wow factor

Because they can be.

On the eve of opening the first Apple store in Australia, Stephen Hutcheon asks why Australians pays so much for Apple products.
Apple replies that their price is right.

Despite there being near parity in the $US-$A exchange rates since the start of the year, many Apple products in Australia - including iPods, MacBooks and iMac computers - sell for between 15 and 30-plus per cent more than they do in the US...

The index shows that Australia is the eighth cheapest place in the world to buy an iPod nano, but the US ranks as the second cheapest.

In a random sample of Apple products surveyed, we found one of the smallest products - a set of iPod earphones made in China - had one of the biggest price differences.

In the US, a set of these white headphones sells for $US29. That translates to $31, based on an exchange rate of 94 cents to $US1.

But in Australia, Apple sells the same headphones for $48 - a price difference of more than one-third, or 35 per cent to be exact.

I guess they have to pay for their $13 million glass box somehow.
Australian consumers don't question it, meanwhile corporations like Apple maximise exchange rates hourly and spend fortunes on price tolerance research.

Update: Peter Murphy's fantastic Panorama of the store opening.
View in QuickTime or Flash

Download here or here

The Mac install was smooth, picking up existing Bookmarks and compatible Add-ons. Hopefully previous issues are resolved. Gmail v2.0 even works.

Opera 9.5 Desktop

We've made the fastest browser in the world even faster with superior support for Web standards. Opera 9.5 is quicker to start, faster at loading Web pages and better at running your favorite Web applications.

* More than 2x faster than Opera 9.2 in rendering JavaScript and HTML
* Faster handling of third party plug-ins
* Much faster start up time
* Superior support for Web standards

I can't measure the claims above, however it sets a speed benchmark for the soon to be released Firefox 3.

Via 37 Signals

To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2 or later.

With the pending release of Apple MobileMe, they are declaring IE6 as not worth bothering with.
That's market leading confidence, given IE6's lingering yet high penetration.

Will this becomes policy for all new Apple applications?