It always seems Apple has a problem with color production. Don't quote me on it, but wasn't the white iPhone 4 that was different in color and had a weird yellowish tint to some of the early models? It seems that they have quality down, as of now. It's just a matter of quantity by the looks of it.
Nailed it. I knew this was yet another Asian play by Apple. The iPhone is getting long in the tooth in Western markets, but there are still many virgin markets in the East.
Really? Because like every other person has an iPhone here in Beijing. I saw a gold one on a flight last night from Singapore, I think this is purely a Chinese thing; weird that they said Asian and not Chinese.
Apple ran out of gold iPhones in our Natick, MA store because they only had eight to begin with! I heard that from two different sales reps at the store.
I would really be surprised if they underestimated the demand, Asia is known for loving gold. I would bet more likely it is a marketing thing, the news that they have all sold out pushes up demand even further and also hits all the headlines. How many people are going around now saying "I have one of the new gold iPhones" to all their friends and colleagues.
If gold hadn't sold out, it would have been a failure. The only function of the gold iPhone is to be hard to get, if it were common as mud, it'd be seen as the bedazzled tacky fashion-gadget shit it is.
They call it "gold" because Asia likes gold. But I saw the gold 5S in the store and it is definitely not gold. It is a beautiful, classy champagne color. If I were buying one, I'd definitely pick "gold".
The pervasive casual racism when discussing the gold iPhone is just astounding. If news outlets were talking about black people this way, there would be riots in the streets. Why is this considered acceptable?
What exactly is racist about saying one product type appeals to a certain set of cultures more than others? It is well known the Korean culture values extra settings and controls as a sign of status, for example, and that Koreans value replaceable batteries more and carry them around more often. Is it racist to say replaceable battery phones sell better in Korea than elsewhere? There are already OEMs that make different SKUs for exactly this reason, like LG.
Which of these is supposed to support the idea that it's disproportionate?
Of course they love gold. Everybody loves gold.
Americans are going crazy over the gold iPhone too. But nobody's talking about that, because they'd rather talk about Asians.
If it can be demonstrated that cultural preferences have translated into a disparate demand for gold iPhones in Asian countries, then and only then can this claim be made with a straight face. As it stands, it's just uninformed discussion about people who are "different".
That you're just making threads toxic with your white knight attitudes.
Saying that BI is racist because they generalize the Asian market is what's wrong with the world. Not only do you generalize an entire continent by reducing it to race (racist against all Asian races?), but you then go on about how they can't generalize.
Almost all markets generalize. They need to. It's how you do business. If target age 24-32 female, white, etc...
Stop being such a white knight and attempt to read the article and bring valid points up for discussion instead of derailing it and wasting many a programmers time.
"White knight"? Sure, because I couldn't possibly be directly affected by issues like these.
Until and unless the assertion is actually supported, it's racist BS.
I read the article. It completely fails to support its assertions. It talks about behavior the entire world appears to be engaging in, but singles out Asians for no reason.
They're telling a story they've basically made up, and are taking advantage of the "mysterious other" to do so.
This story would not pass muster if it were about black people. The author would get run out of town!
I believe that my points are perfectly valid. There's been a whole slew of articles about "Asians love gold" with absolutely no data to back them up, which are clearly based on a racist narrative rather than anything rational. How is that invalid?
"Wasting many a programmer's time"? That's hilarious. Even if the story is completely true, it's a waste of time to read and to comment about.
Personally, I think pointing out how casual racism is tolerated and ignored in certain situations is quite a bit more useful than the other comments on this article.
Personally, I find it more offensive when people get offended by non offensive things than by ignorant generalizations, like grouping all Asians into a race, by grouping all black people into a culture, by mixing up culture and race (this one is tricky however), etc..
>Personally, I think pointing out how casual racism is tolerated and ignored in certain situations is quite a bit more useful than the other comments on this article.
The real ignorance spawned when you compare Asians (multi-racial, genetically diverse, many cultures) with black people (colour of skin). That is racist. You are generalizing a continent of people into one homogenous ethnicity.
Of course the author wouldn't group "black people" into a category. Firstly, "black people" are the most genetically diverse group of people on the planet. Africa is also home to again, many, many cultures.
I think you attempting to be PC, has clouded your judgement. Look at your upvote/downvote ratio. Do you believe most people are just "ignorant" to your "valid and true" beliefs on political correctness? You said it yourself that this is just casual racism. And to many (including me) it wasn't that at all. If anything, you were the one who brought race and conflict into this discussion. Ask yourself if you're truly right.
