I started to wonder the other day just why Macs are so much more expensive in South Africa than elsewhere.

As I write, an entry-level white MacBook is advertised in the US at $999, or R7,300. They’re more expensive in the UK, for example, R8,700. No doubt tariffs and taxes play a role here. But if I want to buy the same MacBook here in Cape Town, though, I must pay … R12,000. No less than 64% higher than the US price.

Is this an inevitable consequence of importing electronics into South Africa? A local dealer tells me the price gap is partly a consequence of buying exchange rate cover. If so, all imports should be similarly affected. But, to take just one example, local PC retailers Incredible Connection manage to sell an Acer Aspire One A110 Blue for just R1,999, when the same machine is advertised in the US at $265, or R1,959.

So who’s behind the 64%?

Apples are distributed in this country by an organisation calling themselves “Core Group”, to whom Apple appear to have granted a license to profiteer (local dealers assure me their margins are no more than 10%). So, who or what is “Core Group”? Its website (which is pretty shabby compared to the gleaming elegance one usually expects from Mac sites) tells us that:

Core Group consists of The Core Computer Business (Pty) Ltd – the distribution company of Apple Computer in SA – and Core Peripherals (Pty) Ltd, which distributes all other brands…

In 2001, the ‘Ichikowitz Group’, which previously was a minority shareholder, bought a controlling interest in Core Group and installed a new management team, and implemented a new strategy…

[Ichikowitz] operates businesses ranging from automotive import and distribution, lotteries and gaming, information technology, sporting goods and dental equipment to minerals, petroleum and other natural resources.”

Lotteries and gaming, petroleum… this does not sound like your usual computer business. And the ‘Ichikowitz Group’ (why the inverted commas?) clearly likes to keep a low profile – it has no website of its own. Dig a little furthur, and we find this: “The arms dealer who flies Zuma“, and begin to understand why. One Ivor Ichikowitz, it seems, is the brother of Core Group CEO Rodney Ichikowitz, and it turns out:

Ivor Ichikowitz, the arms and oil broker who laid on his company jet to ferry Nelson Mandela to a Jacob Zuma election rally in Transkei, has made a career from turning political connections into profit… Ichikowitz (42) made a fortune selling surplus South African armoured vehicles into Africa and the Middle East, and seems to have manoeuvred his way into Zuma’s inner circle … Ichikowitz, who also represents controversial commodities trader Glencore, partnered Majali in his 2001 bid to supply Iraqi crude to South Africa under the controversial oil-for-food programme allowing limited trade with Saddam’s Iraq … In 2005 the M&G revealed Majali, with official ANC backing, intended setting up an oil trading operation intended to benefit the ANC and Saddam’s Ba’ath party … Ichikowitz’s other main business: selling reconditioned surplus South African military equipment into Africa and the Middle East.

(None of this is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Ichikowitz’s company, Paramount.)

A couple of threads on a local website reflect a certain amount of public unhappiness with the ‘Apple experience’ in South Africa.

Lotteries, gaming, arms dealing in Africa, oil deals with Saddam… Way cool, Apple.

First posted on a Guardian CIF forum:

(Mac user speaks)

Macs are ridiculously expensive and far from perfect, and service pretty shoddy here in SA (but then most service is here) – but every time I use a win machine for even a few minutes I’m glad I switched. mostly, on a mac, I can forget about the computer, and focus on the work. Linux I used extensively a few years back, but felt too much time was spent in enforced geekery. might go back, tho, if mac prices don’t drop.

my specific gripe though, is Word. I have to use this program for editing work for two reasons: a) it’s the standard b) track changes. Yes, there’s Open Office, but it’s slow and unstable on the Mac.

Here’s the traumatising tech snag: I have experienced enormous pain and frustration trying to manage large, complex Word docs (250 pages plus, with 1000+ endnotes)

OpenOffice missed a huge opportunity by creating itself as a Word clone, rather than creating a better word processor. The problem with the Word model is that content and layout are confused and overlapped, with horrendous results.

An ideal/better word processor would follow this logic:

1. User chooses document type (note/letter/article/book etc)
2. User creates document, tagging some content as “heading 1″, “heading 2″, “footnote”, “list” etc – but NEVER touches fonts or styles (indeed, these options are kept invisible at this stage of doc creation)
3. Having completed content, user ONLY THEN decides what font size, etc to assign to different content tags
4. All functions/tools, would be invisible until needed/invoked. At present, the average Word user is a bit like someone who wants to bang a few nails through a couple of pieces of wood – and is ushered into a Formula One (some fairly dismal team) workshop for the purpose.

(I firmly believe the developer who could, say, repurpose the libraries/code deployed in OpenOffice along the lines described above, might revolutionise word processing)

Ah, the Word devotees will argue, you can do all that tagging stuff in Word with styles. True – but:

1. most users don’t know about styles, so their documents are riddled with innumerable invisibly coded artifacts resulting from changes in font, size and and style – artifacts which play havoc when one attempts to export to another application (ah, for the ‘reveal codes’ function of Word Perfect)
2. styles are implemented with the same bloat factor that afflicts the whole package, so that they are difficult to use efficiently
3. they’re not neatly integrated with document structure (table of contents) so a heading, for example, has to be tagged not once but twice, for structure and for style. Which is simply crazy.

LaTeX (look it up on wikipedia) produces stunning typography, has very strong design logic, and could be a fabulous solution, but:

1. You have to be super-geeky to have the persistence to learn it – in usability terms, it’s rather like Linux ten years ago, and few designers/typographers are, in my experience, that super-geeky
2. It’s so arcane at times, not even its devotees completely understand it
3. the document classes are mostly super dull/ugly – and THERE’S NO TOOL for easily creating one’s own document classes so one has to choose one of the ugly classes (these are layout ‘templates’)
4. the development curve is glacial in pace (which is not really a valid complaint from the perspective of existing users who are quite happy with it, of course).