Slashdot Mirror
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.
I can't wait to get one of these newfangled Crapple iSpy watches. I wonder if they even connect to smartphones.
Will they blend?
All hail the mighty Mapple.
But the important question - Do they work?
...Because a sub-$100 knock-off counts as the only way I'll ever try one.
Yes, since the design of the fakes doesn't match that of the real ones. They are just close copies.
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.
Took them long enough!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Will they be legal for sale in the USA, or will design patents prevent that?
In this case, yes. These fakes don't have the same components or run the same software as the real ones. They merely aped the design of the enclosure.
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 definitely do not. Apple is a huge customer. Just, startlingly huge. I once spoke to an Apple guy at a trade show. He wanted to know if our company could produce enough machines to assemble a part that they were musing about. We are the largest manufacturer in the world of the equipment that we make - something like 70% market share. I kind of laughed at first, since I figured there was no way they would tax our capacity. Then we started talking numbers, and it quickly became clear that we would have to resort to extraordinary measures to have any chance at meeting their demand. 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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They were available weeks ago actually. Didn't slashdot already host a link to a review of one even?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
What will they think of next--fake Rolex watches? Fake Oakley sunglasses? I'm shocked--SHOCKED--by this most recent development.
This is why I have a hard time buying luxury goods where the brand is more important than some tangible functionality.
If I cannot tell the difference between a $100 watch and a $10,000 watch by its accuracy or functionality, I open myself up to being deceived by people who exploit that people cannot tell the difference.
I don't need to be told a luxury story about how a watch is an expression of my adventurousness or legacy, to part me with $10,000 more than the next equally functional good is worth.
Wow, 24 hours after launch? That's AMAZING! That is, if you ignore the fact that precise measurements and high-res images of the real thing have been online for months at apple.com... but other than that, yeah, quite a feat.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
In this case almost certainly not. This is not some guy in his spare bedroom emailing specs to a Chinese supplier. This is a *big* client with the resources to keep tabs on its supplier launching a high profile product that hopefully will sell bucket loads of units. You'd have to be a moron to mess with them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Possibly, but for 25£ they are too expensive anyway.
Very few things are "worth" what they cost. I mean, sure, on one level things are worth exactly what they cost. But on another level there's the cost of the raw materials and the labour required to assemble them, and the factory and its running costs etc. Do you include marketing? Shipping? R&D which is required up front but not to manufacture. A $600 smartphone costs $100 or so to build, and less after a while. What's it worth - $100 or $600? Is it "better" than a $100 smartphone? A smartwatch can keep time more accurately than a more expensive watch by simply correcting for any mistakes once a day. But when people spend any more than $100 on a watch it's not because they're after the accuracy.A lot of rather sad people are going to buy the Apple watch because they think they're in with a chance to be as cool as they think the people who got the first iPhones were. And the sort of people who spend $100,000 on a watch certainly aren't going to get one; not even the tasteless gold one (although i'm sure it'll go down a storm in the middle east and asia).
You can guarantee the battery life will be better.
More like a look-alike. I'm not trying to play semantics here, but the term knock-off implies that either it's pretending to be the same thing. These watches are made to look like the Apple watch (whose pics have been available for a long time) but they don't carry the same name (Ai-watch, D-watch) and there is no indication at all about functionality. It's like the difference between a knock-off Rolex that actually says Rolex on it and a cheap watch from Wal-Mart that is made to look like a Rolex.
Gold-pressed lead... that's from the Bizarro Star Trek Universe, right?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Here you go.
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.
I can't tell the difference between a bar of gold, and a bar of gold hollowed out and filled with lead*.
Archimedes sorted that problem years ago.
I wonder if a jeweler will be able to tell the difference.
Ordinary watches have been the domain of jewelers for centuries. Now, they will need to start learning about digital technology.
I wear a Citizen Quartz watch which cost me about $NZ100 in about 2006. It is a nice watch, it keeps pretty accurate time and shows the day and date. When I bought it there were lots of other watches for sale. I could have spend $20 or $8,000, but around $100 seemed the appropriate price based on my income and the quality on offer. When the time comes for me to replace my watch, I will need to consider whether a connection to my smartphone is something I need, so I will consider whatever smartwatches are available when that time comes. However $100 or so is really the most I would be prepared to spend, so the various Samsung watches I see around ($300 - $400) and now this Apple watch ($350 US which will wind up being NZ$800 or so) are just too expensive. I suspect I am reasonably typical among the watch wearing public too, based on how few of these items seem to sell.
