As a young broke European I sometimes weep on how cheap computing hardware is in the US compared to here.

Like, my face radiates with joy when I read a tutorial on how to build a cheap home server with some old $15 Xeons or a cheap laptop with an old $50 x220 but my smile instantly vanishes when I look at the local second hand market and realize those Xeons are $60 and the x220 is $200 here.

Americans don't know how good they have it, high incomes, low taxes and cheap prices makes accumulating wealth and starting a business much easier than in Europe.

People in some European countries don't know how good they have it, not having to worry about things like healthcare and medicinal costs, parental leave, vacation leave, and access to higher education.

I raise you South America, where we have low income, high taxes and public healthcare which barely works so we usually end up paying for private healthcare too. Pretty much the same with education too.

No, we constantly hear how good we are supposed to have it with healthcare and education, and how it's horrible in the US.

Nobody talks about how qualified workers are earning 3x more in the US, with everyday items costing less.

Life is pretty awesome for top 10% in the US compared to European countries, and comparable for top 20%. But bottom 80% in Europe will have have better quality of life than bottom 80% in the US, which is the source of those price savings on everyday items and 3x incomes for “qualified” workers.

Not sure about your percentages, but yes in essence this is the pros and cons of socialist countries. Now the question is wether this is good for a given country in the long run, knowing that socialist countries will tend to attract poor people, and will tend to lose some of their rich people.

If there is a correlation between an individual's economic success and that individual's contribution to society, then socialist countries will become less and less competitive compared to the other countries who on the contrario will be gaining people that contribute more to society and losing people that contribute less.

Yeah all those costs are just distributed elsewhere. Like healthcare, dental, eye care, lower wages in everything other than tech, housing, lack of public transit... etc.

I feel most of what you say...

But I'm happy with high prices for technology and free healthcare and almost free education.

You can spare 500€ when you're not spending 5-10 k€ or more in hospital bills.

I actually came here to note how cheap it is in the USA.

It's amazing that there are so many cheap computing platforms available now. Not that long ago the One Laptop Per Child project seemed like a pipe dream, assuming it meant providing any reasonable quality hardware.

For the other devices the prices are fairly close considering exchange rate, VAT and added warranties. So the most likely explanation is the "Powered by up to a 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor" line. The base model in EMEA will be one of the higher speced ones.

I've been wondering about these things for a quite a bit. One thing is that prices in the US often get advertised without VAT, while in Europe it's included and once you factor that in many things are not that different. But in some product areas there is a huge discrepancy, and it's often US-based companies who have very big differences between US and European pricing.

I often notice it when US people complain about some price for a European product and I then look up the prices in the US out of surprise, because the US-company competitor is the same price in Europe. It then shows that the US and European prices of the European product are the same, while the US-company product is a third or more cheaper in the US than Europe (I have recently seen this with bicycles and trainers). Not sure if there are some tax or duty type reasons for this?

Well most of these comparison are not done thoughtfully enough. And in the age of Internet everyone somehow expects pricing to be the same around the world.

Price + Import Tax + Sales Tax + Exchange Rate with Hedging + Additional Coverage ( Such as Legal Requirement for Fixing within certain time ).

That is basically the formula Apple use for their product pricing. Apple gets the benefits of having economy of scale. For many other products, you will need additional cost for Distribution for each country in Europe, Operation Handling, difference packaging for certain items. All these could easily add up to additional 10-20%. You now end up having a price that is 30 - 40% more expensive than US listed price.

You can't factor in VAT to make the prices the same because Americans don't pay VAT.

Americans usually (I think) pay sales tax, unless they are in one of the very few places that doesn't have them. A VAT is just a version of a sales tax that is harder to evade.

It’s almost impossible to do a straight comparison of taxes since the level of services is buys you from different governments is different, and each government (in American states and European countries) divvy up the taxes in varied ways between income, property, sales, tolls, and probably a whole bunch of other ones.

Sales tax exists in some states but not all. It's also less than ten percent. In my state the PS5 costs $535 after tax while in the UK it costs $587.

From my comparisons, the base model in the EU is not generally better-specced than the base model in the US, and on top of that, some higher-specced versions never make it to the EU at all.

I read somewhere (can't remember where) that it may be due to the entry level version in the EU is a higher spec than the US one, hence the price difference.

That's... Weird

Sure, if you look up prices in Europe they're sightly higher. See the PS5 or the latest iPhone

But not double the price. Also I would assume that's easy to get a brand new laptop around the 200/300 EUR range