> I'd say most people already use local apps/services for almost everything, so having Apple moving servers to China won't practically have any impact on "privacy" or "human rights concerns"

Does this mean anything? You also breathe polluted air like "most people", do you want new fresh air then?

The reason of "__INSERT ACTION HERE__ won't practically have any impact on 'privacy' or 'human rights concerns'" is because "most people" unaware the importance of their privacy, NOT because their privacy is not important.

So, their is a choice to make: To make people understand the importance of their privacy; OR, continue selling this unawareness (to make people ignorant). Which way you go?

Whichever way, it doesn't matter that much. At least where Apple wants to put their server makes no difference.

It's not that we are "unaware" of anything, we just don't feel the same way about privacy (and many other western values as well). Not that they're bad, we just don't believe they're so important. Sure you think you "know the importance of privacy", but that's rather just an opinion, not a fact.

In fact, another apparent trend in China is that people who have been studying and living in US for some time tends to become more agreeable with Chinese government afterwards.

You'll feel different the first time the "social credit" system ends up denying you a loan because of something you said in a private message.

Or you'd feel real different if you were a Uighur who lived in Xinjiang.

Right now, thanks to a growing economy, no one cares about rocking the boat, or what the government does. That will all change when China experiences its first deep recession, and like the US, the government will have no choice but to stoke dangerous levels of nationalism to deflect anger away from it, while ratcheting up the amount of control it has.

The current credit systems in China works very, very differently from what the western media describes. Major commercial systems like "Zhemaxinyong" are actually way more transparent than US credit system. You get to see a lot of the details about what's impacting your score at all time, and you have lots of control on where do you want to share your score to.

The official "social credit" system that the government wants to build is still at a very early stage right now, and it'll be no where close to what the western media imagined (or rather, hoped)

The fairy tales about Chinese social credit system denying loans because of private messages are malicious wishes of western media or Chinese activists at most

Right, it's all the delusions of the Western media as to how this could go wrong, because we never had any things go wrong with blacklists in the West? In the 1950s we had anti-communist blacklists that didn't work out too well. Today we have the terrorist watch list. It's our experience with government creating blacklists and the inherent injustice from false positives that make us very wary of it. People have accidentally gotten onto the terrorist watch list and had their lives ruined.

In China, you have this combined with a President who seems bent on keeping power forever (removing term limits), a party which aggressively blocks and filters anything critical of the government, the installation of key-loggers, face recognition cams, firewalls, and a huge system of monitoring social media, that should raise alarms when there is talk about a universal social ranking, as it's pretty obvious how easy you could end up with a low ranking from off hand joke about the government on Weibo. (https://international.thenewslens.com/article/65955)

I assume you've been living abroad for a while, so you must know we that aggressively criticize our own governments because we don't trust them to do the right thing, and there is ample lessons from history that proves that out. While the Chinese government wants to credit a social credit system to keep the population "honest", there is no "good governance credit system" to keep the government "honest". In the West, we have independent court systems to try and achieve that, as well as democratic elections. It doesn't always work, and corruption still flourishes, (good lord, the fucking Trump administration) but at least there's some attempted check on government power and corruption.

All I'd say is, a glass heart when China is criticized is probably not the best way to react, but I guess it may be the only way to react, since criticism of the government isn't really permitted publicly internally, the only Chinese widespread public criticism is from the external diaspora. My own feeling is that Xi is taking the country in the wrong direction and there appears to be no internal forces to stop him.

Anyway, here's an example of the hell of disputing these kinds of lists.

https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/world/social-credit-s...

"Lawyer Li Xiaolin was also not given advanced notice that he was blacklisted.

In 2014, Li was sued for defamation and lost. A judge ordered Li to make an apology, which he submitted in writing in April 2015. Ten months later, when he was away on a work trip, he was blocked from buying a return flight home to Beijing. That’s when he found out he was blacklisted.

It took him another three weeks before an official told him why.

“The court said my apology was not sincere. I asked officials how they determined what is sincere.” Li said.

Eventually Li wrote a second apology and the court removed him from the blacklist in 2016. Then last year, he tried to get a credit card.

“The bank denied my application. I figured out that the bank might still have my name blacklisted and I was right,” Li said.

