There seems to be an alarming trend in South Africa aimed towards ripping people off.
I recently found myself at the Johannesburg International Motorshow, specifically at the Fiat stand. Now Fiat has always been quite a basic car manufacturer of cars that offered good cheap and cheery cars. I was wrong. Now I’ve blogged plenty about the Fiat 500 and despite it being a very girly car it’s something I covet. When I sat in it, I had to push the seat all the way back making the car essentially a two seater making it a cute if impractical car. It’s also ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THOUSAND RAND! I’ve failed to mention that this is for a 1.4 liter engine. Now that’s a lot of money for something that’s hardly going to keep its value. It’s a niche Fiat, it’s going to devalue at an alarming rate. Personally a small, impractical car that will allow your friends to mock your manliness just got crossed off my list of wants and for me the rip off price is the clincher.
Issue no 2: I have a friend who is looking for a laptop. Being an informed tech guy I’ve been helping him look. Since Dell allows you to configure laptops on their site I went to take a look. Now the first prize for my friend would obviously be a new Macbook or Macbook Pro but since they are insanely expensive we’re looking elsewhere. The basic Dell laptop, the Inspiron has an integrated graphics card and will not work for his modeling (Engineering not Zoolander) software. This means we had to look at the Studio range of laptops. The options are 15″ or 17″ so I looked at the 15″. Now being an inquisitive young man I did some pricing to see how it fared to a Macbook Pro of equal specifications. Basically the entry level Macbook Pro costs a whopping R24000 so I expected a fairly lower amount for the Dell. The (relatively) equivalent Dell costs over R30000. Now Dell is a certainly not a budget computer but they’re pretty middle of the range. If this is middle of the range for a powerful laptop then I cannot imagine what the cost of an expensive Sony laptop with similar specs would cost. How does Dell hope to compete on these prices? I’d buy a Mac over a Dell any day!
Question of the day: How do companies hope to sell products? I know there is a credit crunch and we’re supposed to stop spending but companies are actually doing the work for us. The simple economic concept is that if you lower prices you stimulate buying and stem the economic crisis. Instead, companies are trying to make the most off fewer units.
Lower your prices, we’ll buy more. The end!
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About the laptop price,no offence, but that’s what you get looking for a dell,buy from a pc shop,much better value for money.Laptop/pc’s aren’t badly priced in SA.You just need to know where to look.
FIAT = First in All Trouble.
Car manufacturers are crazy.Look @ vw who revolutionised the world with the golf 1,2and 3.Those cars were small,realiable and most importantly..CHEAP…then we had the GOLF 4 and 5 which no doubt looks sweet…but look at the price tag!
Think its only time until TATA come out with a R180 000 car…Time will tell