Greetings all,

I’m an American living in Spain, and I’ve had my eye on the MacBook Pro for a bit, and I’d like to get it. Here’s my question: If I buy the mac from an American bank account from the online apple store located in the US and ship it to an address in the US and then have a friend/family/hobo/etc. ship it here, do I have to pay some sort of import tax? If it were opened by the person previously before sending it here, would that make a difference?

Thanks all!

Trust me, you wouldn’t be the first to do exactly this. Just make sure it’s been thoroughly opened and looks used. Some indication that it’s for temporary use in Spain would help too.

I once bought a Garmin GPS from the USA over the net (because it was cheaper than Spain and a new model U/A here) and I received a letter from Spanish customs asking for the invoice - which I sent them, had to pay a small amount of tax at the post office and my GPS was handed over. All fairly painless and was a cheap deal.

Why don’t you just buy the Mac in Spain? Compare prices, but after adding US sales tax I think the price would be more or less the same in Spain and the USA. It might be cheaper to buy in Spain if you had to pay for shipping from the USA. VAT would be be included in the Spanish price.

Yes, you would probably have to pay duty if the computer was shipped from the USA to Spain, because there’s a customs form to fill out in the USA.

Buying in Spain you’d get a Spanish keyboard with all the accents and symbols.

Admittedly it’s easy enough to type them using an American computer by adding the US International - PC virtual keyboard. Go to System Preferences and click on Language & Text then Input Sources.

I bought my MacBook Pro in Miami Beach, because I’m currently living here, but I’d rather have had a Spanish keyboard.

Also, think about the guarantee. Surely it would be easier to claim if you’d bought the computer yourself in Spain.

David

Apple.es quotes the macbookpro 17” version as ‘starting’ at 2.499 Euros, including IVA.

Apple.com (US) quotes the same item starting at 2500 USD. Cannot tell from the website if this includes US sales tax but I imagine not.

The current crappy exchange rate for USD against Euros means your 2500USD is actually costing 1.745 Euros so there might be some savings to be made if you can buy it free of sales tax for export; you would then be subject to import duty / IVA at 20% I think, making a total of 2094 Euros.

Either way to my mind its a damned expensive way of buying a laptop… especially since most of the software associated with the machine is optional extras…

OK we all dislike Bill Gates and Microsoft but Steve Jobs / Apple are just as bad at producing dodgy equipment and relying on feedback / complaints from customers /guinea pigs to highlight the problems…

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I bought a 13” MacBook Pro in the Apple Store in Miami Beach last September for $1,200 including 7% Florida sales tax, and I’m very happy with it. It’s super-fast compared with Windows.

Four years ago I bought a Gateway with Windows Vista, which was so bad that I uninstalled it after a day and substituted Windows XP. The versions that I had of lot of third-party software, such as Norton Utilities and Nero, wouldn’t work in Vista. Also, I couldn’t copy my files, which I had backed up on CDs, onto the Gateway. Vista wouldn’t copy a folder within a folder, and I had a lot of folders nested within folders several levels deep. With the Mac I had no problem copying them.

The Gateway with Windows Vista was the worst computer that I’d ever had, and I bought my first computer back in the 1980s.

But even with XP installed the Gateway gave me problems which I hadn’t had previously using XP on other computers, and I had to reinstall the system about once a year, plus all the other programs I was using. This takes at least a day.

The Gateway computer with Vista cost me about $900 and was shoddily made. The left-hand mouse button broke after about a year and I had to fix it with Scotch tape.

Macs are much more solidly built and the staff in Apple stores and specialist retailers selling Macs are generally knowledgeable and helpful. They seem to consider it their job to help you sort out problems even after you’ve bought the computer, unlike the employees in a lot of stores selling PCs with Windows installed, who are only interested in making a sale, and don’t know much about the computers that they’re selling.

A big advantage of Mac OS X is that it comes with virtually all the software you’re likely to need, so you save money and time.

The main additional programs that you’re likely to want to download from the Internet are OpenOffice, which is a good free substitute for Microsoft Office, and the Gimp, also free, which does most things that Photoshop will.

I’ve now installed Ubuntu Linux on the Gateway laptop which I bought with Vista installed and it’s working far better with Linux than it ever did with Windows. Of course Linux is completely free and comes with most apps bundled with the system, including OpenOffice and the Gimp. Any extra ones you can download for free.

After my experience with Vista I’ve said goodbye to Windows forever.

Actually I dont think the OP is going to re-appear…we get a lot of subscribers who are a bit like ‘hit and run drivers’ who pose a question then bu**er off never to be seen again…but just to keep the conversation going…

Vista was the biggest dis-service Gates ever foisted onto the public and W7 from what I can make out is just Vista with a few more totally unnecessary bells and whistles. Hell even Windows ME was better than Vista…

Making the Vista machines country-specific by removing the language pack and selling it as an add-on to the top of the range variants was totally counter-productive. I bought my current machine in Spain with Vista Home Premium and it only speaks Spanish… having spent years mastering XP, Vista in Spanish is a total waste of space (unless of course you happen to be Spanish!) I’m a great believer in the old adage ‘If it aint broke, dont fix it…’

My wife bought a netbook in the UK last year with XP installed and it is so much easier to use.

Getting a bit long in the tooth now to consider learning a completely new OS like Mac OS or Linux; trying to fathom out what the Spanish Vista equivalent of English XP files and where they have have hidden them and under what name is is difficult enough!

I still consider Apple products to be grossly overpriced however; my wife’s daughter bought her Mum an Ipod Nano (5th Gen.) for her birthday, cost her well over ?100 for something put together in the Philipines for pennies from parts costing no more than a few bucks… now we find it’s been superceded and costs even more! And as for the Iphone 4… didn’t anyone consider the effects of hand-capacitance on antenna performance?

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Foxbat, you can learn new things at any age.

I didn’t learn Spanish till I was nearly 50, but since then I’ve made a lot of money translating from Spanish into English.

Now I’m 68, and recently I upgraded Ubuntu Linux on the old laptop which I mentioned in my previous post and found it had a completely different look to it - a bit like the difference between the classic XP and Vista - but I persevered for an hour and everything became clear. I don’t need Linux. I’m just playing with it out of curiosity and to have a back-up in case I have a problem with my Apple Mac one day.

The first version of Windows that I used was in Spanish, when I changed from a Mac in the 90s because servicing Macs was so expensive in Spain, and even now I find it easier to use Windows in Spanish than in English.

David