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Report: iTunes Movies and iBooks Stores in China Ordered Closed by Chinese State Agency
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I don't know about you, but I prefer google's search and services (GMail, Google maps, Google Docs, Youtube, etc).
You might be the only person in the world who prefers Bing, Hotmail, etc.
This being an apple forum, my answer probably won't surprise you.
I use bing because it's the best alternative to google. It's good enough. Would I use it in another country? Probably not but then again I'd consider using DuckDuckGo or something anyway.
Gmail is accessible but annoying in that it is intermittently blocked. However, my problems with gmail began long before I moved to China, when they refused to continue supporting push email outside of their own app. Since then I used my @me.com address for anything urgent anyway, so getting spam at 2 hour intervals instead of 15 minute ones isn't the end of the world.
The city I am in has excellent Apple maps support. I don't particularly miss google maps. My wife uses baidu's map product and the street views etc are equivalent.
I don't use google docs. I use iCloud Drive, surprise surprise!
It's also surprisingly easy to find new ways to procrastinate when Facebook, YouTube aren't available. I don't particularly miss either.
Outside of search I don't use Microsoft products. Oh, apart from their new translator, which is pretty damn good.
Have you been here in the past few years? It's going rapidly backwards under Xi.
Global internet sites are being blocked more and more frequently, VPNs are becoming hit and miss, Xinwen Lianbo is becoming extremely anti-western, this year's Gala was full of "red songs" and extreme patriotism to an extent I haven't seen for more than a decade.
Meanwhile, newspapers have been shut down, and many dissidents who had been given some degree of freedom over the past decade are now under house arrest or in prison.
The crackdown on the media and on dissent is shocking. Also, there's an anti-western sentiment that is totally new. With western looks, I used to feel like a celebrity here. Now I feel like I'm being viewed with suspicion.
China really feels like it is headed for a new Cultural Revolution. Especially during the past year. Most expats have one eye on the door, just in case the situation keeps deteriorating.
FaceTime is also not working now. Tried calling a friend in China tonight and we both could not get a connection. On both sides the iPhones or iPads would just ring then say connecting but never connect regardless of whether it was via cellular connection or wifi.
It seems quite clear that the communist party is heading in the wrong direction.
I suppose it's not surprising given that the "president" is a cult of personality type and has been working hard to consolidate powers under the guise of punishing "corruption." Surprisingly, people actually seem to buy into the genuine nature of these tactics, which are really straight out of Orwelian, Stalin playbook.
Now that China is done, for the most part, with the easy part of growth by catching up to 21st century infrastructure and technology, the next wave of economic growth will most likely require increasingly moving closer to a free market system, reducing government involvement along with its bad incentive structures (building ghost buildings, cronyism, etc) and unleashing the power of consumer choice and entrepreneurship.
Unfortunately, this seems extremely unlikely.
That's strange. It was working a few weeks back.
I guess China is really doubling down on restriction of internet freedom.
It worked as of 2 days ago.
But I have had problems in the past where it just won't go beyond "connecting". But usually it would work on an iPhone with a different Apple ID, either my other parent at their end of my wife here.
Yes I've experienced that in the past as well.
Any non-Chinese internet services are bound to be unreliable in China.
Sounds like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They ban FaceTime,Whatsapp,Line and any other app that allows voice calls or videos.
Wechat voice calls on the other hand work when calling China from abroad or to abroad countries.
No... Sounds like the Chinese carriers wanted phone calls to continue and didn't want to allow FaceTime audio to move these calls onto data networks that were at the time stretched to capacity and, although better today, still struggling in many areas.
They probably have 1/2 billion users online now so it is quite possible that their networks get overcrowded and bogged down at times. China's internet connection is very very slow these days especially if you try opening up a website that is not in China.
BBC News,Bloomberg and Flipboard are still blocked in China. Most VPN servers also do not work and if they do work the they are only up for a short time. Aside from the short time is that the connection is literally at a snail's pace.
i access bbc news every day, on both my home internet and on china mobile LTE
That's up to the companies that use these factories and there's a reason why they can't, though it's not what they say it is nor is it what anyone could infer at face value from that. More power to those who know the reason, FWIW (which is nothing, no worries).
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But Tim Cook says it's a matter of skills -- the Chinese are so much better at censorship and dissident round ups, we just can't hope to compete at their level.
I wonder if Cook will dare to say a word in public about China's recent ban on same-sex marriages? My guess is he will stay mum (and 100% hypocritical).
Naah, he'll just move operations to Iran where same-sex marriages are approved of. Apple's been trying to open up stores to sell in Iran, if nothing else... good luck to Apple, I would be surprised if Iran said "no", citing religious freedom issues... and I doubt it's Cook going over there personally.
Perhaps you are lucky. BBC along with Bloomberg news has been blocked for quite some time in China along with Google,YouTube,Instagram and Facebook.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-29628356
have you actually tried to access the BBC from China?
access was restored about 3 days later and i haven't had a problem since.
misinformation is as bad as censorship.
From article about Apple - "a new law in China passed in March. It requires all content shown to Chinese people to be stored on servers based on the Chinese mainland" (bbc.com)
Apparently, there was a new law passed that requires all servers to be stored in mainland China.
Are they seriously going to block all servers outside of China?
Apparently, there was a new law passed that requires all servers to be stored in mainland China.
Are they seriously going to block all servers outside of China?
About 1 week ago I was in China. I could not access Bloomberg,BBC News,Flipboard,Line and even crazier is the graph on stock charts from investing.com
All of those bar bbc news, yup, but I access bbc news every day. Sometimes there are small patches it won't load properly or is massively slow even though I have 100meg internet. Maybe you got one of those patches I guess :/