Samsung vowed to end child labor in its supply chain once and for all with its new ‘zero tolerance’ policy on child labor, but after coming down hard on Dongguan Shinyang Electronics this summer for employing under age workers, the Android maker has decided to just enforce 30% of its policy.
Apple is set to open a new brick-and-mortar retail store at the Paradise Walk mall in China’s Jiangbei District of Chongqing, according to Apple’s official retail website.
The store will open at 10am local time on Saturday, July 26, and will represent the company’s eleventh Apple Store in China: the first of several that will be opening in 2014 and 2015.
After the Chinese media called iOS’s ability to track an iPhone’s location a “national security concern,” Apple has responded with a lengthy statement detailing its commitment to customer privacy.
Yesterday China’s state-run CCTV ran a segment heavily criticizing the “Frequent Locations” feature in iOS 7 that records where the device has been in detail on a map. The implications of the report were that Apple was sharing the data with other companies and governments.
Today Apple responded to the allegations by saying that it is “deeply committed to protecting the privacy of all our customers” and that it has never created a backdoor for any government agency.
The iPhone brings untold billions of dollars of industry into China thanks to the manufacturing jobs it creates, but that hasn’t stopped the Chinese Government — through their state-controlled media mouthpieces — from calling the device a “national security concern.”
Why? Because iOS can track your location, which according to a China Central Television report, could be used to betray Chinese state secrets to the rest of the world.
Given that a large proportion of Silicon Valley is made up of sci-fi geeks, it’s no surprise that over the years tech has focused on bringing to life many of the once outlandish concepts seen in movies, TV series and comic books.
With the Apple Watch bringing several more of these to life -- Dick Tracy’s 2-Way Wrist Radio among them -- we thought the time was right to run down our 8 favorite sci-fi gadgets we’d love to see turn into actual products, as outlandish as some of them might be.
After all, you never know when Bill Gates is going to be scanning a blog, looking for ways to unload his fortune.
Scan right to check out the rest of the gallery.
(Picture: Dick Tracy)
The iWatch is coming. No one really know what it will do yet, but Steven Milunovich, UBS’ top Apple analyst, claims that if Apple has its way, you’ll use the iWatch mostly to send voice messages back and forth with your friends, like Dick Tracy’s 2-Way Wrist Radio.
Because voice messaging is so huge among smartphone users in China, Milunovich says sending voice messages will be one of iWatch’s biggest features along with fitness. And even though it sounds a little silly that voice messages would be the main draws for iWatch, he just met with Tim Cook who couldn’t stop talking about it.
Samsung wants to be one of the world’s top 10 places to work by 2020, but according to the latest third-party labor conditions report, working for the South Korean smartphone maker is still a horrible experience, especially if you’re one of its Chinese suppliers.
An audit of 100 of Samsung’s suppliers in China found issues like overtime, proper saftey gear and training are still prominent issues. You can read the full 69-page report on Samsung’s site, but here’s a quick rundown of the egregious conditions:
China is an important market for Apple, and while the company now has deals like the one with China Mobile that help distribute hardware in the country, that is only half the battle. According to new reports, Apple has recently been focusing on wooing Chinese appmakers to get them to develop for iOS.
“Two years ago there was no developer support in China,” Chinese developer Woody Wan told Bloomberg in a recent interview. “There’s been a significant improvement.”
According to the report, Apple has been taking various steps to win over Chinese app developers — including beefing up developer relations by allowing new apps to be approved in the country, opening up a new office in downtown Beijing where the China App Store is located, and building new Chinese-language-specific software to benefit developers. At WWDC this week, Apple held several sessions and social gatherings for programmers visiting from China.
You probably don’t waste much thought on where to plug-in your iPhone, but not using a real Apple charger has its disadvantages. Not only are they higher quality, and safer, but they also charge faster than a 5W Chinese knockoff.
Millions of cheap Apple copycats make it difficult to tell whether a charger is the genuine article and have been blamed on everything from iPad explosions to spontaneous electrocutions, but thanks to a teardown comparison from Ken Shirriff there’s one little flaw to look for that gives the dangerous fakers away.
Just look for the signature.
Apple is planning to rollout a new 8GB iPhone 5c in India starting this June in hopes to turn the country into it’s next booming market.
India was one of the few places you could still buy an iPhone 4 until last week when Apple pulled phone from the country. A cheaper iPhone 5c will aim to boost Apple’s marketshare in a smartphone market dominated by Sony and Samsung.
Apple’s continued Chinese expansion saw App Store revenue in China increase by 70% last quarter. That’s according to figures from a new Q1 2014 report from app analytics firm App Annie.
Key to this increase is the China Mobile deal which was announced at the end of last year, opening up Apple’s potential customer base to the 763 million users currently on the country’s biggest mobile network.
Apple has announced that the LTE iPad Air and iPad mini are now available in China. Cellular iPad models have been on sale in the country already, but today marks Apple’s adoption of the local TD-SCDMA network standard.
