Why a $799 Computer Doesn't Mean the Same Thing in Every Currency
基本的なコンピュータの価格を、各都市の初任給水準の賃金で割ると、為替だけでなく労働時間で見た負担が分かります。
I built an index to visualize something that's easy to miss when you're only reading prices in one currency: how far a headline price and its real local equivalent can actually drift apart. I read English-language tech blogs and sites regularly, and after years in Japan, I think in both US dollars and yen at the same time. When Apple lists the M4 Mac Mini at $799, it reads as a reasonably priced computer, the kind of price that barely registers as a decision. Look up what the same machine costs in Japan, in yen, and it moves into a different category entirely.
Before Apple's 2026 price increase, the base M4 Mac Mini was $599 in the US and ¥124,800 in Japan. At the exchange rates through most of that period, ¥124,800 already converted to something closer to $830 to $860. Japan was effectively paying for a machine that looked, in dollar terms, like it belonged in a different product tier, while the US price still read as an entry-level bargain. After the memory-driven price hikes this year, the US price moved to $799 for the equivalent configuration, a $200 jump, while the Japan price moved to ¥134,800, a much smaller proportional increase. The two headline numbers look closer together now. What actually happened is that the US price caught up toward where Japan's price already was.
The M4 Mac Mini specifically is worth being precise about, since $599 only makes sense as a benchmark once you know what it was buying. Apple positions the Mac Mini as the entry point into its desktop lineup, sitting below the iMac and well below the professional Mac Studio, and has long used it as the cheapest way into the Mac ecosystem. When the M4 model launched in late 2024, it doubled the base RAM to 16GB over the previous generation at the same starting price, and its performance rivaled Macs that had cost considerably more just a few years earlier. Reviewers routinely called it the best value Apple had shipped in years, a genuinely rare description for an Apple product. It's explicitly aimed at developers, students, and creators, not just casual users, since 16GB of memory and Apple Silicon's performance are enough to compile real projects in Xcode or edit 4K video, not just browse the web. That combination, genuinely capable hardware sitting at the bottom of Apple's lineup, is what made $599 worth paying attention to as a benchmark in the first place. It wasn't a stripped-down machine at a loss-leader price. It was a real computer people could use professionally.
That's the kind of gap a single price comparison hides. A dollar figure reads as affordable or not based on what a dollar means to the person reading it, and most of the currency, tax, and wage context that would make a foreign price legible just isn't there. The index needed to work globally, not just for Japan and the US, and it needed to measure more than currency conversion: what a price actually costs someone in their own labor.
The approach: take the price of a basic computer in a given city, and divide it by the entry-level wage in that same city. The result is a number of hours, or workdays, of labor it takes to buy the machine. It's the same logic as The Economist's Big Mac Index, inverted: instead of comparing what a fixed product costs across countries, this compares what a fixed institution pays across countries, to measure what a different, globally uniform product actually costs someone.
Minimum wage turns out to be a poor choice for the wage side. In Bengaluru, for example, using India's statutory minimum wage puts the labor cost of a basic computer at about 126 workdays. Using the entry rate for a junior software developer, a real, formal-sector job, drops that figure to about 50 days. Neither number is wrong, they answer different questions, and a single minimum-wage figure can't hold both. A large informal economy, or a country like the US where minimum wage varies by state, makes the statutory number close to meaningless as a stand-in for what people actually earn. Entry-level fast-food wages work better: they reflect what workers are actually paid, not a legal floor that many employers exceed or simply ignore, and they exist as a comparable job in nearly every country, which is also a deliberate inversion of the same institution the Big Mac Index already uses.
The Western hubs cluster tightly. London comes in lowest at 5.8 workdays. Berlin and Honolulu land around 6.3 to 6.5. Atlanta, despite being in the same country as Honolulu, comes in at 9.1, a reminder that a single city can't represent an entire country, especially one as large and varied as the US.
Tokyo and Seoul sit in the middle, at roughly 12 to 13 workdays, nearly double the Western hubs despite both being wealthy, developed economies. Shenzhen requires about 26 workdays, at the edge of moderate access, still well short of the emerging-market hubs but a meaningful step up from Tokyo or Seoul.
The emerging hubs need the most labor, 50 to 82 workdays depending on the city. Ho Chi Minh City is the highest-barrier hub in this data. Bengaluru and São Paulo, which I initially expected to be the worst-off cities, land closer to the middle of that range once the wage side is sourced consistently rather than estimated per city, a good reminder that the wage source matters as much as the underlying economics.
None of this is just a curiosity. When a basic computer costs multiple months of entry-level labor, that's not a software problem or an education problem, free coding bootcamps and open courseware don't fix it. It's a hardware problem, and two groups have some ability to move it. Governments can act on the tax side, since several of the largest gaps here are inflated by import duties and VAT stacked on top of the wage gap, so duty relief on entry-level and educational computing hardware would move the number without touching wages at all. Employers can act on the supply side, by routing decommissioned enterprise hardware toward refurbishment and emerging-market hires instead of scrapping it, which lowers the entry price for exactly the talent pool they may eventually want to hire from.
The next time a price looks reasonable because it's in a currency you're used to, it's worth checking what it actually costs somewhere else. That gap is usually bigger than it looks, and lately, it's getting bigger.