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If you think you’re having a rough day after your New Year’s festivities, an Apple Store in Paris’ opera district is still trying to determine just how much hardware was stolen after four or five armed thieves robbed the store three hours after it had closed.
The local police aren’t confirming the exact amount that was stolen, but The Telegraph claims there are reports that the thieves made off with over one million euros, or £0.8 million, worth of goods. The robbery was particularly brazen given extra police and security personnel had been called in to keep the peace during the city’s New Year’s Eve celebrations. But since most of them were concentrated around the tourist-heavy Champs-Elysées, the thieves had a fairly easy escape after spending almost 40 minutes emptying the store’s stock room into a getaway vehicle. [The Telegraph & LeMonde]
Editor, please.
1 Million Euros. Not £!!
It’s around £1 million pounds
— after all, reports say over one mil euros of goods stolen, so close to 1 million pounds
1 million euros is £813,060, that’s like a 20% difference! #Anal
Particularly stupid since most devices will be trackable, surely?
Boxed items in a stock room would not be so easily trackable. Display items on the shop floor in Apple Stores are however trackable, but unless they know the serial numbers for all the stocked items then it will be hard to trace them as far as I am aware.
They do know the serial items for all the stocked items, how do you think they stock-keep?
Ahhh I just checked my box for my MacBook Pro and they have two barcodes on, one for the part number which they would scan to get the price on a POS system and the other is the serial number. So I assume when they bring in stock they scan the second barcode too.
Still harder for them to locate the boxed items though.
They keep track of both, so when you then used the device (iPhone, iPad, Macbook, iMac, whatever) they’re all trackable.
Jeez, someone do that math. If one extreme end Mac Pro, fully decked out with extras and accessories costs about £11K, then they’d still need somewhere in the region of 110 to steal over around a million pounds worth. That’d need some serious lifting capability. Plus, as big as that store is, I don’t think they have 110 Mac Pro’s, nor in that hyper expensive configuration…
Erm, you’d truly be surprised how much stock they have.
They actually stole 39,999 Lightning to 30 pin connectors, and 1 pair of EarPods. It’s amazing how much stuff you can fit on a pallet.
So they stole one 15 inch retina Macbook?
I’m here all week.
Last night, armed robbers stole £1 million worth of Apple products at RRP. This is estimated to cost apple a staggering £57.83 in component costs, lowering their money pile by 18 microns.
Apples 2012 Net income, $41,730,000,000
(((41,730,000,000 / 364) / 24) / 60) / 60 = $1326.88492063 every second (£817.10)
1,000,000 / 817.10 = 1223.84041121 seconds
1223.84041121 / 60 = 20.3973401868 minutes
So within 20 minutes they had made that money back.
Hmmmm I don’t know what to think. If you ask me Apple of thieves in the first place charging so much money for their incredibly simple products.
Okay, genuine question. Why are people so worked up about how much Apple charge? I mean, seriously?
You think that their products are not worth it. Great, don’t buy them. This is how a free market works. They don’t have to sell, you don’t have to buy. If you can find a price you both like, then do a deal. And frankly, it’s clear that there are many, many people who find the price / quality / support trade-off with Apple well worth it. Apple would be in breach of their duty to their shareholders if they didn’t sell at a price the market would support, which it clearly will.
Put another way. A BMW 1 series is a lot more expensive than a Focus, and is arguably a worse car. I don’t see anyone calling BMW thieves for charging more. If you may chose either car, why not the same with tech? Live and let live. It’s fantastic that there are such genuine choices in most areas of tech now, far better than five years ago when all smartphones were pieces of crap.
Happy new year all, hope you all got whatever gadget you wanted for Xmas.
I agree with you. I bet half the people who call out Apple for being overpriced for what they are all wear Nike trainers or some sort of designer clothes. Isn’t that just the same thing?
Apple will just sue Samsung again and reclaim their losses. Maybe Samsung employees stole the gear!
If we get all Samsung workers to thieve from all their stores on the same night we may be able to take them down “:)” “Evil smile”
You’ve got to reckon 20-30% on the pound (or Euro) when it comes to fencing the stolen Apples so a ‘group’ of people risk long term-imprisonment for £200K-£300K, let’s assume 4 thieves (random number) then their ‘take’ is just £50K-£75K each, with a possible prison term of 7-10 years in France, equating to between £7K-£10.5K per year; hardly worth the effort surely?
Criminal economics is fascinating, most armed bank robbers in the UK risk a 10-20 year sentence for, on average £20,000 stolen, although a third actually end up stealing nothing, and that £20K is total stolen, not each, if the robber has a gang with him that needs to be split!
Yeah, the risk/profit thing is really not that great, but despite the lower value goods, Apple are probably a much softer target than say, a jewelers (who expect to be robbed).
£1m of goods, but only cost apple a fraction of that to make them such is their ludicrous profit margins, so they wont lose out on that much.
40 minutes to break in and load up?! That’s oodles of time – who are the Parisian Police headed by, Inspector Clueso?