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Apple's sales plunged in China — these are the iPhone giant's 5 biggest problems right now (www.cnbc.com)

submitted 2 years ago by yogthos@lemmygrad.ml to c/worldnews@lemmygrad.ml

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[–] Trudge@lemmygrad.ml 36 points 2 years ago (1 children)

“These high-end devices are not only competitively priced, starting predominantly at 3,999 RMB ($563), but also boast features akin to those found in premium smartphones,” Shah said. “This increased competition exerts pressure on both Apple’s older models and the base models of its new series.”

This is something I noticed. The specs on premium Chinese phones are comparable to flagship Apple or Samsung, but it's half price or less. I don't buy them since the opaque structure around cellphone ownership forces me to use the ones offered by my carrier unless I want to pay extra, but American and South Korean phones are already not competitive. Chinese phones are superior already and the gap's going to keep widening.

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I also recall reading a while back how wechat has effectively become the one stop app for most people in China. You talk to friends on it, you make payments through it, you order stuff at restaurants, etc. The ecosystem is the major differentiating factor between different platforms like Android or Apple, but if people are spending most of their time in one app, then this doesn't actually matter all that much. Apple phones were just kind of like getting bling to show off, but now it looks like Huawei is getting popular because people are proud that a Chinese company is able to compete with US ones. So, I expect Apple doesn't really have much prospect in China going forward.

[–] Trudge@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

It's actually funny how the app ecosystem mirrors the political discourse.

When you need multiple apps to do anything, there's freedom of choice. When one app does everything, it's authoritarian.

Normally I'm against monopolies, but Apple and Google take an unreasonable cut from their app stores so the Wechat monopoly might be less exploitative if it can make people OS independent, especially when CPC's regulating and watching them closely.

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 years ago

Indeed, and to add to that, I'd argue that a lot of choice is very much superficial here, since Google and Apple control the service pipelines and underlying machinery that the apps use.

This is why it's very difficult to use a phone that doesn't use their platforms in the west. You end up being cut off from most useful stuff.

As always, capitalism provides us with a veneer of choice here.

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 2 years ago

Apple/Google using their monopoly to extort high cuts would be one of the less bad things for China. The biggest problem would be reliance on Western corporations for core and essential services. India's tech sector is being serviced by Western corporations mostly. WhatsApp is the national messaging app, Google Pay is the most common app for online payments through UPI, online shopping is dominated by Amazon, etc. Russia and China have avoided this through protectionist measures but India has no alternatives in place. There are some indigenous gig economy food/grocery delivery and taxi service apps though.

[–] IzyaKatzmann@hexbear.net 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's really fully featured. I was trying to play around with an LLM made in China, they gave an invite to a group on WeChat with some other people and everyone was asking the LLM questions and the bot would respond. I had something similar in Discord for Stable Diffusion, it's just, Discord has poor performance for me and WeChat was running pretty well. It's nice that they have verified accounts too, even with that the sheer breadth of stuff available is overwhelming.

When talking to friends who grew up in China, I would point out a feature and they would comment that they had no clue that was something WeChat could do.

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

WeChat is really pretty amazing, and there's really no equivalent to it in western software ecosystem.

[–] Imnecomrade@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

emacs? (I know it doesn't compare regarding its learning curve, plus it is a more text based environment. I am saying this jokingly.)

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Haha there's a joke that Emacs is a great operating system, it just lacks a good editor. :)

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

WeChat makes me think of X in the sense that the idea of an "eevrything" app that the charlatan Musk peddles has already been realised for quite a while in China. I think Kakao stuff in South Korea is similar in scope too but I am just guessing. For some reason Musk chose an extremely strange starting point for this project in Twitter. Now this X project is public facing in the smallest aspect but no idea where it will go from here. The x.com domain literally just does a 302 redirect to the equivalent twitter.com URL.

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 years ago

I recall Musk actually said in one interview that WeChat was the inspiration. I agree that Twitter seems like an odd starting point for this sort of app, and so far there's been no visible development towards this supposed goal.

As most things Musk does, I expect this will end up being mostly hot air. They'll probably bolt together a. Potemkin village of an app at some point and call it a day.

[–] bobs_guns@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 years ago

Every charlatan CEO in the West wants to make Wechat but in America.

[–] redtea@lemmygrad.ml 24 points 2 years ago

Good job the pressure of the market will force Apple to lower their prices and improve their products. That's why I love the free market.

[–] JoeDaRedTrooperYT@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 2 years ago

RIP lol