Posted on 07/21/2011 12:21:44 PM PDT by americanophile
BEIJING - At first, it looks like a sleek Apple store. Sales assistants in blue T-shirts with the company's logo chat to customers. Signs advertising the iPad 2 hang from the white walls. Outside, the famous logo sits next to the words "Apple Store."
And that's the clue it's fake.
China, long known for producing counterfeit consumer gadgets, software and brand name clothing, has reached a new piracy milestone — fake Apple stores.
An American who lives in Kunming in southern Yunnan province said Thursday that she and her husband stumbled on three shops masquerading as bona fide Apple stores in the city a few days ago. She took photos and posted them on her BirdAbroad blog.
The three stores are not among the authorized resellers listed on Apple Inc.'s website. The maker of the iPhone and other hit gadgets has four company stores in China — two in Beijing and two in Shanghai — and various official resellers. Apple's Beijing office declined to comment.
The proliferation of the fake stores underlines the slow progress that China's government is making in countering a culture of a rampant piracy and widespread production of bogus goods that is a major irritant in relations with trading partners.
China's Commerce Minister promised American executives earlier this year that the latest in a string of crackdowns on product piracy would deliver lasting results.
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This is BullShite. Freepers keep telling me free trade is good for America.
This is nothing compared to the fake economy and international image they’ve managed to manufacture.
Aren’t most Apple products made in China anyway? Why can’t they sell them?
bought a microsoft program not long ago manufactured in Puerto Rico. Said such, right on the box. Apple is now made in china. Think I'll go to my padded room.
Amateurs...this is nothing.
Here in America, we have a former community organizer masquerading as the President...
wedged in between the fake Starbucks and the fake Barnes and Noble
The stores and products are identicle to what is sold in the US. All the product is made in China and other 3rd world mudholes. Nothing is made in the US anymore. US companies are nothing but importers (think Pier 1 from the 70s), they have a foreign made item emblazoned with their name and sell it through their US importing and distribution system.
Those same factories that make Nike,Rebok,Apple, GE, etc items by day also make the same items on their 2nd and 3rd shifts for sale to the highest (non US) bidder.
So when you see “fake” product in China, maybe it is the real deal and the true fakes are in the Apple Stores in the USA.
You’re conflating free trade with theft. No trade deal condones theft of intellectual property. Conversely, no barriers to trade could have prevented this theft.
So how exactly did China get access to all of this technology in the first place?
Outsourcing does lead to theft of technology, when the foreign contractors take to doing some moonlight production; or when they decide to manufacture under their own label. Outsourcing is facilitated by free trade — so, to that extent, you have a point. However, you have to ask yourself why manufacturing and services were outsourced in the first place. Free trade is not the root of the problems, and protectionism has always been, and will continue to be, the path to ruination.
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