By delaying release of iPhone 6 in mainland China, Apple encourages fakes
Apple has announced that the iPhone6 will be available only in silver, gold and grey when it goes on sale in Hong Kong on Friday, and it will not be available in the mainland for another week.
Dear lady, you hope in vain. Apple has announced that the iPhone6 will be available only in silver, gold and grey when it goes on sale in Hong Kong on Friday, and it will not be available in the mainland for another week.
But you can always check if you have a fake. Just see if it came with a twist key and whether there is a wind-up slot in the back. If so, you have a genuine article of some sort or another. It might even give you a reasonable approximation of the time if you wind it up. Very retro, the latest fashion.
You can just picture the Apple people in California, fuming every time some new feature of their latest gadget is revealed to the public in China when it was all supposed to be kept secret for the big announcement at home.
"We'll show them," says boss Tim Cook. "We'll release a week late in China. That'll teach them. But don't tell anyone that that's why we're doing it." Bad call, boys. Delay a product launch in China when the product is assembled in China and all you do is tempt the fakers to fake you as they have never before.
Of course, it's not as easy to fake an iPhone as it is an Italian handbag, at least not if you expect to make any money from it. I imagine the fakers are either selling iPhones that fell off the wagon and were given substitute pink covers or they are making promises to supply the genuine article at a later date.
Let me say immediately that I do not approve of faked medicines, faked packaged foods that contain toxins or faked flight-critical components of aircraft. But I do very much clap and cheer when fashion goods are faked.
That sort of faking keeps the market honest. When a handbag that retails for US$1,000 can be produced for US$100 and few customers can discern the difference, the faker tells us in the most concrete way possible that the difference is purely marketing hype.
Into the blown-up bubble of marketing illusion he then sticks the pin of reality and all of us can have a giggle at the discomfiture of the brand-name owner. As a form of consumer protection, I think it is more effective than any consumer council.
Recently, for instance, I watched a documentary on the top Bordeaux grand cru houses in which one vineyard owner described the drinking of his wine as a mystical experience of religious proportions and in the next breath railed against wine fakers in China.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. If your particular ferment provides such a transcendent experience, fellow, then the fakers could never have matched it and no one would be fooled.
But it's just wine, probably very good wine, but still just wine and what it does is it goes well with dinner and gets you drunk if you have too much of it at a sitting. That's what it does, no more. The buyers couldn't tell the difference.
Time, therefore, to bring the prices of wines from your vineyard back down to reality, sir. You have been spotted. Thank you, Faker Charlie, for a service to the wine-drinking public.
I have yet to see Apple set the iPhone in a shrine and worship it, but some of its customers are close to such veneration and already we hear of scalpers charging big premiums at iPhone launches.
If this trend continues and Apple encourages it by restricting supply, then at some point the price of an iPhone will exceed its cost by such a large margin as to have the fakers replicate the whole thing rather than just give it a pink cover.
And then Apple may scream and yell as much as it wants, but I shall just laugh again. Production dishonesty in China promotes honest pricing for consumer goods in the rest of the world.
