Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339576
Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
241–250 of 251 posts
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t need to change the sticker continuously thought right? This is almost certainly what they’re doing with Lira now.
Charge a price in USD, but accept bitcoins for it?
There's absolutely no reason I can think of for doing that - instead of posting a price if USD or EUR and accepting paying in TRY. They'd have to exchange that Bitcoin for TRY anyway to pay their local staff, and they'd have to convert the balance to USD or EUR anyways. It's just extra lossy steps with huge volatility.
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> EU got to the brink of collapse with 1 million Syrian refugees (...) That's quite the extraordinary claim. Can you offer any extraordinary evidence that supports your claim? Because from what I've gathered, it barely holds any bearing with reality.
Yes, check Brexit and Marie Le Pen, politics in Poland, Hungary, Germany back in 2016. The refugee crisis was a central theme back then and anti-EU politics managed to gain significant grounds thanks to it. In UK, they even passed the mark narrowly and left the EU. Sure, the refugees are never the only EU issue but the 2016 crisis pushed EU to its limits and even chopped of part of it. That's why EU was at the bring…
You mean Brexit, which started 3 years before the Syrian refugee crisis and Marie Le Pen, whose support numbers moved from 17.8% to 21.3% after the Syrian refugees? That's your "major fracturing"? Meanwhile Poland and Hungary have been moving to a far right dictatorship pretty steadily.
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pretty bad, and if you voted for a bunch of dumb assholes who don't care about you or the nation, you're multifucked. The vote tally and the resulting leader are not necessarily related in these places.
Where in Eastern Europe do you think elections were stolen by invalid vote counting?
Belarus, Russia, Turkey, Romania. There is a list under ‘Europe’ here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversial_electi...
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially wages. At least for the industries where workers are in a position to demand. A tech job that offer in local currency gets laughed out of the room around here.
Are people using btc because of the threat from Russia?
Who said anything about btc?!
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember the process of getting a SIM in turkey was super annoying. I had to physically go to a store where they needed BOTH of our passports and a second form of ID (so had to go back to the hotel and return with my traveling companion) and a decent 30 minute process of entering our information into databases and making copies of IDs. Compare that to most countries where I can either trivially pop into a local sto…
Devices, SIM cards and identities must be matched in Turkey, so that nobody does anything naughty. They also make the service providers keep tower signal logs worth of many years, so it's common to prove your whereabouts in courts by requesting these logs. On the plus side, you can see and manage all your data from the government portal. It's rather convenient to be able to see all the subscriptions(GSM, TV and so on…
> cancel them from there if you wish
You can cancel such services from a government portal? That's nearly worth living under an authoritarian regime.
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember the process of getting a SIM in turkey was super annoying. I had to physically go to a store where they needed BOTH of our passports and a second form of ID (so had to go back to the hotel and return with my traveling companion) and a decent 30 minute process of entering our information into databases and making copies of IDs. Compare that to most countries where I can either trivially pop into a local sto…
You have to buy sim at airport, there is an exception from this registration, it is easy.
Wasn't an option in 2018 I think. I was tired and stressed and on my 3rd week of travel though, so, perhaps I missed it.
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely is a good example of such. A good example of such after 20 years of the West quietly cheering for such outcome. Turkeys' EU accession plan went nowhere, despite Turkey being genuinely serious for years on end. Western capitals were dead silent during the 2016 coup attempt.
> Turkeys' EU accession plan went nowhere, despite Turkey being genuinely serious for years on end. Only the Turks are to blame for this. Maybe they were serious, but they did a shit job. Had Turkey quit their bullshit regarding Cyprus, things would probably have gone very differently. Turkey has no legitimate claim to any of Cyprus, as evidenced by literally nobody wanting to live in the Turkish controlled shithole.…
Well, I beg to disagree. There are millions of Turks living in Northern Cyprus. Prior to Turkey's military intervention, the Turkish people were being massacered. If Turkey ever ceases to support Northern Cyprus, there needs to be some sort of military presence to keep peace.
Northern Cyprus is not just a lifeless island, it's a place that has been the home for many Turks for hundreds of years. If having lived in the same country for hundreds of years after conquering it doesn't give you a legitimate claim to reside there, I don't know what will.
I think the value of human life is much more important than getting into a union. The EU shouldn't have pushed this requirement.
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#249Hyper inflation drives people to buy goods that can be resold later for more. This happened in CCCP while it was falling apart. People would show up with all their money every morning at their local stores, buying whatever was available no matter what it was. They could resell it later for more money (effort to preserve the value of the currency they held). Apple products are a safe bet as they typically hold on to t…
Whats stopping people to exchange their money for euros or dollars? It's a popular tourist destination, after all.
Nothing is stopping us, in fact the dolarisation of savings hit 67% (if I'm not mistaken). People keep their savings in gold and fx. But your salary is fixed in Lira, the cost of living increases. Each month you see that you are getting poorer and poorer (and by poorer I mean 10-15% each month). It's really hard right now.
If you're interested, this article on economist covers the situation: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/erdogans-zan... (There is a paywall, you can read it from google cache).
Re: Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it's not Apple's fault Turkey's currency is unstable. Why would it be their responsibility to take the exchange risk? I wouldn't be surprised if in response to future events like this they stopped accepting payments denominated in TRY altogether.
It's been a few years since I was in Turkey, but at the time, most stores took Euros. And street vendors even preferred it. However, whether Apple is allowed to use Euros for the retail prices in store or not may be a legal matter. There are plenty of countries where it's illegal not to price and sell in the government's preferred currency.
There are capital controls, it would be illegal to sell in Euros to non-foreigners. There isn't anything stopping you from increasing the prices by indexing it to Euro though, you just have to announce it. Most consumer electronics markets use digital price tags for this reason. They update all prices in TL regularly (once a day etc.). Apple has this strange policy that it uses a fixed rate. They pick a high fx rate and stick with it until Lira depreciates to absurd amounts again.