Still Impossible To Source Stuff

[ben]

So I have a Logitech wireless keyboard. It works on solar light - has worked for 3 years without a hitch.

Recently it's started to give up the ghost - stopped working as soon as the light was off, and then started acting up even with the light on.

I saw early on that behind the keyboard was a tray of sorts, presumably to make changing the batterly possible. So I go online to see how that gets done.

It turns out that it uses a rechargeable version of a very popular coin battery. The normal version is the CR2032, ML2032 is the rechargeable one. (It goes without saying that putting a non-rechargeable battery in a place where it will be receiving charging current is a bad idea).

I check on eBay and Amazon, the normal price for the ML2032 is between $5 and $7. Great, so here it will cost 200 pesos minimum, right?

Wrong. They don't have them in this country. Anywhere. At any price.

I walked into a couple of electronics shops, nobody heard of this thing. One started explaining to me that no such product exists, until his buddy googled it and "what do you know? It's true!"

Checked on mercadolibre - total dead end.

Googled for any arg page that mentions it - links to a bunch of ML searches that produced nothing, as above. Followed by AliExpress.

This country has no shortage of tech. Overpriced, yes, but generally stuff can be found here. Hell, the keyboard in question can be found here (at double the US price, of course) all over the place.

So, the following takeaways:

1) Any not-end-user product, is still not to be found anywhere.
2) No user of such a device (as above, it's sold here plenty) has tried to use it past the life of its battery.
3) Anyone has a spare ML2032 battery? Please let me know.
4) Anyone has a Mac keyboard to sell, wired or not? Please let me know.

</rant>

 

[gpop]

crap, i have the same keyboard. And I'm going on my 3rd year with it now.

 

[scotttswan]

get a friend in the usa to post it?

http://amzn.to/2ag5W4L

 

[nikad]

In 30 days you can buy it online and get it at your doorstep, just like in the old days.

http://www.clarin.com/sociedad/regimen-compras-puerta-oficial-arranca_0_1621037891.html

 

[ElQueso]

Well, easier (maybe), but not everything goes to the door:

Los paquetes que no superen los dos kilos de peso ni los US$ 200 de valor se podrán recibir en el domicilio. Si el envío superara cualquiera de estos parámetros deberá retirarse en la sucursal del correo.

(Emphasis from the article).

But at least one is no longer limited to $25 USD in value twice a year, though it is $1000 USD in value 5 times a year (and limited to no more than three of the same thing per shipment as well!). In addition, the recipient will receive a notice in the mail that they received a package and the recipient must go to AFIP website, generate a ticket for the package and go pay required import duty before they actually send the package to your door - or before you can go pick up the package if it's more than $200 USD in value.

You also must have a CUIT, CUIL or CDI to do this - "tourists" won't be able to have stuff shipped to them like this unless they get a CDI.

We'll see how well this works, I suppose. Of course, I think having to pay import duties is crap to begin with, but at least they are trying to make it easy to pay your fine for buying outside the country where prices and quality.are better (or where things exist that aren't even sold here because of restrictions)...heaven forbid should there be competition!

But I love this part:

Siempre según lo establecido por la AFIP, los libros y otros impresos serán librados bajo la modalidad puerta a puerta.

(Again, emphasis from the article).

I'm not saying that I think Macri will try to limit imports on books like Cristina did, but rather laughing at the use of the word "siempre" in the article. I quit ordering books from Amazon when they were consistently held up at Ezeiza when I was sending them through my mail forwarder (which comes via DHL) or at Correo central when Amazon shipped them directly (last time the latter worked was 2008).

Doesn't matter to me any more though - the holding up of books during Cristina's time forced me to get a tablet and an Amazon account so I could "read without borders"...I always thought physical books were so much better than reading something from a screen and now I'm the opposite. Cristina was good for something - I wonder how many trees she saved!

 

[UK Man]

Your first quote detailing the limitations makes sense and is most welcome. However I think I'll wait until I hear some first hand reports before putting in an order from blighty.

I wonder what will happen to parcels that have been impounded already? My wife has been waiting months for a parcel from England so it'll be interesting to see if it arrives. Probably been sold on Mercado Libre.

 

[ElQueso]

According to La Nacion, there will be an auction for things never picked up from aduana:

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1921954-dientes-de-dracula-joysticks-y-barriles-de-roble-los-productos-mas-insolitos-del-proximo-remate-de-aduana

 

[Crema Americana]

And by "never picked up from aduana" they probably mean "notice never delivered to recipient and parcel thrown in a dark container for 4 months..... oh, and we're only the selling the garbage we haven't taken for ourselves."


Been over 3 months now and I have yet to get a package from a friend in the US.
So far I have not been impressed with Macri and his administrations ability to run anything.



As for the battery, that seems small enough that if you get a family member to send you a card (birthday card or whatever) and tape the battery to the inside, it may just make it through. Those musical cards tend to be okay. Of course it took 3 weeks for the last card I got to make it here, but they generally fare much better than packages.

 

[ElQueso]

I don't know - I left two hard-cover books and an electrical cable for a laptop (just the electrical part, not the whole transformer) with aduana, two different shipments, a year or two apart, because I found out it was going to cost me around $100 USD to get them out of aduana (each shipment). The books were $40 USD and the cable $19 USD. Certainly neither one worth paying the thieves to get out.

It wouldn't surprise me to see that most of the items left in aduana that are going to be auctioned off fall into the same sort of category. Also, I suspect that aduana themselves are not the ones who robbed the shipments that never made it (those that weren't simply lost due to incompetence), but rather the employees of correo or others who handled the shipments.

 

[UK Man]

And by "never picked up from aduana" they probably mean "notice never delivered to recipient and parcel thrown in a dark container for 4 months..... oh, and we're only the selling the garbage we haven't taken for ourselves."

Indeed.