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Apple agrees to honor incorrectly priced Mac mini orders in Taiwan, but limits one per customer

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 · 5:19 pm · 12 Comments

Apple Taiwan has agreed to honor online orders placed on July 23 for Mac mini servers with 8GB RAM which were listed at NT$19,900 (US$618), roughly 60% lower than the actual retail price of NT$47,000.

Advertisement: Apple Mac mini Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM, Dual 500GB Hard Drive Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard (MC438LL/A) only $969.99

However, each purchaser is limited to receiving only one unit, according to Apple.

Because the incorrect prices were listed only in Apple’s Education Store, purchasers will be required to confirm their eligibility before Apple will accept the orders.

[Attribution: DigiTimes. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Fred Mertz" for the heads up.]

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Comment Feed

12 Comments

disposableidentity

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 5:26 pm · Reply

Nice resolution.
Lamos

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 5:36 pm · Reply

aren’t they required by law to charge what they billed for the product?
Mac4lfe

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 6:01 pm · Reply

Sooo, you are a student huh? And you ordered 5 Mac Mini’s.
Crabapple

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 6:16 pm · Reply

Now thats what I call putting the customer first and thereby enhancing the Apple experience.

Multiple orders could have been made by educational institutions in whuch case the purchases will be limitrd to one per department if they can prove that each department is independent off the others.
Crabapple

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 6:17 pm · Reply

Sorry! sausage fingers today!
WriterGuy

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 7:31 pm · Reply

Nice compromise on Apple’s part… (especially considering local law more or less requires them to sell at the price point they advertise, typo or not.)
lsed

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 9:01 pm · Reply

Considering that the 8GB RAM mark up by Apple is quite a lot, they are essentially not losing that much.

For example, it costs $400 USD to upgrade from 4 to 8GB on Apple store US.
I paid $230 to buy new Samsung 8GB RAMs, and then sold the stock 4GB for $85.

So effectively the upgrade was only $145 vs Apple’s $400.
Plus I’m sure Apple can get their RAMs even cheaper than what I paid.

Not forgetting that the Mac mini is not eligible for the back to school promotion. So if a student bought this instead of a MacBook, then they save a bit on the free iPod.

But still $600+ is a very good price on a new Mac mini server.

Apple is seriously great. They overpaid me for my education rebate and then emailed me later to keep the excess! I mean, what company does that?!
Horseman

Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 12:55 am · Reply

Lamos, I don’t know about Taiwan, but here in the US, the answer is no, companies are not obligated to honor a misquoted or misprinted price. Most companies, however, will do so anyway to avoid bad PR.
jecastej

Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 1:18 am · Reply

So I sold my house for nothing???? Bad Apple… No house and just one Mini.
Victor

Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 9:43 am · Reply

Dear Justin:

Phil told me about your little mishap on the Edu Store page, I am terribly disappointed in you. I will have you appointed to internal messaging again on August 15th.

You are to be kept with the monkeys for 2 weeks, there will be no nano cookies, no iCare lessons and absollutely no ShuffleShots before bedtime, and you will be forbidden to play with your iPhone V (by the way I need your report on Product Peace and the iPhone Cinco project DONE while you’re there), furthemore we will only allow 2 hours of usage of iPhone 4 per day (4 on a day of a press conference if there are any), and I will have Jason Chen call you first to test the bars on iPhone 4 live on Saturday Night Live and you WILL answer.

Tim will write this off your paycheck this year, you will feel a bit cheap around christmas with no new iPod TV, guess you will have to pass Christmas with your pops again, I still havent forgot what he to with AMD for us, it has taken this long to get to them to trust me again… Your family is all alike… and lets not bring your mother into this…

Well, I will see you in my office in a week, hopefully I will get you the iPhone 4 in white by the time you get out… I want to trust you again, so be good to Woz while youre there, you know how much I love him still, and yes, you can get as much segway-time as you like.

Run along now,

Papa Steve
Scubaboy

Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 10:22 am · Reply

@lsed

Quality. Yes, Apple RAM is expensive. Dell RAM is cheap. What kind of price:performance issue would you rather have. Could Apple sell the same quality RAM for less? Yes. Apple’s gross margins are high. But if you measure acceptable margins by quality of product, (which makes sense — higher quality = better quality control = more rejected parts = higher manufacturing costs), then you are paying a reasonable amount for the product. RAM is one of the best examples out there, too, of the exponential increase in rejects with higher QA standards.

Where a disconnect occurs, is when the manufacturing QA exceeds the perceived need for quality by the customer. If the RAM were 70% of thte price, overall failure rates might double. To 5% (hypothetical number) over the lifetime of your machine. That might be something that customers would be OK with. But Apple doesn’t fudge quality. Period. And there is something to be said about a company that has that as a single high standard that applies to everything they make.

if you want cheaper upgrades, you can find them. And upgrade the RAM yourself. I’ve done that. I hang on to the original RAM as backup hardware, in case I have a failure. So far, in 30 years, I can recall only a single RAM failure. And that included a 10 year period of Windoze PCs.

What you’re really talking about is the price-point difference between two incomparable products. You may as well whine that this 2cu ft convection oven is so much more than that .7 cu ft microwave. Duh!
KAO

Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 10:40 pm · Reply

it seems like apple is pretty honor and pretty general right?
but the truth is apple did not respond anything of their incorrect price for 4 days until the government force apple to make the respond and apple was just simply modify the price from NTD 19900(US 625) to NTD 47700(US1500) to every order that the customer made, how smart!!!