rip off britain | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Wed, 19 Feb 2014 20:49:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png rip off britain | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 Adobe still leads the way in Rip Off Britain scores https://www.kitguru.net/professional/design-create/jules/adobe-still-leads-the-way-in-rip-off-britain-scores/ https://www.kitguru.net/professional/design-create/jules/adobe-still-leads-the-way-in-rip-off-britain-scores/#comments Sun, 01 Dec 2013 10:52:54 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=165199 After running this morning's story about Crucial's inexplicable $50 bump for an SSD drive price when it gets sold to Brits, we got a timely reminder that there is one company that rips hard and faster than anyone else in this industry. KitGuru checks the sums before declaring Adobe the winner. While Crucial can try …

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After running this morning's story about Crucial's inexplicable $50 bump for an SSD drive price when it gets sold to Brits, we got a timely reminder that there is one company that rips hard and faster than anyone else in this industry. KitGuru checks the sums before declaring Adobe the winner.

While Crucial can try to claim that shipping etc might make a couple of dollars difference to the price of its drives in one part of the world or another, the ‘download pricing option' from Adobe means that not even that defence is available.

Maybe it's the cost of providing software in a different language?

Nope – no luck there. When the Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, they are carrying on a tradition from England in the 1500s – and they do it in English.

KitGuru has tried – and failed – to find a logical reason why Adobe software should be even $1 more expensive in the UK than it is in the USA.

The differences are WAY more than the sales taxes of any modern government, so we have focused on the numbers presented by Adobe on its various sites – for DOWNLOAD VERSIONS ONLY – so there are no material/postage costs.

Here's the comparison:-

Numbers will fluctuate +/- 20% with various taxes etc, but the differences here are WAY outside even that kind of movement. Impossible to explain.
Numbers will fluctuate +/- 20% with various taxes etc, but the differences here are WAY outside even that kind of movement.  They are impossible to explain.

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KitGuru says: It's lucky that Adobe doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of content creation software. Oh. Wait.

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Crucial SSD pricing confirms Rip Off Britain continues https://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/jules/crucial-ssd-pricing-confirms-rip-off-britain-continues/ Sun, 01 Dec 2013 09:40:40 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=165181 Many SSD manufacturers have to buy components through multiple vendors before they are able to sell the final unit to you, the customer. Companies with fewer ‘steps' should show ‘purer' pricing – less inclined to be impacted by a multitude of component price moves. KitGuru puts Crucial's latest offer on Amazon under the margin-microscope. The …

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Many SSD manufacturers have to buy components through multiple vendors before they are able to sell the final unit to you, the customer. Companies with fewer ‘steps' should show ‘purer' pricing – less inclined to be impacted by a multitude of component price moves. KitGuru puts Crucial's latest offer on Amazon under the margin-microscope.

The companies with the biggest advantage in the memory markets are those with the closest ties to manufacturing.

Line up the industry giants here (in size order) and you get Samsung, Toshiba, Hynix, Micron and Intel – pretty serious organisations.

Within one of these, lies greater granularity.

In addition to the company name itself, Micron also sells its products as Crucial and Lexar (it also partnered with Intel on another project to make NAND in Israel, but was not able to make it work as planned and it was subsequently saved by Intel – hence Intel's name on the NAND leader board).

So when Crucial sells a drive, it is doing so as a ‘genuine manufacturer' – part of the fourth largest producer of memory chips in the world – and so there very few costs being slipped in by 3rd parties.

With the offer being as ‘pure' as you can reasonably get, KitGuru asks the question, “So if you wanted a Crucial M500 960GB drive from Amazon in the UK or USA, what would the price difference be?”

Amazon claims to have taken a chunk off the price of this drive in the UK, so why is it still over $50 more than in the USA?

Even when you account for the currency exchange rate and UK sales tax, the result is disappointing for a global economy
Even when you account for the currency exchange rate and UK sales tax, the result is disappointing for a global economy where there are no obvious additional costs to take into account. But who is to blame?

.KitGuru says: Manufacturers have a lot of control over what prices arrive in the channel. We wish IT pricing was more competitive in the UK for 2014.

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