Here’s the full press release:
Sure, we’ll be seeing a host of fun things tomorrow on the internets, many of them having to do with new crazy Apple products.
Today, however, we found this slick little number from site AppleUser: the Mac Air Desktop, a slimmed-down version of the Mac Mini.
What’s great about this sweet little photoshop job is that it meets the requirement of any good April Fools’ prank–it’s totally something we’d want to buy.
The iPhone 5c flopped in the U.S. — and now figures released by Umeng, China’s largest app analytics platform, suggest that things aren’t much different in China.
In the fourth month since its launch in China, the colorful iPhone 5c accounted for slightly less than 2% of all active iOS devices on Umeng’s app analytics network.
By comparison, the iPhone 5s represented 12% of the market — while the iPhone 5 remains a consistent seller.
Apple stuck to its guns when it came to expanding into China: refusing to compromise its brand equity by selling lower cost iPhones to compete with low-end smartphone manufacturers.
That decision seems to be paying off, since a new study in China by app and mobile advertising analytics firm Umeng shwes that Apple’s targeting of affluent users has already seen it capture more than 80% of the Chinese smartphone market, who spend upwards of $500 on their phones.
Remember the recent bizarre Steve Jobs statue, depicting what looked to be the decapitated head of Apple’s late CEO?
Well, a new Steve Jobs sculpture may have it beaten in the weirdness stakes.
Urban explorer Darmon Richter found the above hexagonal blue sculpture — depicting Jobs’ profile against the iconic Apple logo — during a recent trip to Ordos City, China.
Apple is taking on “hundreds” of new engineers and supply-chain managers in China and Taiwan in an effort to speed up product development and offer a greater range of devices, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The Cupertino company has reportedly poached staff from HTC and other rival firms to create new teams in Shanghai and Taipei.
Apple just set a record for the most iPhones sold in a quarter, but while the new iPhone 5ses and Cs are flying off shelves, a new scam is booming in China where broken old iPhones are cannibalized for parts to build complete units sold with a full retail price tag.
We’ve seen a few great Flappy Bird machines before, but nothing as incredible as this robot that flawlessly plays Flappy Bird using a web cam, a robotic arm made from an old hard drive, and the tip of a stylus.
It was created by two Chinese developers, Liu Yang and Shi Xuekun, who live in China’s Shaanxi province. According to the duo, it took four days to create the robot, which is probably 3.99 days more than Dong Nguyen originally spent programming the game himself.
Now can it beat Flapthulhu?
According to numbers from analyst firm IDC, Apple is now the fifth-largest cellphone maker in China, with 7% of the overall market share.
Apple jumped an entire 1 percent in the last quarter of 2013, based on the success of the iPhone 5s and 5c. This doesn’t take into account the impact of Apple’s deal with China Mobile, which began selling handsets to customers this January.
This week, Cult of Mac Magazine explores how Apple will reboot China, and why you, the aficionado, should care.
2014 is the year of the horse: seen as an auspicious symbol for swift success, it bodes well for Apple. The Cupertino company launches its deal with China mobile around the same time as the year changes over, a deal Tim Cook called a “watershed” moment.
Author and reporter Luke Dormehl delves into the factors that will shift Apple’s strategy there as it hopes to reach over 700 million potential fanatics and why this year we may begin to see the transition into “designed in California, built for Asia.” Hong-Kong based tech reporter Truman Au takes a look at local iPhone culture and why the gold iPhone is the choice of device – and matching cars, bags and shoes — for the country’s new rich.
As always, we’ll have the best in new apps, music, books and movies plus answers to your most pressing Apple-related questions from an actual Genius.
After years of speculation — and some incredibly drawn-out contract negotiations along the way — China Mobile finally began selling iPhones today.
Tim Cook was in Beijing for the launch, where he handed out autographed iPhones to customers, alongside China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua. Cook tweeted the following:
According to Tim Cook there is good reason to feel excited about the possibilities offered by Apple’s deal with China Mobile.
Cook — who is currently in Beijing ahead of the iPhone going on sale on the China Mobile network this Friday — said he is “incredibly optimistic” about Apple’s partnership with the world’s largest mobile carrier.
Cult of Mac has reported on Xiaomi — the multi-billion dollar tech company commonly referred to by the Chinese media as “the Apple of the East” — before.
Apple has opened an official online store on popular Chinese e-commerce gateway Tmall.
Run by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tmall was launched in 2008 and hosts more than 70,000 merchants — including global brands such as Nike and Gap.
While Apple hasn’t officially commented on its Tmall store opening, an Alibaba rep has confirmed that this is an official Apple page and that it opened recently.
Everyone is so focused on the “will they, won’t they announce it?” Apple-China Mobile deal that it’s all too easy to forget about the success Apple is already enjoying in China.
According to technology market research firm, Counterpoint Research, Apple’s share in China’s burgeoning smartphone market leaped to 12 percent in October — with the iPhone now the country’s third biggest smartphone player.
