Apple may be prepping a change in iTunes pricing, a long-time sore spot for international users sometimes charged double that of buyers in the United States.
The tech giant announced maintenance work on iTunes Connect between 9am and 4pm Pacific. The work centers on “pricing changes” that will result in users from several countries, including Mexico, U.K., and Australia, being unable to make purchases. In the case of Australia, that country’s dollar is $1.03 while the Cupertino, Calif. company’s iTunes ‘exchange rate’ expects $0.60 – or an 81 percent surcharge.
Elsewhere, Switzerland-based iTunes users are levied a 105 percent surcharge, according to reports.
The iTunes maintenance is also seen as pointing to the imminent released of OS X 10.7, codenamed ‘Lion.’
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
