China Telecom Getting The iPhone 4S On March 9, Prices Start At Free
This will get overshadowed by the new iPad unveiled a couple days before, but this is big news. China Telecom has 130 million customers. And, get this, one model of the 4S will be given away for free with a contract.
Huge.
"Spouting Nonsense"
Tim Worstall, a Forbes contributor, absolutely rips apart the anti-Apple tone of the recent stories about Chinese factory conditions.
This, alongside Tim Cook’s response and the letter to The New York Times from BSR President and CEO Aron Cramer refuting just about everything attributed to an anonymous “BSR consultant” in the most recent NYT story, certainly makes it seem even more like the laser-focus on Apple here was simply unwarranted.
Worstall’s best line is his last one:
Boycotting Apple for better Foxconn wages and conditions is like having sex for virginity. Entirely counter-productive and exactly the wrong thing to be doing.
[via The Brooks Review]
We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues. What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain. On this you have my word.
Tim Cook responding to the NYT piece about awful working conditions in Chinese factories where many Apple products are assembled.
It’s not a response to the press, it’s a response to the Apple team, which Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac was able to get ahold of.
It’s a good response, and the right one. I’m still just ultimately not sure how much it matters in the grand scheme of things. The real problems go far beyond Apple.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
A lot of people have asked for my take on The New York Times piece yesterday about the true cost of making Apple products in China. Let me first just say that it’s an important piece full of good reporting by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza. Parts of it are very sad — sickening, really.
But let’s be honest. The post focuses on Apple because Apple is now arguably the most successful company on the planet. If they were, say, the 8th largest computer manufacturer, they probably wouldn’t have even been mentioned. Again, that’s not to say it shouldn’t have been written — it absolutely should have — but it’s important to keep that in mind.
The real key here is that this story could have been written about any number of technology companies that have to deal with hardware manufacturing. This sad state of affairs is the way the world works in this space. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.
Does that excuse Apple’s behavior in some situations? Not at all. But there also isn’t enough background here to know if Apple is even the worst enabler of these poor working conditions. That’s sort of implied a few times in the piece, but never fully backed up.
My TechCrunch colleague Devin Coldewey wrote a great response to the piece. As he writes:
Something the article only fleetingly acknowledges is that Foxconn is used by most of the major electronics brands in the world. Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon, and the rest all contract with Foxconn to manufacture, assemble, or finish their products. The threatened mass suicide the other week was, in fact, at an Xbox production facility.
And later:
So it has never been a surprise to me when I hear that Apple, and others, only do so much to change the situation in factories and factory towns in China. The simple fact of it is they’re not the ones at the reins. Foxconn and China have our all-important tech companies by the scruff of the neck, and bear the big bad audits by Apple (more likely by people representing people representing Apple) like they’d bear a kitten swiping at their face. It’s a high stakes game, and Foxconn and its like hold all the cards.
That’s something important that the NYT never addresses. The situation is decidedly more complicated than Apple simply turning a blind eye.
While this report brings such an issue to the forefront, similar pieces and stories surface quite frequently, actually. Guess what changes? Nothing. It’s shitty to say, but it’s the truth. And we all know it.
The fact of the matter is that we live in a world that demands amazing technology delivered to us at low costs and at great speed. That world leads to Foxconn.
We say we care about the means by which the results are reached when we read stories such as this one. But then we forget. Or we chose not to remember. We buy things and we’re happy that they’re affordable. And then we buy more things. And more. With huge smiles on our faces. Without a care in the world.
Apple has done what Google and Facebook cannot do: become No. 1 in China.
John Quelch, former senior associate dean of Harvard Business School and now head of the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, talking to the New York Times.
This is something that finally got some buzz this past quarter — Apple is killing it in China.
They did $3.8 billion in revenues from Greater China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) last quarter. And that’s with only four Apple Stores open in two cities, Beijing and Shanghai. In the coming year, they’re going to open a ton more.
And those numbers are coming before Apple is on China’s largest carrier, China Mobile.
When people look at Apple’s already astronomical numbers and wonder how they can possibly go higher, this is how.
Baidu Goes With Bing For English Searches
It sure is easy to pick Bing when you can’t pick Google.
It was the last straw,” he said, pointing out that he and his family were visited repeatedly by the police before they left the Soviet Union when he was 6 years old.