Chinese manufacturing is also unimaginably huge. Foxconn manufactures Apple's iPhones and iPads, but they also manufacture Kindles, PS4s, XB1s, and Wii Us. If you think about the capacity they must need to meet peak demand for new iPhone models, they most certainly share factory floor space during off-peak seasons. Many companies have been ruined by overramping their capacity and workforce to meet peak demand and then facing the music when the expected orders don't continue to roll in. Smart companies don't put all their eggs in one basket.
That may be true but I can 100% guarantee the real designs were stolen and then manufactured by someone else. Happens to everything over there.
But don't go thinking that just because it's based on the real design that it's going to be anything equivalent. They will use low-end failure-prone parts and build them in a contaminated environment by an unskilled workforce. That's how they get the low price.
You need to study some basic economic concepts.
The WORTH of something is (correctly and with good reason) completely decoupled from the amount of money it COSTS to make.
The worth of something is how much the consumer is defined as the maximum he/she is willing to pay, according to the benefits he/she subjectively feels he/she the purchase would yield
Those subjective benefits can be in regards to the technical merits, the the aesthetic appeal, an irrational emotional response, or anything else. The PRICE is determined by government regulations interacting with market forces like competition, marketing. At the end of the day, the correct price is the one that makes the seller the most money. Competition would hopefully reduce this to something fair to the consumer.
The only time production cost becomes relevant is if the revenue doesn't lead to enough profits, because the market won't bear high enough prices.
At this point the company stops making the product.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
The article says, "Yet it is unlikely that buyers will mistake the clones for the real thing. The price tag alone is a dead giveaway -- the Apple Watch costs from $349 in the U.S." So I'm guessing they're buying the fake watches to show their friends: "Look - I have an Apple Watch!"
They'll throw in a free Rolex if you ask...
So, bear with me here. The Apple watch is manufactured and assembled in China, except for the solid gold ones, which (I've read, but it hasn't been substantiated) have guts made in China but the final assembly is in the US to avoid shipping gold to China to be made into watch cases. Or something like that.
So, let's assume for the moment that (at least) all the consumer grade Apple watches and all the guts are made in China. We also know that China companies in general have ... different ... ideas about intellectual property.
And so, anyone who is surprised that "knock-offs" start appearing nearly simultaneously with launch, should be beaten with a switch and made to sit in the corner. Hell, the "knock-offs" could have been made at the same factory.
Funny story -- I'm a photographer, and the brand I use (which will remain nameless) demands premium prices for official accessories, which are often just pieces of plastic with a certain shape and a few basic electronics. Almost immediately after a new product is introduced, a shower of "knock-off" accessories appear, which are often indistinguishable from the official parts. The story is, they're identical because they're a covert run from the same factory, merely with different branding and perhaps not as fastidious quality control. (Or, at least, that last part is what the vendor wants you to believe.) And so an official battery grip may list for $300, street cost $255, and the knock-offs are not more than $50, look and behave identically, and appear to last as long even under rough use. (And you don't mind being rough with them because if they break, you can get another for $50.) However, there will always be (brand name) affectionados who will sneer at your $50 part with "you get what you pay for", even in the face of contradictory evidence.
And of course, as no true Apple enthusiast at least in this country would dream of wearing a knock-off, even were it electrically and visually identical, Apple will still make a bazillion dollars off the product.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I can't tell the difference between a bar of gold, and a bar of gold hollowed out and filled with lead*.
Archimedes sorted that problem years ago.
Then how about a bar of tungsten with a little lead to lower it's density to that of gold, then coated with gold?
In case you missed it, the parent's point was that sometimes people buy things because other people value or are expected to value them, of which any form of money including gold bars are a perfect example.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
They must be fake, iMaps works right.
Table-ized A.I.
'All about the new Apple watch in 0:90'
What? 1:30 of advertising? command-W and FO.
I know someone who has bought a number of "Rolex" and other expensive watches in China. These aren't the really cheap knock-offs and they're actually of decent quality and keep excellent time. One of my cousins has a real Rolex watch. We put them side by side and it was impossible to tell them apart, right down to the hologram on the back. Of course they were different when you opened them up, but the works in these fake watches were often made in Switzerland or Germany just like the real watches. The writing on the inside of the back of the case also made it obvious that these were fake and this appears to be intentional. From the outside, however, everything seems to be the same, even the smooth movement of the second hand.
