Glad to see a thread about China as i'm Chinese.
In my view, the user of Apple in china, especially the iphone user would grow significantly in the next few years. As you all says, few Chinese are interesting about Apple's product for mainly two reasons: First is the high price. Not every single family can afford 10000-20000 yuan for a laptop or 5000 yuan for a smart phone. In this case, we've got two choices to get an iPhone- directly buy it from apple store in 5000 yuan or sign a contact with China Union by a monthly pay for phone charge, what you also should know is the strange Chinese social system- China has the world's most public servant, and people who engaged in this job are usually get a regular allowance for telephone fee(in fact, many state-owned company workers have the same allowance too), as mentioned before, these people could use the allowance to get an iPhone from China Union totally free! What stop these people from getting an iPhone is the problem caused by change service to China Union which means they also need to change their phone number too, another reason is also the reason why most Chinese doesn't like Apple: the bad after sale service and language support, until this month, China has only four Apple Stores- two in Beijing and two in Shanghai, if you are in other cities, you can only looking for the service provider which could solve only few few cases. While turn to the language issue, i found it's a really special case - even apple has do a great job for Chinese support in both Mac os and iOS that doesn't means all the software developer do the same job, in a result, people are turning away from apple as they don't understand English and to many apple owner, they would contend that iXXX is useless as they know little about English, but it's a shame to acknowledge one can't do something like reading English in Chinese tradition, accordingly, they'd like to say apple is a beautiful hull but useless. The left few people are typically the upper class or people who receive a higher education. Gradually, Apple has become a symbol of rich or superior education in China, as the human basic instinct, many apple customers are actually buy an apple device to imply he or she is rich- they even never use Mac os in an iMac or mbp and most iPhone users can only follow some websites to do a jailbreak then download numbered apps from those webs. Whatever, as the progress of apple in Chinese marketing, apple would continually and more wildly satisfy our Chinese customer.
