The cheapest countries to buy a Mac Pro

As a big player in the high-end laptop game with the MacBook, it makes sense that Apple also produces a desktop computer. It’s also unsurprising to see that the machine is phenomenally expensive. We’re not saying it’s not worth it — you’re getting top-tier specs such as the Apple M2 Ultra chip, a 60-core GPU, the 32‑core Neural Engine, and 64GB unified memory. But even that base model starts at almost $7,000 in the US, before tax. If we told you that it retails for a different price in every other country, your next question might be, which are the cheapest countries to buy a Mac Pro?

It’s not just the price difference that makes the idea of buying the Mac Pro abroad a tempting prospect. A US resident buying in America has to pay sales tax, which works out to several hundred dollars on a computer of this nature. However, if you’re a tourist in another country, you can often avoid or claim that nation’s equivalent sales tax and make further savings.

While there are Tower and Rack models of the Mac Pro, we’ll just focus on the Tower in this article. It’s a bit cheaper than the Rack, so bargain hunters will probably be more interested in it, and some countries don’t even have the Rack available. Besides, they’re always proportionate in price, so a cheap country for the Tower will also be cheap for the Rack.

What are the cheapest countries to buy a Mac Pro?

The table below shows the local currency retail price of the Mac Pro in 22 countries. We’ve converted these prices into the US dollar equivalent for the purpose of the comparison and ranked them from cheapest to most expensive.

As a quick explainer, the United States price has had 10% added onto the retail price to reflect an approximate amount a US citizen would pay by the time the Mac Pro is shipped. Conversely, the prices for other countries are the maximum you would pay as a US tourist abroad. In many cases, these values include the sales tax. If this is avoidable in that particular nation, you could get the computer a whole lot cheaper.

While most of the more inexpensive countries are in Southeast Asia, the cheapest country to buy the Mac Pro is Canada. The base model of the Tower version is CAD$8,999 for America’s northern neighbors, which equates to approximately $6,645 in US dollars. That’s about $250 less than anywhere else in the world, at least among the countries we surveyed.

Malaysia, Thailand, and Japan emerge as the next cheapest options, all offering the device in the $6,900 to $7,000 region. However, the Canadian figure doesn’t include sales tax, so a tourist wouldn’t be getting it for less than that. But the tax could be included in some of these other nations. If so, you may be able to claim it back and get the Mac Pro for less than in Canada.

The majority of the places you’d be spending more US dollars for the machine are in Europe, with one stark exception — it’s the equivalent of over $15,000 in Brazil. This is an extraordinary outlier in the table. We’re not privy to the exact reasons for this, but we’ve speculated on some possible factors below.

The USA sits around the middle of the global range in terms of the Max Pro price, even with the approximate sales tax included.

Will I not see a cheaper Mac Pro than this while I’m abroad?

We’re only running with the official retail prices of the Mac Pro Tower from the Apple website for each nation. You might find a third-party vendor selling it for less, but this should always set off alarm bells in your head. Some outlets are less scrupulous than others. Could it be stolen? Might it be a replica? Perhaps it’s second-hand and being presented as new? When a deal looks too good to be true, it often is.

That said, there’s no need to be too cynical. Shops have sales all the time, sometimes offering fantastic deals that don’t make them much money but have the effect of luring in buyers who might then purchase other items. We merely urge you to exercise caution, and buying from the official Apple retailers gives you peace of mind.

Should I buy the Mac Pro from another country?

Given the price disparities, this is certainly an alluring idea. But there are practical considerations to take into account. Apart from the fact that you’d have to find a lot of luggage space, you might find that the Mac Pro has a different software configuration than you’d expect when buying in America. You may also get a warranty that’s either invalid or extremely hard to capitalize on once you’re back on US soil. If you were looking to get a cheaper iPhone 15, for example, then the modest savings probably wouldn’t be worth the hassle of buying abroad, but the Mac Pro is a different proposition because you could stand to save at least $1,500.

As such, this is very much a matter for you to decide. If you’re in the market for a desktop PC and happen to be passing through one of the cheaper countries, then you might consider it. It’s probably not worth traveling to somewhere like Malaysia with the sole intention of scoring a cheaper Mac Pro, though, as your trip expenses will likely wipe out any savings you’ll make.

We can certainly speculate. For starters, hundreds of different costs are involved in bringing a product to a new market, and these costs will vary significantly in different regions of the world. They’ll include labor, logistics, import taxes, and so on. If the costs that Apple is incurring in each country aren’t the same, then it stands to reason that the amount the Mac Pro will sell for should also change across borders.

Let’s also face facts: Apple is a profit-making machine. It knows that there is a loyal customer base out there, many members of which have deep pockets. Costs are a factor for sure, but at the end of the day, Apple will charge what it thinks it can get away with in order to maximize the bottom line. Consumer spending power is very nation-specific, and you can envisage huge teams of financial analysts digging into numbers and trends, working out how much the tech giant can get away with charging for the Mac Pro in each country.

We should also remind ourselves that we’re converting all of the prices into US dollars in order to compare them. This brings exchange rates into the equation. To spell it out, if USD falls in value against the Euro, for example, people in Europe won’t see any price change on the Mac Pro in their country, but a US tourist will be spending more of their follars than they might have done six months prior. In a turbulent economic time for the world, exchange rate fluctuations could have countries jumping up and down the table above quite quickly.