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Purchasing a mac overseas?

F

frillyme

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 23, 2006
1
0
Hi, i'm new to this forum and also new to macs!

I am looking at purchasing a notebook and currently leaning towards switching over to a mac and getting a mac book.

I will be travelling to japan in a few weeks and having had a look at their apple site, their prices for mac books seems to be a bit cheaper than here in Australia.

What are the pros and cons to buying a mac overseas? i.e. warranty, power/voltage, what about language issues with the OS?

Any tips/advice would be greatly appreciated

:D
 
I bought my iBook overseas (Canada) and use it here in Australia - all I needed to buy was a plug adapter so the plug it came with would fit in our power points. All the Apple laptops come with auto-switching voltage adapters so there's no need to worry about anything there.

Make sure you take it out of the box, put some photos and stuff while you're over there - make sure you use it otherwise they could make you pay duty coming back in if they think it's brand new.

If you have to pay some form of sales tax on it, make sure you are aware of the time range within which you have to take the laptop out of the country because if you exceed that you won't be able to claim back the tax.

I'm pretty sure there won't be any language issues with the OS - just select your language when you first turn it on - but there may be some issues with the keyboard, I'm pretty sure the Japanese layout is the same as here but there may be some minor differences, they could also have Japanese characters as well as the English equivalents, not really a big deal though - might help you brush up on your Japanese.
 
Dude, get it in Australia. You won't save THAT much after buying a plug converter, and it's not worth the trouble. Their keyboards should be different as well. Other japanese keyboards seem to be, and I have a load of japanese friends (with laptops).
 
I think the retail version of Mac you can pick up at Apple stores in Japan has the Japanese board. Even though the layout is somewhat similar to QWERTY USA layout, certain keys are located differently (smaller space bar, some function key on the side instead of next two next to space bar areas, and etc).

If you do the BTO, they also have an option to choose the USA keyboard.

If I were you, I would just buy in the country I live in so that I don't have to learn to use a new keyboard. For me, I will stick with USA QWERTY for the rest of my computing life.
 
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