It could also be for people who want the status symbol of owning an iPhone without shelling out for one. That’s very common in China.
In the early part of this century, I used to travel in Asia quite a bit, and I started collecting knock-off Apple products as souvenirs. I had quite a collection of various look-alikes at one point. It was a cheap hobby because they were all very inexpensive, and if you were in the right country or situation, you could haggle the price down a little further.
They were all in the one box that got lost (stolen?) when I moved out of Seattle.
(Not Apple-related, but I still have a watch that plays videos [loaded with On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Incredibles] that I picked up in Singapore for US$30 around 2005.)
>They were all in the one box that got lost (stolen?) when I moved out of Seattle
I'd like to imagine the karma involved in the thief thinking they'd made it... only to discover what they'd nicked. My condolences for losing the physical objects, but I'm glad you have those memories. Thanks for sharing!
Not just in China though, western culture also has a knack for having / showing off status symbols. Like clean / unworn sneakers, or vintage T-shirts, or early Magic / Pokemon cards, or mechanical / customized keyboards (to be used in photoshoots on minimalist and/or vaporwave-themed workspaces of course).
I would argue that “status” related to “stuff” is one of the strongest cultural exports the west has had on the rest of the world.
Yes, status (which is often a stand-in for class, if we’re honest) existed before the west, but the value (and by extension, class stand-in) to consumer brands is something the west has very successfully exported to the rest of the world. It’s why nearly every major brand with “status” is a western brand. This has changed in some sectors (automobiles, though real “status” is still largely given to German or Italian or high-end British variants — there is some status around Asian car brands, significantly less around almost all American brands — and in some areas of electronics, Japanese brands became the status symbols in the 1980s and beyond, Sony is a prime example here), but by and large, the brands that exhibit “status” in non-western countries (and I’ll expand this to parts of Europe that came of age in the post Soviet era), in my experience, it’s the western brands that gain the most attention.
Dubai, as an example, has a tremendous amount of wealth on display. It’s the height of nouveau riche, even though the money itself is very old, and as a westerner, I was floored by the near religious dedication to western culture and brands. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Cara de Lavigne or Kendall Jenner’s face on as many billboards in my life. Seeing a Red Lobster in Dubai with a line even longer than the one in Times Square, largely by non-tourists from what I could tell, in a place where many of the people there have far more money than the average Red Lobster patron in the US, was incredibly fascinating.
