Apparently Apple treats Chinese consumers even worse than it does North American and European consumers. For Apple buyers and tech enthusiasts, Po Boy’s comments on Apple in China are an eye-opener.
It amazes me that Apple has any business at all in China. Apple has been an extremely poor “corporate citizen” in China. They have operated with extreme arrogance in China, and have treated both their own customers in China and the Chinese courts very badly. If you look into it, you will be shocked and disappointed. Apple has just been nasty as hell in China, and needlessly.
They are pricey, too. All they got is status and “bling factor”, when domestic Chinese phones are killing them on price.
When you make this silicon for the chips and cameras, each one does not come out equal. Some chips perform to specification, some exceed, some fail. An honest company would mark the ones that fail or are on the margins as waste and not sell them. Apple marks them as “for the Chinese market”. So it sells products in China with a markedly higher rate of sluggish performance or even failure than Apple products elsewhere. And then, it cheats Chinese customers by welching on warranties. This is not a rumor or unfounded allegation, it was proven in Chinese court. Apple simply ignores the court findings and refuses to comply.
Chinese noted this stuff and this created a “black market” for Apple products in China, actually, in which Apple devices bought in the USA were sent back to China for resale, and this infuriated Apple. Then, a Chinese American lady in New Hampshire attempted to buy 4 iPhones for Christmas gifts and got denied, and the fallout from this exposed a corporate policy of Apple to deny sales of multiple units of products to any Chinese not living in China. As a way to defeat the black market that Apple itself had created, but, as an upshot — a nakedly racist policy. For that is how Chinese people took it.
Apple then released a few batches of iPads in China that were a debacle, featuring all these marginal and defective chips. This prompted a new law in China for stricter enforcement of warranties for all tablets, thanks to Apple. Unbowed, Apple simply declared that iPads are not tablets, even though 1) they are; 2) the law was specifically a response to the crap Apple was pulling with its iPads. It refuses to follow the law.
No Chinese company, no European company, no Japanese company, no other company operates with such arrogance and outright open criminality in China. Except for Apple and a few other American companies, who openly defy the laws of the land and dare the Chinese government to do something about it. They are extraordinary exceptions. Most companies operating in China at least comply with court rulings, and don’t continually abuse their own customers by welching on warranties, etc.
We’ve just moved from iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro phones to Xiaomi 14 & 15 Ultras. The cameras are another category from iPhones. There’s no reason for Chinese to buy iPhones when their own phones are significantly better. Any Westerner who wants value for their money when buying a high-end phone should be looking at Xiaomi, Huawei or Oppo at this point, not Apple or Samsung.
If the richest company in the Western world behaves the way Apple does in China, the West no longer provides any positive leadership in business. I know many small businesses who do much better. When the biggest and richest in the world behave like this, they pull the whole business environment down. In the West, we are moving from high trust societies to low trust societies. We should not be surprised to find ourselves with the same issues with stagnant economies, widespread criminality, prospering black and grey markets from which other low trust societies suffer.
Western business leaders, in particular Apple, must do better.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
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