【Lily LaBeau Archives】

The Lily LaBeau ArchivesiPhone X is expensive in the U.S., but that's nothing compared to prices in some other markets.

Case in point: The United Kingdom. There, the 64GB iPhone X costs £999 while the 256GB variant costs £1,149. That's an absolutely insane price difference: 999 British pounds is about 1,330 U.S. dollars, and 1,149 pounds is 1,529 dollars.

This means that the 64GB iPhone X costs $331 morein the UK, and the 256GB iPhone X costs a whopping $380 more in the UK.

That's right: You can buy a decent flagship phone, like this Xiaomi Mi 6, just for the price difference in these two countries.

The situation is even worse in some other markets. For example, in Germany, the iPhone X costs 1,149/1,319 euros, which is roughly $1,376/$1,579. In Italy, it's 1,189/1,359 euros, which is about $1,425/$1,629. Ouch.

These prices partially depend on VAT rate, so I checked the price in the country with the highest VAT rate (27 percent) in the world: Hungary. Over there, the iPhone X costs 379,990/436,990 Hungarian forints, which translates to about $1,481/$1,703.

At an insane $554 price difference for the 256GB variant, Hungary wins this sad contest.

It's a bit better in Singapore, where the iPhone X costs 1,648/1,888 Singapore dollars, which is about $1,225/$1,404.

And in Australia, the iPhone X costs 1,579/1,829 Australian dollars, which is $1,267/$1,469.

The fact that the iPhone costs more in other parts of the world than it does in the U.S. is not new. But starting at $999, the iPhone X is the most expensive iPhone ever, and the price difference is bigger than ever.

Yes, the U.S. pricing does not include state and local taxes (which can be anywhere from zero to ten percent), but even if you factor that in, it just hurts to pay several hundred dollars more for the same device you'd get in the U.S.

Some things never change, and this includes the iPhone being cheaper in the U.S. than elsewhere. But this time -- especially if you intend to buy more than one -- it might actually pay off to fly over to the U.S. and buy your phones there. You might still have leftover change for lunch.