stuart test blog

That’s one of the big questions on everyone’s mind at the moment, probably second only to: "when is the exact release date?"

Up until recently, the cost of Apple’s products in NZ were expensive compared to prices in other countries. At the time, all Apple sales were handled by local distributor Renaissance, and prices seemed to be set on (at least) a 3:1 currency conversion with USD. But the exchange rate hasn’t been that high in years, and when Apple set up their NZ based online store prices started to become normalised with the current exchange rate.

So now NZ benefits from pricing that is equivalent to, or in some cases, better than other countries.

For example, the iPod Touch pricing is as follows:

As you can see from the table, our pricing is not that far behind the US pricing and you would expect there to be some difference to take into account our strong current exchange rate. And the NZ pricing is actually much better than in the UK.

So what does that tell us about the pricing of the iPhone?

Well the iPhone is priced the same as the 16GB and 32GB iPod Touches in both the US and the UK. So the 8GB iPhone is the same price as the 16GB iPod Touch, which is $399 (USD) and the 16GB iPhone is the same price as the 32GB iPod Touch, at $499 (USD.)

So based on the current prices we can safely assume that if the iPhone was on sale in NZ today, it would cost $599 for the 8GB version and $749 for the 16GB version.

But… the 3G version of the iPhone is expected to be released soon – possibly as early as next month, according to the latest rumours. At the most it’s a couple of months away, so we can also assume that the version of the iPhone that will be sold here will be the 3G version. It’s also possible that the release here could be tied into the worldwide release of the 3G iPhone, but that seems doubtful if it’s released in June.

Unfortunately we don’t have any official details on the 3G iPhone yet, let alone the price of it. Apple could bring in the new 3G model at the original price of the iPhone which was $599 for the 4GB version and $699 for the 8GB version. This would likely mean that the NZ prices would be $749 for the entry level version, and $999 for the high-end model. But at those prices, you would hope that Apple would bump up the storage capabilities as they did after introducing the original iPhone. Those prices would align the iPhone with what NZ consumers are used to paying for high end phones and PDAs, like Nokia’s N95 or the Blackberry Curve.

So my final prediction for the NZ pricing? Put aside $749 for a 16GB, 3G iPhone which will suit most people, or if you’ve got some extra coins lying around, you’ll be able to get the 32GB model for $999.