Taiwan laptops more expensive with lower specs? Whaa?

Apparently, Taiwan laptops and components, even Acer, Asus and other Taiwan brands, are incredibly overpriced and missing specs!

I’m looking at Newegg and Amazon, to compare. An MSI mid tier gaming laptop of a specific model is $1500. If I look in Taipei at that ZhongXiao area in Syntrend area or pc home it’s terrible! The same laptop will be a slightly different model name, but exact specs and such, only HALF the ram, lower SSD capacity, and $500 more almost consistently. Even lower ends are $500 more. Then the average laptop is 4gb ram which is ludicrous. Even the super expensive ones.

Then it gets worse, instead is brushed aluminum it’ll just be some form of heavy plastic. In my comparison, the USA version is 3lbs,the Taiwan version is 5.9lbs. Wild!

It seems that im just looking at the wrong models right? No! Totally the same with all models I’ve compared. Like 1 model number difference at the end, 1/4 the specs gone and $500 more. Crazy.

Is there a magical site that ships reliably to Taiwan? Even $200 shipping fees would save a fortune.

PS, this seems like the forwarding business for laptops would be extremely profitable :stuck_out_tongue:

I know that North America always gets the newer stuff first, like 4k screens and etc. And you dooooo have to bargin in Taiwan. But i don’t see the same model being 500 more.

It’s true. I have screenshots on my desktop showing pc home vs Amazon. Even if you exclude sales. I also just remembered even the graphics card was 1 tier lower.

Then for other laptops, I got one for my wife a few months ago. Paid $600 and $120 shipping for a laptop with about 20% higher specs than the Taiwan slightly different model (Taiwan exclusive last digit model difference) and 26 percent cheaper AFTER considering shipping lol. That wasn’t $500 cheaper, but still a significant amount.

idk about PC home, I go to guanhua. Price is about the same, but you do not get the same as the best and newest specs the north american ones get or you have to wait.

Post the screen shots and/or the links, I’d be very surprised if there was 500 in the difference.

Buy it from the US. Amazon shipping fees should include duties and other taxes.

Careful there. I’ve done that and Amazon claimed duties are paid in advance. However, once it arrived, it was held in customs until I paid a duty fee on it. Double duty happens a lot and the cost can be hefty.

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I haven’t looked at laptops but most other tech gear I want to purchase here is more expensive than the US or often Canada. $500 difference doesn’t seem that outrageous if the price was on a sale item.

Could be the reason. Like I said. They roll out the newest model out first in North America. Could have been out for a while and the same thing just came here. Plus it’s holiday times so a lot of stuff goes on sales there.

I agree. Perfectly plausible. I’ve no idea what’s going on, but stuff that was (10-15 years ago) noticeably cheaper in Taiwan than in the UK is now much more expensive. I need a new laptop but won’t buy one here.

Some sort of weird tax thing to “protect” manufacturers, I guess.

Yea I just bought a laptop, and I saved over $300 usd buying it on amazon and shipping it here, including the taxes and shipping. Taiwan is overpriced as hell.

To be fair, amazon often sells things for even cheaper than the official retail store or site of things. My baseball glove is 499$ retail and only sold for North America version. Taiwan and Japan uses different cow hides because they like gloves stiffer here. I got it on amazon for 350$ compared to the mizuno site that has it at 499.

And sometimes be prices change depending on stock on amazon. I bought a tv that retailed for 2000 for 1500. I saved an extra 100 from 1600 for waiting a day actually.

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A quick check shows that with “similar” models, there is some “pre-fee” savings is available from Amazon.

My Chinese is a little iffy, but I did what I could.

To wit…

49

and

44

Even with the ghastly small 256GB SSD, that is a hell of a bargain!! (seriously, who is the genius who thought a 256GB SSD would be big enough? at least you can swap it out, or add a 1T hybrid for storage)

pfft. In 1989 my office computer was five feet high with a couple of 200MB HDAs and 500MB tape cartridges, and we thought that was awesome. Plus, we had a lot more blinkenlights than you get these days. I dunno, kids these days, don’t know they’re born.

My office SSD at the moment is 240GB with space to spare. :grandpa:

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I buy almost all my electronics outside of Taiwan because they are cheaper, are newer better models, and more variety.

I went to Syntrend last night and bought an MSI Raider. I7, Nvidia gtx 1060, 16gb ram, 256ssd+1tb 7200rpm storage. 15 inch. Was $1900 USD. Amazon has 1070 version, dupe specs/model for 2499 base price. In the end I sucked it up because of 2 year included warranty where they come to your house to fix, no customs issues or shipping fees. And I get it now.

In the end, it’s more expensive for lower specs, but the long included warranty plus other small benefits of buying retail sold me.

(I’m a game dev, tired of only working from home 10hrs/day on my desktop lol)

What seems to be done is that they’ll take out the ram. Then charge more for upgrading ram that should already be there. And the graphics/SSD they’ll start at 128.

So like you see this badass gaming laptop with a shameful 4gb of ram and 128ssd. You can’t even open 10 chrome tabs with that on windows 10.

Its the same for Microsoft surface.
The standard config in Taiwan is 4MB Ram and 128 SSD.
That’s just too little for an expensive and otherwise Veey nice laptop. So of course they push you to pay even more for the 8MB and 256SSD.
Also they had limited choice of colours.

(I check on Amazonand the different was neglibke on pricing…Maybe cos new product so no cheap deal in US and pricing controlled by Microsoft).

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Huh? I don’t use chrome but there’s no way it’s so memory-hungry. And if it really is it’s perhaps time to ditch it.

I have a i3 4GB laptop and run Firefox with 20+ tabs, it consumes about 70% memory. This may look like a big number but the truth is it’s fine because Win 10 manages memory in different way than previous ones - it’s being adjusted on the fly with more efficient paging and priority systems.

Therefore I can also run some extra programs like Open Office, foobar etc on top fo that and the system is still very snappy - and I’m super sensitive to any desktop lag.

That’s an aside from the OP: I do agree Taiwan is generally overpriced when it comes to tech, or at least not cheaper, something I would think logical since so many of these things are made here.

I will also wait until im back home. Here the Razer Blade pro costs around 700€ more.

What I want to know ist, why would the local customers pay more for less?