iPhones Coming to Canada, but It'll Cost You

Accord­ing to Betanews :

Apple is plan­ning to begin sell­ing its Apple iPhone through Rogers Wire­less in Canada by mid-October, tech­nol­ogy news site Dig­i­tal Jour­nal reported this week. The site said a source from within Cana­dian lux­ury retailer Holt Ren­few said it would be receiv­ing the phone within two weeks, and it would retail in the coun­try for $799.

Did they say $799? Uh, the Loonie is strong, but not that strong. I think I will plan on a trip to the Apple Store in Belling­ham or Seat­tle to pick one up. I can’t imag­ine them giv­ing us the same trou­ble as Cana­di­ans have had try­ing to buy cars in the US. An agree­ment with Cana­dian Car Deal­ers make it impos­si­ble to do so, deliv­er­ing as much as 30% more profit straight into the hands of the car mak­ers, lead­ing to a 2 Bil­lion$ Class-Action Law­suit on the part of Cana­dian con­sumers. If that’s no good, and they find some way of stop­ping us at the bor­der, even buy­ing online from the Apple Store and pay­ing the duty and import taxes here would be cheaper.

I expect that the only iPhone buy­ers actu­ally pur­chas­ing it from Holt Ren­frew will be the Amer­i­can Film Actors stay­ing in Van­cou­ver while they shoot what­ever movie they are in.

At any rate, this con­firms a sim­i­lar rumor that I had heard ear­lier in the week. Geeks across Canada are ready to heave a sigh of relief.

An Update from Dig­i­tal Journal:

 We have received word from Mario Manza, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of VIP Ser­vices at Holt Ren­frew, that they will not be car­ry­ing the iPhone for now. He said he con­firmed this infor­ma­tion with the buy­ers this morn­ing and apol­o­gized for any mis­in­for­ma­tion on behalf of the company.

It sure is a weird sce­nario: Yes­ter­day we placed cold calls to their acces­sories depart­ment and they were telling every­one the iPhone would be there in two weeks. They were even going so far as tak­ing down phone num­bers of peo­ple who called, inform­ing them they will call back when it arrives in two weeks. They even quoted the exact price of $799.

Yes­ter­day we also received a panic-sounding call from Holt Renfrew’s PR team say­ing this deal was not con­firmed “yet” — “yet” being the oper­a­tive word.

If you call today, how­ever, the same employ­ees are now say­ing they are no longer get­ting the iPhone any­time soon. Dig­i­tal Journal’s insid­ers are now say­ing the same thing.

As we men­tioned, and as most peo­ple agreed, Holt Ren­frew sounded like a very unlikely place for the iPhone to be launched in Canada. But the retailer does carry expen­sive Nokia, D&G and Prada phones, and they have car­ried iPods in the past.

So rumour is quashed, for now (accord­ing to Mario Manza). Holt Ren­frew insid­ers still say Rogers will have it in Jan­u­ary but they say it’s not clear why a poten­tial Holt Ren­frew deal fell through. We’ll see if we can get more infor­ma­tion on that.

We’ll keep you posted if we learn any­thing new.

This is approach­ing the level of hys­te­ria. You’d think some­one had leaked that mar­i­juana was going to be legal in Canada.

Oh, it already is. My mistake.