Discovery of the century!, or Chinese like shiny things

Ok, as I have said already (well, repeated ad nauseam actually) the habit of reading the news will be my downfall sometimes. You ever try to show your wife an article you find amusing while she's busy with reading stuff she finds amusing?.. Yes, exactly. No cutlery flying as of yet, but I wouldn't rule it out. Oh, but I digress.

One of the funniest things is reading various Apple-related blogs. Apple Computers' fans are a funny lot. Anything Apple does they see as great innovation (OK, OK, excepting the iPod Socks). Like, you know, GUIs (idea came from Xerox Alto, of course). Or using RISC CPUs in computers (Archimedes Acorn and countless others, anyone?). But there was at least something to say for all these. Like making something with GUI that does not require a decent-sized cabinet to house it. Or participating in the creation of a really successful RISC architecture. They were not the first but they managed to bring it to the customer in a neatly designed package and that's a lot in my book.

But some of the more recent things: iPhone 3G, which introduced such revolutionary features as MMS and (gasp!) 3G connectivity. Oh, and GPS. Also known as "the features all the other smartphones had by that time". And I'm saying nothing of the Great Copy-Paste Debates... Every time those Apple fans would defend crippled features of them gadgets (AFAIR some people even told everyone and their grandmother that you need no copy-paste feature on a smartphone!) and when the next iteration of hardware or software brought them to their beloved devices there would be cries of joy that Apple had somehow revolutionized it.

But all that lengthy preamble was written just for me to say that Apple fans are a bit too sure that Apple devices are bought for "Apple experience", whatever that means. And that's where the news come in.

You see, I've been reading this. And it occurred to me that good people at TUAW are somewhat naive. The article was about Macs being the most desirable PC in China and they seem to believe that Chinese are buying them for the same reason – that same "Apple experience". Alas, if that's the case they're wrong. The reason Chinese people buy Apple gadgets is entirely different.

To understand it you may want to look up the sales figures of BMW in Zhejiang province of China. They grew 60% in one year. Similar figures were reported for other luxury brands. And the reason for that is simple: Chinese are show-offs. They must show to the whole world that they're prosperous, otherwise nobody would believe it. And you show it by bying expensive cars, stupid  LV handbags and yes, expensive gadgets.

As you see, that "experience" things comes nowhere near it. And the sad truth is, most of these computers will have Mac partitions shrank to the minimum size and then Windows installed in the Bootcamp. And pirated windows, at that. How do I know that? Well, I talked to the retailers and I know plenty of Mac owners here. Only one of them is using OS X. All the others? Why, Win XP of course! They don't need to learn anything new, they just need to show off... So the real title to that article should be: Apple the most desired PC in China to run MS Windows.