As Apple gears up to announce the iPad’s local pricing the Aussie dollar plummets to under US88c, and Web stats indicate at least one in ten iPads sold in the US are used overseas.
Monday can’t come soon enough for local Apple fans. That’s when Apple Australia, along with the rest of its non-US cousins, will announce its iPad pricing and begin taking pre-orders ahead of the late May release.
But with the Aussie dollar slumping overnight to below US88c, punters are already wondering what effect will this have on the iPad’s price? Will this add to the expected sticker shock?
Fortunately Apple, like most companies, places its buy orders well in advance and uses ‘hedging’ to lock in an expected exchange rate and minimise the impact of currency fluctuations.
So whatever prices Apple has already set internally should remain in place for Monday, although of course there’s nothing to stop Apple from bumping them up a little while nobody is looking.
Previous indications have pegged the iPad to start at $649 for the 16GB Wi-Fi model and $819 for the 16GB 3G model, possibly stretching as high as $1,099 for the flagship 64GB 3G edition.
Meanwhile, the
extended delay in releasing the iPad outside the US has created a thriving ‘private import’ market among
Apple fans and the digerati.
Yahoo reports that based on the browser identification tags and IP addresses of visits to yahoo.com, one in ten iPad users are located outside the US.
“The iPad has only been available for purchase in the US market” writes Ashley Cheng on the
Yahoo Mobile blog, “however, we observe approximately 10% of IP traffic coming from Europe and Asia Pacific. Specifically the UK, France, and Germany are the top countries in Europe, and Taiwan and Hong Kong make up the most traffic in Asia Pacific.”
(We expect this figure is actually higher, as Yahoo is a much stronger brand and destination in the US than many other countries – we’d bet that many non-US iPadders have never even visited Yahoo from their magical and revolutionary device).