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What You Get When You Buy a $40 iPhone In a Bar
Barence writes "How good — or bad — are fake iPhones? PC Pro blogger Steve Cassidy has a friend who paid £25 ($40) for an 'iPhone' in a bar, and he's got the photos and full lowdown of what's inside this not-so smartphone. The phone looks convincing enough from the outside, with a genuine-looking backplate, but things start to go wrong when you switch it on. What's a "Java" and "WLAN" App button doing on the screen? And how about that Internet Explorer icon? It's like you're handling an artefact from an alternate history, dropped in via a spacetime wormhole. It has dual SIM handling, too, and came with a bizarre auxiliary battery festooned with warnings about not pressing a button mounted on the front of the top-up device."
You know I'm almost never ceasing to be amazed by the effort and dedication of people who bootleg.
So much hard work. So much time spent working out how to design, construct, and replicate just close enough to make the sale and in some places even make a 'moderately' working replica.
If only the bootleggers could be recruited to actually create and sell your product!
On another thought you have to wonder on a component standpoint some of the bootleggers/replicators (wow sounds like I'm talking about some robot race) throw it all together with all that effort and sell it so cheap when a suitably crappy real version can cost quadruple or more!
I do what I must because of what I must do.
It's even better than the iPhone:
- two SIMs
- user-changeable battery
- unlocked
but here's my favorite:
- "drag and drop files through USB port of computer (No Software Required)"
No mandatory iTunes. Eat that, Steve!
How much is "$99 (with a two year contract)"?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Even if it doesn't, that's almost as good as the phone in an iPhone.
Not that I want to dispute your overall point of that's what you're counting, but a contract that binds you to another $1700 outlay over 2 years isn't much of a "technicality".
That is why basically all phones are subsidized. Most people don't know how to count, so they think that $1800 is less than $120.
Arrested as in beer, not as in speech.
Buy one overseas, then. The US is the only country where you can't buy unlocked iPhones.
I'd rather buy from a company that actually wants my money; Apple apparently doesn't.
It's not Apple who is being restrictive, but AT&T - see above point that iPhoines are sold unlocked everywhere outside the US.
And whose choice is that? Apple's. It's their phone.
They're the company that chose to make the exclusive deal with AT&T. Without Apple, AT&T wouldn't have any say in the matter.
The guy got a functioning touchscreen smartphonefor £25. Counterfeit or not, it's hard to call that a ripoff IMHO.