Apple pricing anomaly

I'm living in London at the moment and I'm considering a trip to New York for some christmas shopping. I want to buy a SLR lens for my Nikon plus some Christmas presents for myself/wife and others.

I've got 3 Apple things on my shopping list. A 80gb iPod and iMac 24" for myself and a 15" MacBook Pro for my mother who lives in Australia.

So I did some pricing comparisons between the 3, taking into account current exchange rates, £/$US of 1.87 plus NYC sales tax of 8.375% and £/$AU of 2.49.

Below is a table, all prices are converted to £ sterling :

	US	UK	AU
80gb ipod	202	259	200
mbp 2.16 1gb	1448	1699	1606
mbp 2.0 0.5 gb	1158	1399	1284
24" iMac 2.16 1gb 250gb	158	1349	1204
pimped 24" iMac 2.33 *	1633	1899	1718

(* 2.33Ghz, 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD, 256MB graphics, Wireless keyboard / mouse )

Two things stood out above. Firstly the UK iPod is almost 30% more expensive than US or AU cost. Secondly, yes it is cheaper to buy in the US compared to Australia, but it isn't as much as I had thought ( around 10% ). (Why it would be 10% is another matter since Australia is a very close to Thailand or Shanghai where some products Apple are assembled).

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