iPad pricing all over Beijing: It’s a jungle out there

A little diversion from music and food unto my other guilty pleasure: Apple!

So, it’s official and Apple put it on their website: The iPad is gonna be launched in Beijing officially this Friday September 17th. The official starting price is RMB3988… great… or is it?

A quick stroll over to Zhongguancun shows that there are plenty of iPads available on the market as of right now.. much like with the iphone, I think the early adopters have already managed to get their hands on a unit that was brought over from Hong Kong or somewhere else in the world. What did surprise me was the pricing which varied from RMB 4200 to RMB 5000 depending on the shop. Most vendors I asked said that they knew of the impeding official release but stock was limited and thus the premium. They didn’t seem to be planning on cutting the price down even after the official release.

A little clicking over to the Hong Kong side of the apple store shows a different story: official price for a the entry level unit, the 16GB WIFI model, is HK$ 3888 which translates to about RMB 3373. Now, having bought my fair share of Apple products in Beijing, the norm is that the zhongguancun prices fall somewhere between the HK price and the Official China price. In most cases, for a 16GB ipad, I would expect to pay about RMB 3500 here and have it delivered to my doorstep.

It’s be interesting to see how the price shifts over the next few days. The prices on taobao are already on the downswing with a few folks from guangzhou listing the little sucker at RMB 3700….. buyer beware, it’s a jungle out there, so know your prices before you set out to get one…