Now with the iWatch it should be fairly obvious since they run different operating systems, though I suppose it's possible for a cloned watch to also be able to run iOS just like the real one.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Oh you assume they share the factory floor? No that's not how fake products work.
Fake products are often no different to real ones. Sometimes it's the result of a production run at a time where there's no supposed to be one, working a shift that isn't supposed to exist without oversight or QC, and sometimes it is purely people stealing products and having them hit the grey market to make a little more money on the side.
This would all be a great disaster if management found out, if it weren't for high levels of corruption in these types of companies. You are completely underestimating the level of ingenuity of the Chinese clone / fake / grey market.
Very few things are "worth" what they cost. I mean, sure, on one level things are worth exactly what they cost. But on another level there's the cost of the raw materials and the labour required to assemble them, and the factory and its running costs etc. Do you include marketing? Shipping? R&D which is required up front but not to manufacture. A $600 smartphone costs $100 or so to build, and less after a while. What's it worth - $100 or $600?
Very few things are worth what they cost...aside from the value-added things you mention, profit enters the mix as a reasonable consideration a company must account for if remaining in business is part of the mission statement.
Apple's products are Veblen goods of the most coveted sort: profitable and popular.
Things are always and only worth what you can get for them.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
because the Chinese had to outsource it to Vietnam to get profitable labor rates
Table-ized A.I.
Fake products are often no different to real ones.
Well, not really.
sometimes it is purely people stealing products and having them hit the grey market to make a little more money on the side
But that's not a fake product, that's just stolen and potentially unserialized product. Most fake products differ from the official products at least in quality of components. Switches, caps, anything that can get cheaper does get cheaper. Odds are most of that stuff is built the same way, on the same production lines but during off hours and using inferior materials.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That may be true but I can 100% guarantee the real designs were stolen and then manufactured by someone else. Happens to everything over there.
That is absolutely true. I know our designs go to our competitors and vice versa. That said, it would be extremely hard to produce some of the things Apple does - if you could even source the parts - while significantly undercutting their price. They really do push the envelope on miniaturization of the form factor. I suppose you could cheat if you used a bulkier layout and sacrificed battery size or something... but that is diverging from the design. The knock-off maker is going to want to avoid as much R&D as possible :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, but inventory is going to be pretty tightly controlled by Apple. Foxconn couldn't just set up a little side business pumping out a few extras here and there without Apple noticing the missing parts.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The place I work is one of General Motor's bitches. We supply them and haven't been able to sell to other customers (our sales team claims. I think they just like being GM bitches.)
That is a danger, but I think we would approach it as a one-off. We make capital equipment and so are used to ramping up and down. It's all fantasy-land anyway, since nothing ever came of it - I was just struck by the scale they operate at.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If I pay $10,000 dollars for a watch, it better damn well cause me to have an orgasm every four hours (accurate to a billionth of a second per 40 thousand years).
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The local Apple representative here has been selling the "iWatchz" for months now...€100. I should complain to Apple, actually.
Yes, but his method won't work if you make an undersized ingot of titanium and cast a little gold around it. Same specific gravity, to within the resolution of even some extremely accurate measurement tools.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It is within the standard definition of fake. The product does not show up on formal documentation, will lack or have incorrect serial numbers and generally lack any form of quality control shipping everything out without oversight.
There are a big range of what is considered a "fake". It could be a piece of shit with "Appel" written on it (likely) but you can't discount the fact that it could be the exact same device made from the exact same factory. The Chinese are well known for this practice.
Be careful what you wish for:
http://www.stippy.com/japan-wa...
I always wondered where this setting was...
Luckily we've at least moved on from DOS:
Hand on fire.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
I always wondered where this setting was...
I'm not quite sure how some people delude themselves as much as you do.
The maker of this watch has too much to lose by making fakes in their factories. They would be killing the golden goose.
I'm sure there are some counterfeits which are really just "night production". But to assume this is the case in all cases and here is a failure to really put much thought into it.
Have you read the reviews of the fakes?
http://mashable.com/2015/01/08...
It's clear they don't have the same parts. It doesn't even have the same screen or knob. One of the knockoffs doesn't even have a touchscreen!
