iPrice Pro

Generated Apple product buying recommendations

Even though I've been a software engineer for many years, buying a new Apple computer is still a significant expense for me. This is mainly because as soon as I discover I have some savings, I immediately quit my job to do something I want to do.

Although... excessive research doesn't really save much money, I'm always obsessed with how to buy Apple products at the best time and at the lowest price. I find that when I'm preparing to buy a new Apple device, I always browse MacRumors, considering whether the products on sale are equipped with the most advanced chips, and whether they will soon be replaced by new products. I browse almost every day until I make up my mind to place an order.

Actually, I once developed a simple crawler to scrape content from MacRumors and translate it into Chinese. I'm not the first person to do this. But in reality, doing this is quite foolish, as Apple only releases new products two or three times a year at most. And I have to crawl once a day to ensure the release dates are synchronized with MacRumors.

This year, I was determined to buy a high-end M4 iPad Pro and try to learn drawing.

But in the end, I didn't buy it, but this led to a new website called iPrice Pro.

In China, we buy Apple products from distributors. Chinese people are very good at disrupting the market with low prices, and all distributors join in the low-price competition. Just like the recently released iPhone 16, even during the pre-order phase, you can pre-order at a price 85 dollars lower than the official price.

But sometimes, even if you try your best, you still can't buy a certain product at a truly affordable price.

I discovered a website: Apple Price Compare, which records the prices of Apple products in many countries. I found that the price of iPads in Hong Kong is far lower than in mainland China (250 dollars).

Even the official prices in Hong Kong are far lower than the lowest prices offered by distributors in mainland China. If you want to go further, you can even participate in the back-to-school event, buy at the education discount price, and get a free Apple Pencil and headphones.

In the past, I wouldn't have considered this, because I couldn't possibly fly to Hong Kong to buy an iPad for a few hundred dollars in savings. But as I left my long-term residence in China, I found that I started frequently moving between multiple Asian countries. Buying some electronics in Hong Kong on the way became possible.

For a moment, I was amazed by the creativity of this website. But after deeper research, I found that this information was outdated, with the last update time still last year. Moreover, ApplePriceCompare is not the first to do this; many years ago, a website with the same function called MacIndex appeared.

Developing such a website cannot be completed in just a few hours. Why did the developers abandon it so quickly? I started to consider this question.

I found that most people, when developing similar functions, would naturally use a server-side and database storage architecture, which would bring relatively large cost pressures and manual update pressures.

I'm very interested in developing a low-consumption and easy-to-update Apple product purchase advice website that doesn't require backend service support.

iPrice Pro integrates the functions of MacRumors Buyers Guide and multi-country price comparison through rationalized data organization. The editor only needs to intervene once after Apple's press conference, and other work will be completed by daily builds.

After being away from the keyboard for a long time, I indeed need a practice project to readjust to writing some delicate programs.

In addition, while scraping Apple prices, I also discovered some things that no one has mentioned before:

Products that heavily rely on voice like HomePod and Vision Pro are not sold in many countries (because Siri cannot support their languages)
Mac Pro is sold in most countries, except Turkey (and I don't know why)
Apple products in Brazil are basically the most expensive in all countries, and much higher (seemingly due to very high import taxes)

Finally, I found that I seem to have a lot more code to write. So I don't have time to learn drawing for now, and I didn't fly to Hong Kong to buy an iPad Pro. But I won't browse other websites' information so frequently now, iPrice Pro has more streamlined information display and will never close. (Unless Cloudflare Pages starts charging)