Author bought a Huawei watch and found it to be an excellent replacement for his Apple watch.
That said, most the article concerns the below bit and I tend to agree with it.
The China challenge is much bigger than alarmists understand.
It’s not just about espionage or market share.
It’s about the United States and the West more broadly losing
preeminence and Chinese firms becoming reliable parts of life.
From a security standpoint: When my data lands in the hands of Chinese interests and USA entities, only the latter is leveraging it against me. In the stack of data risks to be mitigated, China is at the bottom and everyone tied to the US is at the top.
> But a new Apple Watch would cost several hundred dollars, and I can’t justify that. With the discounts, a Huawei watch cost well under two hundred US dollars. And, frankly, it looks better. So I betrayed America. Reader, I bought one.
A more direct way to think about this is that you betrayed yourself by buying things you don't need, regardless of if it came from Apple or Huawei. You could have bought a Casio digital watch that's much cheaper, more robust, more eco friendly, and runs for years on the same battery with no recharging.
> But since the Chinese government already has my OPM file and probably a lot more besides (I worked in the House during Salt Typhoon!), it’s not like I was risking a lot.
> Chery specializes in making affordable, mass-market cars that look nice. (The entry-level Chery retails in Qatar for about $15,000 USD—try finding a new car of any kind in the United States for $15,000.)
This is because nobody (*EDIT: by which I of course mean relatively few) would buy it. People signal wealth, status, and even personal values by way of their vehicle in the US. Dealership financing departments ask customers how much they can afford per month in payment and work backwards from there to sell them the vehicle that they want at any cost. The average new vehicle price is around $50,000 because people are actively choosing to buy more expensive cars and trucks [1], not because there aren't cheaper ones around, and 96-month car loans are now a thing because of it.
Unrelated to article per se, but I’ve noticed a distinctive shift as to who tourism-dependent countries cater to. Thailand, Malaysia, etc. all shifted their tourism to cater to the Chinese tourist market, as Westerners don’t spend as big when travelling. Both places have big signs in mandarin in the airport going 友誼長存, meaning long lasting friendship (between our countries). Personally, I’ve never seen this level of glazing towards any Western country before.
Similar thing with luxury brands. While Louis Vuitton is closing stores in SF, they’ve custom built a huge boat-shaped one in Shanghai.
If we want to catch up, maybe we really need to work a lot harder, and to smooth the shocking pain, some redistribution of wealth to the working class is needed.
There’s a smaller gap in smartphone makers, where Apple and Samsung dominate globally and in the USA, but once you look at the next manufacturers after the leaders you notice that names like Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme, and Huawei together constitute a sizable global share. And, yes, those are all Chinese brands.
There were a lot more Chinese Android "brands" (most of them probably OEM'd, but I digress) around 10-15 years ago. Ainol, Blackview, Cubot, Doogee, Elephone, Gionee, Goophone, iOcean, Jiayu, KingZone, Leagoo, Meizu, Nckia (yes, seriously), NO.1, Oukitel, TCL, THL, Ulephone, Umidigi, UniHertz, Vivo, Zopo... how many of those still exist today? It's rather interesting that the ones which still do have gone the same user-hostile route as Apple and Samsung. The era of Shanzhai has unfortunately mostly passed.
turns out if you shit on your allies, they'll start doing business with your systemic rival instead
and once their consumers start buying their better products, produced at lower cost, with less political baggage, you aint getting that market share back
and all it took was some facebook ads to get the US to surrender the next century to the Chinese
Over 10 years ago we were buying a lot of camping equipment. We had purchased some items from Amazon which looked good visually and they were from one of these mashing-on-the-keyboard brands like "kjhghjdfh". When we received the items they were of AMAZING quality. I wanted to purchase more items from this brand but of course, they were gone.
A lot of those "mashing-the-keyboard" names come from a company with a Chinese name translating their name into English using the first letter of each Chinese character.
Disregarding issues with politics or privacy, I find the rise of Chinese manufacturing quality astonishing. I ordered all kinds of consumer articles in the last 20 years and the improvements have been big and steady. In recent years they also leapfrogged on the service front, like how AliExpress offers Amazon-like return policy despite having fraction of the infra and the wares under tax sanctions. I see not only more chinese cars, but construction and medical equipment. Price/performance is always excelling.
One would think this would trigger some sort of revival and competing from US/EU industries, but not much had happened yet besides lobbying for sanctions.
China has been making good for the rest of the world for decades. I thoughts it’s common sense that it’s only a matter of time before they replace the Apple logo on the phones they made with their own logo.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 33.9 ms ] threadThat said, most the article concerns the below bit and I tend to agree with it.
From a security standpoint: When my data lands in the hands of Chinese interests and USA entities, only the latter is leveraging it against me. In the stack of data risks to be mitigated, China is at the bottom and everyone tied to the US is at the top.A more direct way to think about this is that you betrayed yourself by buying things you don't need, regardless of if it came from Apple or Huawei. You could have bought a Casio digital watch that's much cheaper, more robust, more eco friendly, and runs for years on the same battery with no recharging.
> But since the Chinese government already has my OPM file and probably a lot more besides (I worked in the House during Salt Typhoon!), it’s not like I was risking a lot.
Apathy is never a good solution.
This is because nobody (*EDIT: by which I of course mean relatively few) would buy it. People signal wealth, status, and even personal values by way of their vehicle in the US. Dealership financing departments ask customers how much they can afford per month in payment and work backwards from there to sell them the vehicle that they want at any cost. The average new vehicle price is around $50,000 because people are actively choosing to buy more expensive cars and trucks [1], not because there aren't cheaper ones around, and 96-month car loans are now a thing because of it.
[1] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-flirting-...*
The competition for a $15,000 new car is the US is used cars, which are available in great abundance for under $15,000.
Similar thing with luxury brands. While Louis Vuitton is closing stores in SF, they’ve custom built a huge boat-shaped one in Shanghai.
There were a lot more Chinese Android "brands" (most of them probably OEM'd, but I digress) around 10-15 years ago. Ainol, Blackview, Cubot, Doogee, Elephone, Gionee, Goophone, iOcean, Jiayu, KingZone, Leagoo, Meizu, Nckia (yes, seriously), NO.1, Oukitel, TCL, THL, Ulephone, Umidigi, UniHertz, Vivo, Zopo... how many of those still exist today? It's rather interesting that the ones which still do have gone the same user-hostile route as Apple and Samsung. The era of Shanzhai has unfortunately mostly passed.
and once their consumers start buying their better products, produced at lower cost, with less political baggage, you aint getting that market share back
and all it took was some facebook ads to get the US to surrender the next century to the Chinese
Strong brands are good for the consumer.
you can get a Nissan versa for $17k https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/versa-sedan.html
One would think this would trigger some sort of revival and competing from US/EU industries, but not much had happened yet besides lobbying for sanctions.