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Knock-Off Apple Watches Hit the Chinese Market Less Than 24 Hours After Launch
schwit1 writes Fake versions of the Apple Watch can be bought for as little as £25 — despite the fact the real thing will set you back more than 10 times that. The flagship new product was only launched in San Francisco yesterday but knock-offs are already available in China. According to CNN Money, they can be found at Huaqiangbei electronics market in the southern city of Shenzhen, and others are being sold nationwide via popular e-commerce websites. Right down to the digital crown, the fakes mimic the design and style of Apple's new offering.
This is one of the "hidden" costs of doing business in China. You can pretty much count on the theft and exploitation of your designs. How dare they exploit us back!
However, given the fact that this is a luxury good and status symbol, I don't think Apple is too worried about this, except if consumers are fooled into buying one. No one wants to show off a knock-off status symbol. It defeats the entire purpose.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The joke is, most folks who are willing to spend $10,000 for watch won't be able to tell the fake ones from the real ones.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They need another country to do it first so they can copy it.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
They are a massive operation, and if you are a vendor of theirs you don't need to share factory floor space with other customers - and certainly not knock offs of their products.
The problem is that you knock a lot of other customers out of the way to take care of Apple, and they become your only huge customer. Then they pull the rug out from you and your left with no customers.
At some point, being too dependant on one huge customer is only barely different from being owned by the customer. The difference being is that the customer takes none of the risk, but gets all the benefits. The customer can even leverage their position of power over the company to renegotiate deals, dictate terms, meddle with the internal affairs of the company, and other such abuses. And as the article shows, some huge customers do not give a damn about what will happen when (not if) they eventually dump a company.