Lenovo says Apple is missing the boat to China

I sold my iphone 3G to friend in China. First problem is they don't have the VISA card which is required to register with itune and then download software. I gave up after a while.

Chinese consumers are used to low cost PCs.
I don't see a huge shift towards $1000+ Macs.
Apple is more likely competing with SONY's laptops than Lenovo's in China.

As of today, China's estimated population is 1,338,480,000 -- half of these are apparently mobile phone subscribers, and 1% of those is 6,692,400. At $500 a pop, that's $3,346,200,000.

Apple doesn't even have to try and dominate the Chinese market -- 1% of all subscribers would bring in quite a bit of cash.

I'm from China and I'm a iPad/Macbook Pro user. But I hate to say Apple doesn't research nor try to make it easier to switch for ordinary people. One example is the Chinese input method, the built in "Pinyin" is almost the worst among all the Chinese input method on any platform (maybe a bit better than on iPhone). If you can't do it so right, you can pay for some pros. So one of the best Chinese input method on Mac is the Open Sun Pinyin ported from opensolaris, it is also ported to Windows but hardly any Windows users are using it.

Another thing is the online payment. Yes it's not your fault that most Chinese banks uses ActiveX objects for IE (to prevent Windows worms) and not compatible with Safari. But if Apple really cares about customers, they could contact the banks and give some technical support to make the bank pages compatible.

In US, or even Japan, most daily jobs can be done flawlessly on Mac. But in China, you can't type comfortably, can't pay online easily, which makes early switchers very unhappy.

It's because Apple refuses to try to play the price game in China the way everyone else will. In the land of KIRFS, everyone competes for the lowest price on the Chinese consumer and there is little value seen for companies like Apple that consider themselves to be a premium brand. The rest of the world has buyers that agree with Apple and see it as a premium brand as well, China doesn't.