I will replace my ageing desktop computer. Since I don’t have a need for desktops any longer, I’d probably consider a second laptop. After pointing my browser to Apple.ca, I selected a Mac Book Pro configuration that I think would suit my needs:
- Firefox, Adium, BitTorrent, iTunes, yada yada
- Apache, PHP, Python, Ruby, MySQL and PostgreSql
- Microsoft Office or OpenOffice
- Boot Camp (or VMWare Fusion with another 2GB of RAM) running Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005
The resulting Mac Book Pro has:
- Mac OS X Leopard
- 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
- 120GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
- SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
- 15-inch Widescreen Display – not the glossy one
- Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS – U.S. English
- Accessory Kit
- AppleCare
The damage would be $2,598.00 CAD.
The price seemed a bit too high for my tastes, so I ventured over to Apple.com to configure an identical laptop. $2,348.00 USD would get me a laptop that is exactly like the previous one that I configured on Apple.ca.
Since the Canadian dollar is a juggernaut and the US dollar is in free fall at the moment, purchasing the laptop on Apple’s US online store should be a no-brainer, one would think.
$1 CAD = $1.03 USD. Therefore paying $2,348 USD dollars in Canadian dollars would only set me back $2,271.43 CAD. It would be almost $330 CAD cheaper for me to buy the laptop from Apple’s US online store in Canadian dollars! Would I? Of course! Can I? Not a chance, since Apple won’t allow users to shop at another country’s store.
Apple isn’t the only one to blame. Hey book publishers, consumer electronics manufacturers, car companies, greeting card companies! www.xe.com – USE IT and adjust accordingly!
