(apple)mac geek

Today’s exchange rate is R7.94 to $1. Core charge R24,000 for the 15 inch 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro (http://www.zastore.co.za/macbookpro0810.php) and it’s available from the Apple site for $1,999 (http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro).

Using the above exchange rate, $1,999 = R15,869.16. That’s a difference of R8130.84 which is 51% markup. 51%!!! Are you kidding me? This is unacceptable; I’ve sent an open email to Core asking why this is. Why do you, dear South African Apple user, think this is? And what can be done about it?

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This is an open letter to Greg Hill from Core asking him to answer a few questions. Firstly, whether Core apply 51% markup to all of their products. Secondly, if Core hope that people reading Stop Grey will really be convinced to not buy grey Apple products. And lastly, what Core is doing to engage Apple users in South Africa.

The email reads:

From: Roger Saner
Date: 31 May 2009 11:52:28 AM
To: Greg Hill
Subject: Pricing for MacBooks, StopGrey.co.za and Core’s strategy to interact with Apple users

Hi Greg

I’ve been directed to you by Rene Firsing, who gets the contact emails sent to ZA Store via the website. I’m very confused about a few things, and she said that probably only a Core Executive could answer my questions.

My first question is about prices. Today’s Rand/Dollar exchange rate is 1$ = R7.94. You charge R24,000 for the 15 inch 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro ( http://www.zastore.co.za/macbookpro0810.php ) and it’s available from the Apple site for $1,999 ( http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro )

Using the above exchange rate, $1,999 = R15,869.16. That’s a difference of R8130.84 which is 51% markup. Do you apply 51% markup to all of your products?

My second question is about Stop Grey.co.za, a website which makes no definite claims, but makes lots of hints – and uses a fair amount of scare tactics – as to what will happen to someone if they buy a grey Apple import. Do you hope that people will be convinced to buy from Core, even when they are so much more expensive than grey imports?

Core is widely perceived as a command-and-control old-style organisation who doesn’t understand that who you are is more important that what you sell. My final question is this: what is your strategy to start and continue an online conversation with Apple users in South Africa, so that you can continue upholding the good reputation Apple has, while at the same time repairing the damage Core is doing to the Apple brand?

Regards
Roger

 
[Update: No response yet. Resent to Greg on 7 June 2009.]
[Update: 702 ran a piece this morning on Cool Apple Buddies in Sandton. While nothing to do with Core, it's all Apple, and since Core claim to be the official Apple people in South Africa, it would be prudent for them to response. I resent this open letter to Greg today, 15 June 2009.]
[Update: resent 22 June 2009. Have confirmed with Core that Greg is indeed the person to send this email to, and that I have his correct address. Greg must be really busy.]
[Update: resent 1 July 2009. Deafening silence.]
[Update: resent 16 July 2009.]

Comments(89)

I’m currently at the Net Prophet conference listening to some fine minds reaching into the future of the connected sphere in South Africa over the next 10 years. Since so many people here are familiar with e-commerce, I’m posing a question to the dev AND marketing minds here.

I’ve developed a few e-commerce websites for South African clients, and each time I go through the same process with them. To get to the point where it’s possible to sell products online, you need:

• A business plan to show to a bank where you will
• apply for a merchant account.

This means you’re paying something around R200 a month so that you can accept credit card payments…AND per-transaction fees of around 5-8%. Not that you’ve accepted any payments yet, but you have the capability. Then you need a payment gateway, which you’ll typically pay around R100 a month for, and you’ll also pay a per-transaction fee, either a set fee or a percentage.

Once all this is done, it’s time to set up a website with a shopping cart, and start selling. The costs look like this:

• R200/month for the merchant account, plus 5-8% transaction fee.
• R100/month for a payment gateway, plus per-transaction fees.
• Monthly website hosting fees, say around R100/month.

Total monthly costs: R400 plus per-transaction fees.

So before we even get to the website design and development costs, we’re looking at R400/month. Obviously people moving small volumes of product can’t spend R400 a month to do this, which is why most SME’s don’t have e-commerce sites.

A great solution is to have PayPal active in South Africa, but they’re not going to do that any time soon, or probably ever. Since I’m a drupal developer, I posted a thread on groups.drupal.org (which has grown quite a lot) to ask what payment gateways people use, and pretty much heard the same story.

So, 2 questions:

• Is getting a merchant account the only way of accepting credit card payments online, if you’re a South African?
• If so, is there an easier and more cost-effective way of doing this>

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I’m a Mac user who loves the world of Unix software. I can’t live without wget, lynx and the GD2 library (for resizing images in drupal).

However, these packages aren’t natively available on Mac. No problem! I have 2 options: Fink or Macports.

I’ve used Fink for over 4 years and by and large have been happy with it. Just last week I was chatting to caktux in the #drupal channel on irc.freenode.net (my Mac irc client is Colloquy – because I can’t find anything better) and he convinced me to start using subversion to manage my drupal module code. No problem, I fired up Fink…and found a horribly outdated version of svn. Not even the “latest unstable” version was close to what it should have been.

Twice in the last 2 weeks I’ve had people tell me that they prefer MacPorts: caktux and Adrian Rossouw. So I decided to uninstall Fink (by opening Fink Commander, selecting all packages, and making sure that both source and binary installs were removed, and then removing the /sw folder) and install MacPorts, which is painless.

wget and lynx were quickly available (sudo port install wget and sudo port install lynx) but GD2 was another story. I got the same error under MacPorts that I got while attempting to install GNUcash under Fink. Compliation exited with this error:

/usr/bin/gcc-4.0 -o hacklocaledir.so -fPIC -bundle hacklocaledir.c
hacklocaledir.c: In function '__open':
hacklocaledir.c:44: error: 'RTLD_NEXT' undeclared (first use in this function)
hacklocaledir.c:44: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
hacklocaledir.c:44: error: for each function it appears in.)
hacklocaledir.c: At top level:
hacklocaledir.c:113: warning: alias definitions not supported in Mach-O; ignored
make: *** [hacklocaledir.so] Error 1

‘RTLD_NEXT’ undeclared is the offending bit, which means nothing to me. Last time this happened, I search the C files to see if I could manually declare RTLD_NEXT but gave up. Who knows what its value is supposed to be?

Well, the solution is something completely different. Turns out that everything in /usr/local will influence the compiler, particularly the existence of /usr/local/include/dlfcn.h

I can’t remember why that particular file is there or even why renaming it to dlfcn.h.backup allows GNUcash and GD2 to compile, but it does. Googling the error didn’t return many useful results, except from the MacPorts ticket list, so hopefully this blog post will help someone similarly bewildered.

fink, macports, mac os x, compilation, error, RTLD_NEXT

Comments(2)