I don’t understand why Apple charges $1400 for an $800 phone in Brazil.
Brazil has a import fee of 60%, that came from the 80-90s when they where trying to "protect the national industry" and had a over protective goverment on national matters, devalued currency, the confiscation of money from people reserves, the exchange from cruzeiro to real to try to value the currency etc etc etc.
Normally when purchasing anything from outside, specially chinese market places, there was basically a taxation wheel spin caused by the inneficiency of the postal services, when you could either buy something and pay no taxes or be taxed a lot by a arbitrary ammount ("hummm here says it costs 78USD in the import declaration, but we think that it 's real value is 230USD based on our random arbitrary reasoning, so You need to pay us 350 in taxes" was pretty common) , 70-80% of the time you product would get there without incurring taxes.
Goverment was angry because of the lax fiscalization and the huge ammount of people opting to purchase outside even with the wheel spin, because of the surreal taxes on the internal market, and... less tax money is less money in their pockets and it was also making the store owners mad by lossing customers to aliexpress and shein, since instead of purchasing the same chines eproduct from them for 5x time the price, people purchased from chinese sellers directly, and so after much consideration, goverment decided that instead of leviating the taxes for a more sane ammount increassing comsuption and so gathering more money from lesser taxes in the process, like most other countries, they got lobbied pretty hard by the "national industry" to try to increase even more. in the end they decided that for imported purchases under 50USD you only pay 17% ot tax, but for purchases above 50USD the tax currently is at 93%, and they increased the fiscalization to make sure taxes are being paid, not because they expect people will buy, but kinda of as a barrier to importation as a whole since hardly anyone will try to purchase something paying fdouble the price, in a atempt to force people to buy from the lobbied industry internally. Basically if something costs 50usd you will pay 59USD, but if said thing costs 50,01USD you will pay 97USD for it. thats for you purchasing directly from the internet as a customer, if you purchase from a store or something, them there is even more taxes over the import taxes.
Paraguay, on the other side, decided to go to the oposite direction and focus on welcoming imports, so much so that they have basically triple the variety of products most of it don't comking to brazilian market because it would be too expensive and no one would be able to buy anyway, for 1/3 of the price. So when you need something very specific people tend to travel to paraguay frontier for a day or so via bus or plane, and purchase things there, (by law you can bring 500USD of products import tax free from terrestrial frontier, or 1000USD via plane, but as always, 99% of the time there is no one to fiscalize that...) and it will be cheapper than buying here, or most of the time it would not even sell here in the national market.
last time I've gone there myself, hotel+plane to Foz was like 50USD, then I purchased a 8tb hard drive, 2 128gb sd cards, 1 512gb nvme, a satechi mac mini dock, a 65W GAN charger and some other smaller things for 465USD, 515USD taking into account travel expenses, If I was to buy here, just the 99usd dock alone would cost at least 200USD and the 8tb drive 350USD.
