7 August 2005, 18:55 Hebrew Apple Store
Well, I finally did it! After months of work I finished the Hebrew version of Apple’s online store – iApple.co.il.
The Israeli market is barely aware of Apple great products. Even the iPod family of products sold only 30,000 items in total. The reason is that the Israeli representative of Apple—Yeda Computers—has never marketed the products in the media.
Me and some guys decided to go ahead and launch an online store that sells Apple products to the Israeli market. We designed the store to be as identical as possible to Apple’s online store.
I hope that I can get more people to start using Macs—less then 5% have a Mac in Israel today because of Yeda.
If everything will go as planned, we should start a campaign soon on MTV Europe for the iPod family. We hope to sell about 100,000 iPods within a year. We also plan on conducting seminars and let people get to know the Macintosh…
PS. I know the store doesn’t validate. This is because the store is using the excellent X-Cart shopping cart and I have to finish porting all the template files to proper XHTML. This will be done over time…
Comments
Lederon / Nov 16, 04:33 AM
The question on everybody’s lips is: What about Hebrew support?! Thus far no Apple product has matched the (excellent) Hebrew support you get with you know who. I’d love to switch to Apple but Hebrew is indispensible for me. Apple seem to be indifferent to this, apparently insignificant little niche in the market, yet it was important enough for Uncle Bill to address this need. I lose out as I’d buy a Mac in a heartbeat, Apple lose out on my custom. Your thoughts?
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Ran Aroussi / Nov 16, 08:39 AM
All macs fully supports Hebrew, both Unicode and Windows-1255 (by you know who…). Also, 90% of Israeli websites now supports Safari (thanks to FireFox). The iPods has Hebrew support thanks to iPodHE.
MS Word does NOT support Hebrew. A “funny” thing is that the RC version of Office did support Hebrew and you know who deliberately took it out. So for word processing you have 3 options:
- Use NeoOfficeJ/OpenOffice
- Get Office for Mac RC version
- Wait for the next office. I think MS is forced by law to have Hebrew support for the next version, though I’m not sure they’ll comply…
Hope that helps.
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Larry Steingold / Feb 25, 05:57 PM
Can you make your website convertible to English as my son is making Aliyah, and he, and others are ramping up their Hebrew. I need a transaltion software and other stuff that is Apple compatible
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Ran Aroussi / Feb 25, 09:09 PM
I don’t know of any translating software for the mac, especially one that speaks Hebrew… I’ll see what can be done about the site.
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Danny Brothers / Apr 14, 09:02 AM
RAN, the thing is Israelis will NOT buy Apples because the tariffs on electronics are SO huge here. A PS3 for example costs 4,000 shekels! That’s about a thousand dollars. In America it’s less than half of that.
So while PCs are cheaper in America and Apple’s are considered relatively expensive, over here they will be UNBEARABLY expensive as the PCs are considered manageably expensive.
What do you think? This is one thing I hate about this place is the cost of electronics.
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gps surveying / Jul 13, 09:23 PM
“RAN, the thing is Israelis will NOT buy Apples because the tariffs on electronics are SO huge here.”
NOT TRUE. ofcourse israelis will buy apples and they already do. israel is NOT a poor country. leave computers alone because i dont know statistics but 83 or more percent of israeli teens own iPods not including other apple gadgets.
Chris
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Shahar / Sep 24, 06:15 PM
Danny Brothers is right, the price is the killer here – it’s cheaper to fly to London and bring one back with you.
Yeda’s prices were plain absurd, but while the current prices are better it’s still not worth it. I expect to be flying for my next upgrade, even though I’d much rather buy here, just not at that price difference!
By the way, your alternating ‘Remember me/Forget me’ is not cute, it’s just arrogant.
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