The story is simple. Apple got sold out of their gold iphones in parts of Asia. You're right, everybody likes gold. They state that in the article. Let's see the articles sources shall we?
> gold in Asia is perhaps even more fetishized than in the West.
Wow, talk about bias! Perhaps!?!?!?
> said Mr. Lian, who works at a local TV station. "Chinese people like gold."
What?!?! A Chinese person generalizing their society?!?!? Hold the phone. We got a self hater here says mikeash...
Now this is just hurrible... Of course this POS article doesn't have contrary opinions... Oh Wait!
> 28-year-old Chris Wong who works in marketing. “I think the metal casing looks much better.”
And there you have it. A different opinion.
But yes. The article is racist. I'm racist. The people who downvoted you are racist. The whole word is racist. How about you take your white knighting to tumbler social warrior! We'll miss you!!!!
India, China are gluttons for gold [1]. So much that Indian government has to impose curbs on gold import to safe guard its national currency [2]. Most of this gold ends in private citizen hands as jewellery or bars and buscuits.
Isn't this data? "In Australia and China, online Apple Store shipping times for the iPhone 5s rapidly slipped to 7–10 days for all colors and capacities, with immediate unavailability of the 64GB gold version."
It's not big data in the Facebook/Twitter sense of the word, but in this case, how quickly unavailability is reached seems to be the best data point.
This completely ignores the fact that the exact same thing happened in the US and probably every other 5S launch country.
That gold is preferred in Asia is not under dispute. What I dispute is the idea that it is preferred more than in other countries. I've yet to see any evidence for this, but that doesn't stop all of these articles from making the claim anyway.
Is "Asians love gold" a common racial stereotype? Serious question. Is it common for racist non-Asians to think, "Them Asians, they sure do love cat chow mein, blonde women, and gold"? [EDIT: If you like, substitute "math, martial arts, and gold". I'm asking only about the existence of a stereotype, setting aside how demeaning or inflammatory it's considered to be.]
I've been hesitant to assert cultural differences in another thread, but I think it's safe to say the color gold, like red, has a different significance in China than in the West. (Less sure about other Asian countries.) It's possible some people stupidly associate the preference with race, as if it's genetic, rather than cultural; I've just never encountered that stereotype.
Before the announcement, my overwhelming impression from American writers was not that they love gold. Quite the opposite: they did not expect to like the color, and were trying to come up with an explanation for why Apple would go that way. They were flailing for some conclusion, not rationalizing a conclusion they particularly "want[ed] to reach".
I'm skeptical of the theory myself, for a couple of reasons, but it doesn't strike me as racist. It might if I were convinced the racial stereotype was a common one that I happened to be unaware of.
> So far I have seen no data whatsoever to back up this idea that Asian people prefer gold more than other people in the world.
I too would like to see data that supports the theory that a gold iPhone should be expected to do especially well in China. For example, have other companies benefited from making the same decision for their own product lines?
What specifically in this article are you calling out as casually racist? Was Mr. Lian, who is quoted as saying "Chinese people like Gold" being racist about his own race? My wife has said much the same thing to me. She's Chinese, though now a naturalised Brit.
(1) I apologies to my esteemed HNers for that, but it seems appropriate and if I take a karma hit for it, so be it. It was worth it.
This article takes a racial stereotype (Asians love gold!) ignores confounding factors (turns out, lots of people like gold, even non-Asians!) trots out a token Asian (some of my best friends are black!) and produces no evidence whatsoever to support its claims.
In fact, the article itself basically admits that the entire premise is full of shit:
"...gold in Asia is perhaps even more fetishized than in the West."
"Perhaps". This entire article, this entire kind of article, is based on a wild guess. Yet this doesn't stop everybody from running with the "Asians love gold!" theme.
Probably two thirds of the people in the iPhone line I was in wanted gold. Yet I don't see any articles saying "Americans love gold!"
Writing crazy and uninformed articles about faraway people while ignoring similar behavior at home? Yep, that's racist.
Get a grip. This is a news article, not a PhD thesis.
Yes, gold is fetishized in the west. However the fact that it's even more fetishized in the East is overwhelmingly obvious to anyone what actually knows what they're talking about. Including actual Chinese people. My Chinese relatives hold a significant amount of their life savings in Gold. This is quite normal over there. In Hohhot, my wife's home town, you can buy small gold bricks in many department stores. They have little sheep stamped on them because that's a lucky sign.
