[ubj]

> When we price out things in the USA we pretend sales tax doesn’t exist, but it does, hoo boy it does, and most of us pay it.

The price breakdown in this article was probably the most useful part. There was a slim chance I would have considered a product like this for $3700, but $5000 is simply too much for my budget.

[nozzlegear]

The author's price breakdown matches mine almost identically, and like he said: if it weren't for the 0% financing for 12 months, there's no way I would've swallowed that $5000 pill. I still haven't decided if I'm going to return mine or keep it yet. I find it pretty compelling and I like to write code with it in bed or on the couch, but I can't say it's better than my much cheaper (by comparison) iPad Pro for such things.

[fsh]

I just don't get this obsession with taking on debt. "Financing" doesn't make a product any cheaper. If you can't pay $5000 now, you probably shouldn't buy the product.

[jherskovic]

It's better-than-free money. The 0% interest rate means, accounting for inflation, you're getting paid to use Apple's money instead of your own.

I can afford the lump sum, but it's a lot nicer to smooth out the cash flow using Apple's money instead of mine. As long as you're responsible, what's the harm?

[nozzlegear]

This is America baby, I don’t have a debit card I have a credit card. Jokes aside, if I’m going to pay the $5000 anyway and they let me pay for it over 12 months with no interest, I might as well do that and get a little credit score bump as well. I can afford the product, I just decide to pay it in 12 small chunks instead of 1 big chunk.

[archagon]

You can invest the money in the meantime, leading to anywhere from guaranteed 5% to likely 10-30% returns.

[fsh]

I still don't understand why an effective 5% "discount" (not counting the effort to actually invest the money) makes the $5000 pill any easier to swallow. The money is still gone.

[nozzlegear]

You're right about the pill thing, I considered that myself after I wrote my other comment. It's something psychological; I know I'm still paying $5000, but it's easier to do that when I'm only paying $400 per month over 12 months versus one big payment of $5000. Even though I can afford the $5000, it's much harder to convince myself to pull the trigger when I'm looking at that amount of money. I guess that's why it works and all of these big online retailers are doing financing.

[dboreham]

Some states don't have sales tax.

[tomschlick]

Not only that, but even on the same street you could have varying sales tax from the store 100ft down the road because you are on the border of a city/municipality that has their own tax applied.

There really is no good alternative than to just omit tax and have the customer expect 5-7% typically.

[testfrequency]

Ok.

Some states have higher sales tax also.

[tuatoru]

NAXALT (not all X are like that) isn't really a useful comment.

[tuatoru]

It's better to identify differences between the general case and the exceptions, and the reasons for them, than simply to say exceptions exist.