Digital Daily » Hong Kong

Apple's Latest Fortune: You Will Be Unusually Successful in Business

John Paczkowski — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:20:46 +0000

“We will enter Asia with the iPhone in 2008,” Apple COO Tim Cook declared in March 2008. “And we will one day enter China, we’re not saying when.”

How’s September of 2009 sound? Because China Business Network claims that China Unicom and Apple have finally inked a deal that will bring the iPhone to the country around that time.

Manufactured by Foxconn, the Chinese version of the iconic handset will reportedly be identical to the original in all features save one: To comply with the demands of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Chinese version of the iPhone will lack Wi-Fi support.

Why would people pay retail for a defeatured iPhone when they could buy the real thing on the country’s flourishing gray market? Well, for one thing, Wi-Fi-enabled iPhones are pricey–$695 for the 16GB model, $811 for the 32GB version. For another, they might not perceive Wi-Fi as a necessity, as Dan Butterfield notes over at iPhonAsia.

“While some consumers in China may prefer grey-market iPhones with WiFi, there are many millions that have never used WiFi on their phones and have only experienced 2G speeds,” Butterfield explains. “For this group, WiFi might be a less important feature. They may be more interested in iPhone’s enjoyable user-experience, entertainment value and status.”

Either way, defeatured or not, Apple (AAPL) benefits. “For China’s most tech-savvy power-consumers, WiFi will be important,” says Butterfield. “As a result, I suspect smuggling of WiFi-enabled iPhones will continue to be a profitable enterprise. Apple will be a prime beneficiary as grey-marketers will continue to acquire full-price WiFi enabled iPhones in Hong Kong….

“Using conservative estimates,” Butterfield continues, “I believe Apple can capture a full 2% share of the wireless market in China within the first 12 months of an official iPhone launch. That’s 14 million iPhones and perhaps another 2 million or so coming via grey-market iPhone sales.”

[Image credit: iPhonAsia]

You've Been Xserved

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:02:42 +0000

The Apple Store went offline earlier this morning and when it returned, its homepage featured not a new 2TB Time Capsule, not an updated Apple TV, but a new Nehalem-based Xserve–the same one the company’s Hong Kong online store accidentally started taking orders for last week.

Zzzzzz…

Not exactly a big surprise. Still, quite a piece of machinery. Built around Intel’s (INTC) latest Nehalem Xeon Processors, the new Xserve boasts twice the performance of its predecessor, according to Apple (AAPL). It offers a 128GB SSD boot drive option and up to 3TB of internal storage and RAID 5 support. And it is, according to Apple, the best Xserve the company has ever made. It always is.
“The Xserve is the best workgroup server for our education, business and creative customers,” David Moody, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing said in a statement. “With up to twice the performance, better power efficiency and an innovative SSD drive option, this is the best Xserve we’ve ever made.”

The Anchor Found Near the Cut Google Cable–It's From the S.S. Ballmer, Sir, Redux

John Paczkowski — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:05:52 +0000

Who would have thought that a search company that began as a Ph.D. research project back in 1996 would someday become a behemoth of such bandwidth-consuming appetite that it would require its own high-bandwidth undersea communications cables? Earlier this year, Google revealed that it had joined a six-company consortium to build a new multi-terabit undersea cable linking the U.S. and Japan. And now it appears the company is planning at least two more. According to TeleGeography, Google (GOOG) is part of another consortium of carriers hoping to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system that would connect Japan with Guam, the Philippines island of Luzon, Hong Kong, southern Thailand and Singapore. The company is also said to have held exploratory discussions with a number of South African telecoms about jointly building another new subsea cable connecting to Africa. Why such interest in undersea optic cables? Google would likely claim the volume of data it needs to move around the world requires the kind of capacity they provide. But there’s another reason as well. Fast, reliable connectivity encourages people to use the Internet more. And that’s good for Google’s overall business. “Google wants people to pay as little as possible for access,” a source familiar with the company’s plans told ITWeb. “In fact, they don’t really care if it is totally free, because it is good for them in the long run.”