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The Chinese government officially recognizes both knock-offs and counterfeits. Counterfeits are illegal. Knock-offs, which merely look at lot like the other item but do not try to pretend to be it, are legal.
These are knock-offs and are legal. The fake Rolexes you speak of are counterfeits and are illegal even in China. Of course, the law is unevenly enforced there.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I can't tell the difference between a bar of gold, and a bar of gold hollowed out and filled with lead*.
Archimedes sorted that problem years ago.
No he didn't, he figured out a way to measure the volume of an irregularly shaped object so that its density could be calculated and compared to a known density. Presumably a bar of gold is in a shape that is easy to calculate the volume.
According to wikipedia, density of gold is 19300 kg/m3, lead is 11340 kg/m3, so a bar of gold hollowed out and filled with lead would have to be up to 1.7x the size of a bar of pure gold in order to have the same weight. (Less larger if the amount of lead is small but that isn't the point of the GP.....)
Need to learn to read,dude. Second sentence.
Actually, they are tungsten bars, specially made and coated with gold. No lead.
Federal reserve bought hundreds of thousends of tungsten bars during Clinton precidency times. Years ago there was a big "ruckus" between China and US, becouce chinese were not trusting the fort knox chipment og gold bars and tested all the bars. They all were fake bars, no gold only gold coated tungsten.
In October 2009, China reportedly received a large shipment of gold, containing some 6,000 bars, weighing 400 ounces each. When it was received, the Chinese government asked that tests be performed to guarantee the purity and weight of the gold bars. In this test, four small holes were drilled into the bars, and the metal was analyzed. Officials were shocked to find the bars were bogus. They contained cores of tungsten, with only an outer coating of real gold. What’s more, these gold bars, containing serial numbers for tracking, originated in the United States and had reportedly been stored in Fort Knox for years.
Tungsten is vastly cheaper than gold—maybe $30 dollars a pound, compared to $1,200 an ounce for gold right now. It has exactly the same density as gold, to three decimal places. Therefore, it has to be drilled to detect the fraud. The only differences are that it’s the wrong color, and that it’s much harder than gold. Pure gold is soft and can be dented with a fingernail.
At first, many gold experts speculated that the fake gold must have originated in China, which is considered the world’s best knock-off producers. However, the Chinese government investigated and issued a statement pointing a finger squarely at the United States.
The Chinese claim that in 1995—during the Clinton administration (Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers)—between 1.3 million and 1.5 million 400-ounce tungsten blanks were manufactured by a sophisticated refiner in the United States, amounting to more than 16,000 metric tons. Some 640,000 of these tungsten blanks were then gold plated and shipped to Fort Knox, according to the Chinese, where they are said to remain to this day. The Chinese contend that the remaining collection of these 400-ounce fakes was eventually gold-plated and then “sold” into international markets.
The global market is literally “stuffed full of 400 ounce salted bars,” said one unnamed expert. “It’s enough to destroy the world markets.”
I might suggest that manufacturing is harder than you seem to think it is. Months can be spent fine-tuning a single part in a complex product. That part might not even be available to other manufacturers. Process can be a very difficult part of manufacturing - simply getting the drawings is insufficient (though quite helpful).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Still, they aren't just a drop in the bucket - they are more like a liter in the bucket... that was my surprise.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What you call economic concepts are really more extreme capitalist concepts. Let's try again:
The WORTH of something is (correctly and with good reason) completely decoupled from the amount of money it COSTS to make.
The worth of something is how much the consumer is defined either subjectively by the consumer or by society's mandated access to it (e.g. air, water).
Those subjective benefits can be in regards to the technical merits, the the aesthetic appeal, an irrational emotional response, or anything else. Society can decide that individuals have the right to certain things, either for free or at a regulated price. The PRICE is determined by government regulations interacting with market forces like competition, marketing. At the end of the day, the correct price is the one that society deems is fair. Purely optional items like jewelery have no upper limit, essential medicines might be capped, necessities might be provided for free as a condition of access to other markets.
The only time production cost becomes relevant is if the revenue doesn't lead to enough profits, because the market won't bear high enough prices, or because society will not tolerate high enough prices. In such causes the company may either stop making the profit or seek an alternative arrangement with society to keep producing it in exchange for some other benefit.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If the knock offs have better battery than the original, I'll take the knock offs any day.