Ever since the dollar took a nose dive against the Euro I always drooled at the nice prices the US seems to have. Why ? Because most sellers in the EU (and Romania) make a really 1:1 conversion. This means that if something is about 1000 USD in the US it will be about 1000 EUR in EU (although this means about 1300 USD - 30% increase! ).
Now, on the other side of the spectrum sits Romania. Since we basically have no market-culture and we are still in some sort of Wild-wild-west kind of economy, the prices here are even higher than in the EU. So, there you are: probably in the poorest country among the EU ones, and you have the biggest prices for computers.
That would be one thing but there's more: you basically can't find decent brand workstations (powerfull desktops) and if you do, your best chance is if you live in Bucharest, the capital. And Bucharest is way in the east compared to Timisoara, and quite-ugly as a city might I add ;-)
So, outside Bucharest you only have the major retailers (which means that you get no service on-site and all your hardware is sent to Bucharest for service; scary thought for a laptop) or some medium-sized companies. As in Economy 101, when you sell something that's in short supply, what do you do ? Well, of course, you increase prices.
Thus the local companies that do have service on-site have even higher prices than the retailers.
In summary: Price(Timisoara) > Price(Bucharest) > Price(EU) >>>>> Price(US).
To everyone that complains in the US about high Apple/HP prices or some other nonsense like this I have an advice: come to Romania for a while and live the experience :-)
End of trolling / muble-grumble session.
