Well, I don't feel the slightest bit comfortable with gratuitous waste of taxpayer money by self-serving bureaucrats either. And those numbers are in a entirely different league than even Apple's.

But there is a key difference; Buying an Apple product is a choice. I'm not aware of any law requiring all those people to buy an iPhone, iPad or iMac. And it's not as though those people don't have plenty of other choices. Something I believe is a rather remarkable achievement for any business.

So, although Apple may not be the choice for me, I have difficulty demonising them for their (well-deserved IMO) successes. If anything, we need more successful innovation in this world, not less of it. And penalising successes like Apple's isn't going to make anyone any better off.

But it may make some feel better. The Germans call it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

Mercadona sell packets of wipes to clean your spectacles.

They clean my Apple white keyboard perfectly.

We have an iMac, 2 iPads, an iPhone 6 and a two 4S's in our house

They are all excellent

But I do wish Apple paid their taxes!

They do, but not in the places you would expect.

If they paid the highest rate of tax they could, their prices would go up accordingly.

Ultimately they are responsible to their shareholders and are bound to do the best deal for them that they can and that includes minimising their tax deductions.

Immoral? Possibly, but do their shareholders care?

There are also the many scandals related to the working conditions in their Chinese sub contractors .Again not something that shareholders would be overly concerned about unless it affected their profits.
But Apple are not alone in taking advantage of far eastern relaxed " working " conditions.
What would an I phone cost if it was produced in the EU.?

Obviously working conditions in China lag behind conditions in the west. The main company that Apple use is Foxconn and they have a better record than most. A lot of that reputation is a result of the pressure Apple have applied to get them to improve their working conditions.

Foxconn is a Taiwan company with factories around the world but mainly in China where their main facility employs up to 450000 employees. It employs 1.3 million worldwide. Most Chinese would sell their mothers to get a job there.

What would an iPhone cost if produced in the EU. Probably not much more as all the components would be imported from China. If the whole thing was made in Europe then it would be totally uncompetitive and no one would buy it.

I can't think of any significant electronic product that doesn't involve an awful lot of Asian products.

Cillit Bang!
No best not, just a joke

The price of Apple products has very little relationship with the cost of production. Apple's MINIMUM mark-up is 30% and many of their products are 60-70% profit. One has to take one's hat off (grudgingly) to their marketing and product placements which pitches their products as 'premium' and indicate that they are attractive to high achievers and creative. So all those aspirational climbers who are taken in by marketing hype buy Apple so they too can be media whizzes or architects. After all you can't tell me that a MacBook does it's job 3-5 times better than a regular laptop, but it costs 3-5 times more. Is an iPad really 50% better than the Android equivalents from Samsung, Sony and the like? Apple lock you into IOS and the Eco-system and there's no competition to drive their prices down. They are seriously anti-competitive.
If one purchased on the basis of value and not image then Apple would be a very poor also ran.

While I agree with the sentiment of this post I take issue with the highlighted bit.

A costlier piece of kit only needs to save a business its extra cost to justify that cost.

If you buy a laptop for 900 when you could have bought for 300, then as soon as it has saved (or made) you 600 more than the cheaper one would, it has justified its extra cost. Better performance after that point comes 'free'.

It doesn't need to be three times as good or productive.

BTW I've just bought a Windows 8 based 10 inch laptop with detachable touch screen. Seems a really good piece of kit so far.

The only Apple product I have purchased was an Ipod for the wife.
Shortly afterwards I purchased a cheap Chinese Android phone for her.
The Ipod has not been used since.

It would not and could not be produced in the EU. No such gadgets are. They would be prohibitively expensive if they were.

And I know he said "many"scandals but I think he's referring to the one foxcon example, which afterward Apple gave Foxcon their ultimatum.

You appear to be missing something on this thread

Or is it simply that you only attack the matter of tax in your racist comments against Gibraltar?

Most European goverments get a huge part of, if not most of their tax revenues from VAT. Easy to enforce, and hard to dodge. With 20% average across Europe, it's no small chunk of change, and clearly is amongst the world's highest.

I wasn't aware, however, that Apple products were exempt of VAT.

I would love to know what the flying foofah Gibb has got to do with Apple .

It is not true that bulk manufacture of electronics is not possible in the EU. I can remember not so long ago that thousands were employed by Sharpe, Hitachi ,Sony and Panasonic in S Wales. They occupied their own industrial estates. But being global manufacturers they are always in search of the subsidy or tax benefit offered by developing nations. The plants were closed and manufacturing went to the east.
Dyson is a classic example.he still maintains a very good research facility in the UK but moved his manufacturing to Malaysia putting over a thousand locals out of work in the UK. The prices of Dyson products has not fallen has it ??

We all benefit from increasing affordability of electronic products until such time as the global manufacturers run out of cheap labour or as we are seeing in the clothing industry the reality of sweatshops and dangerous working conditions is revealed.