It's "overwhelmingly obvious" yet nobody can produce any evidence for it, and especially not for the specific claim that the gold iPhone is in more demand in Asia. Even the linked article can't bring itself to straight-out say that gold is more fetishized in Asia. It weasels out of the claim! Is it really "obvious" then?
Until and unless this stuff can be backed up with something resembling actual evidence rather than "everybody knows", articles like these are racist. Calling out a single racial group for behavior everybody is engaging in is pretty obviously so.
Throughout this thread, people have posted links to evidence that there is a higher demand for gold in Asia than the rest of the world. Ignoring them doesn't chang e Business Insider's piece definitely could be improved by adding some more context beyond "My friend says.." anecdotes, but not everything that is poorly researched is racist.
Not everything that is poorly researched is racist. But everything about race that is poorly researched is racist. This is poorly researched, and it's about race, QED.
I'd argue the title is probably the worst part because singling out a demographic without mentioning that they're talking about said demographic while using bizarre phrasing makes it sound almost laughable. In writing a piss-poor title it just sounds like someone not giving due-respect to X billion people. By the way, Asia likes gold? Continents can like things now? I need to read more on plate tectonics.
"People in Asia like gold a lot, as evidenced by the demand for the gold iPhone 5S." What about this is racist? Or is looking at data based on location now racist?
Demand for gold is high everywhere. I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever that demand or preference for gold is higher in Asia than in the rest of the world. Yet everybody runs with it because "Asians like gold!" as if that's somehow different than anyone else.
"In Australia and China, online Apple Store shipping times for the iPhone 5s rapidly slipped to 7–10 days for all colors and capacities, with immediate unavailability of the 64GB gold version."
Speed of unavailable being reached seems like the best metric available right now, and that suggests more demand in Asia than other places (although it's early and hard to draw conclusions - so I guess I would agree with your point that Business Insider jumped to conclusions a bit, really just seems like Apple wildly underestimated demand for the whole 5S series).
Unless I misread the article, it seemed to claim that gold iphones sold much more quickly in asia than other markets. Observing that fact and say, "that region probably likes gold more than other regions," is not racist. If you were to get off a plane in hong kong and say to the first person you see, "Hey, everyone here loves gold right, do you wanna buy a gold iphone?" That would be racist.
Populations do things, and it's ok to say that they do things. It's not ok to assume individual members of that population do those same things based on their ethnicity.
Watched something on TV a while back on how ingrained gold is in the Indian culture. I don't have any links handy to back up my claims, but I think India accounts for a majority of the gold market worldwide.
It has little to do with the color gold and more to do with the social status.
Money spent on home appliance is minimal and an after-thought, and this is because you cannot impress people with your home appliances while you're out of your home. Meanwhile you can flash your Gold iPhone everywhere you go and it implicitly shows everybody around you that you can afford a Gold iPhone.
Social posturing is a central part of East Asian cultures and the Gold iPhone appeals directly to that mindset. There is no racism but instead it's just the reality of the situation -- hubris is ingrained and prevalent.
It's especially prevalent in China. Their one child per family policy has created an entire generation of people with too much money, so extravagance and opulence are approaching and exceeding interesting levels of absurdity.
Or, more simply, Apple ran out of gold phones because they were rightfully cautious about over-producing an untested color. Just like the first all-white iPhone, there's no rush prioritize the new color while proven ones are already selling as fast as they can be made. Of course, this doesn't make for good link bait.
Is the article racist? Yes, a bit. Only long-term sales data will reliably tell us which colors are preferred in which markets. Right or wrong, the article is rushing to judgement based on flimsy racial stereotypes.
I don't think the article is racist. Just poorly sourced. It's rushing to judgement based on anecdotes (which are probably rooted in a bit of stereotyping - just in the case, there is some data backing up the stereotype). This comment has a good round-up of evidence that gold is more popular in Asia than elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431520.
To be fair, the 5th avenue New York store consistently "over-indexes" (as the article puts it) with shoppers of Asian heritage. Until recently at least, it was not very easy to buy an iPhone of any type in many Asian countries, and as a result, many tourists on vacation to the US would buy multiple devices to take home. Even now many Asian countries are among the last to have new Apple products roll out to them. Certainly don't have data to back this up, but I lived in New York for 6 years and took more than the occasional trip to the Apple store and witnessed these types of bulk purchases. Point is, even the "data" this article introduces doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gold.
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