Taiwanese Mac Mini Pricing Error Doesn’t Work in Your Favor; Apple Might Pay Fines

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It seems that more and more these days we hear bad things about Apple. You might have noticed how I stopped, at least briefly, from showing my disbelief in the Apple-way of handling the Death Grip / Antennagate PR disaster, and I’m not going to talk about it in this post either.

But just earlier today we heard that South Korean citizens are upset at Apple for not sending the iPhone 4 their way this week and we’re going to stay in Asia for a while longer. This time around we’re going to talk about Taiwanese Mac Minis. Odd subject I know, but the Mac Mini is in the center of another local PR disaster in Taiwan.

It looks the tiny desktop from Apple became very popular recently due to its price. No, Apple is not discounting the Mac Mini across the board, but due to an understandable (but is it really?) human error, the Taiwanese Mac Mini version was priced at 19,999 Taiwan dollars or about $625 which is about 42% cheaper than the original 47,710 Taiwan dollars price.

More importantly, that error in pricing was made on a Mac Mini with an 8GB of RAM upgrade, thus making the computer a lot cheaper than the 4GB version which costs 34,900 Taiwan dollars.

What followed is only logical, 200,000 cheap units have been ordered but Apple doesn’t want to sell them at discounted prices. Cupertino corrected the prices a few hours later, when it found out about it, and, again, what followed is only logical. More than 30 consumers complained about the price change for their orders and that’s definitely understandable, as they probably want Apple to deliver the Mac Minis for 19,999 Taiwan dollars.

Apple now faces a fine of up to 300,00 Taiwan dollars, about $9,400 (I wonder if they can afford such a fine?) in case it won’t answer to the Taiwanese government’s Law and Regulation Commission by tomorrow evening. It will be interesting to see what happens next in this scenario, especially as the Taiwanese courts ordered Dell to deliver customers their discounted gadgets (laptops and monitors) in a similar case last month.

In case you’re reading this one from Taiwan, we’ll be waiting for your updates.