The bank updated its records the next day, but by that point, he had spent almost a year to fully clear his name."

I'm not denying China doesn't have problems. It has tons of problems in fact. Aggressive blocking is annoying. But let's take a break and see:

Do you think you have to be super careful if you are in China and not to call Xi "Steamed Bun"?

Do you seriously believe anyone in China would get blocked of loans because a credit system is in place that assigns low score to anyone talking ill of the government?

That's what western media wants you to think. The truth behind these stories are usually a lot more complicated, but it's not in the interest of the media to unravel all the truth.

In fact, tons of people calls Xi "Steamed Bun" in China, it's like his nickname, I also do that myself.

And yes, a government blacklist do exists in China. It's totally reasonable you'll at least be denied of applying for loans if you made your way to that list. I couldn't find the reason why those Xie is on that blacklist (the article certainly downplayed that part, at least), but the article also said "Hu said the central government has not assigned any social credit scores to its citizens yet, but eventually there will be a financial credit score".

Did you see what that mean? At least these cases in the report do not have much to do with credit system because it doesn't exist yet. How things would turned out eventually is a guess, at most.

I've lived in US for quite some time, and saw tons of shit show. Why do American news media split into "Left" and "Right"? If you read reports from both sides, you'll almost see two entirely different world. And yet most Americans do not do so, they chose one side and read only what they want to believe. Is either side lying? Maybe, but not necessarily. News reporters just need to selectively report the truth that can reinforce what they believe. Magnify problems of the other side, and downplay anything that they found hurtful. That's just human nature

> A party which aggressively blocks and filters anything critical of the government, the installation of key-loggers, face recognition cams, firewalls, and a huge system of monitoring social media

I'm sure you're aware of this, but I'd like to point out that U.S. (and many of its allies) has all those things as well, apart from the aggressive filtering.

At least China is up front about it.

False equivalence.

The US has no regulation that requires the installation of spyware or face a fine or jail. China does (https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/08/12/chinese-government-req...).

The US has no laws requiring firewalls to block or censor content from foreign countries. The US doesn't block VPNs and there is no law against them.

Yes, they try to snoop on communications, but in US domestic citizens and companies can resist with encryption and in the courts, and in general, a warrant is required for legal access. Having the NSA snoop on your conversations or use 0-days to hack isn't the same as being told to put security backdoors by the government and go to jail if you don't.

And "aggressive filtering" is your euphemism for the Great Firewall? I'd call sending to to jail for selling a VPN a little more than "aggressive filtering"

I've lived in China and to call it "aggressive filtering" is a pretty nice way of putting it.

Americans really shouldn't be commenting on the credit system of other countries...

Why not? Because our's is very bad? Why does that preclude one from commenting on any credit system around the world? It's standard practice on HackerNews to comment on surveillance and tracking systems in general and point out the dangers of them. There are lots of European commentators discussing US government policy, and vice versa. All criticism is fair, where you are born or what your government has done in the past doesn't invalidate one's opinion. There's too much nationalism sensitivity in these kinds of discussions when someone takes offense to someone else criticizing their country.

There are some aspects of China's proposal which are good in regards to giving scores to businesses in an effort to regulate them, similar to independent reputation systems in the West, but it is the promises of "holistic rating of character" they've made and the comments about introduction of big data deep learning techniques that have people concerned. Even if intentions were completely benign, you could end up with something very bad.

The idea of using surveillance capitalism in a multipolar system is one thing, especially if there is a very transparent dispute system, but using it at the state level should scare everyone. People complain about being ruined by small tweaks to Google's ranking algorithm, but having a single ranking instituted by a government monopoly would be inescapable.

Different cultures value things differently. In many societies east of Europe, things typically considered private in the west (work, salary, family, political affiliation/opinions etc., friends circle etc.) would be commonly accepted social knowledge.

So what you consider "Important" may not be as important to them when you consider they may already expect society knows these things.

you can't do IT business in China without sleeping with gov in one bed, so it doesn't really matter what people want, whatever you want company it's not allowed to provide

only reason gov doesn't care about imessage is either because everybody use Wechat or they know already how to read your conversations even there

That's primarily an excuse foreign companies use to explain their failures in China. They want to run their business in exactly the same way the do in their own country, they expect the users to behave in the same way as their existing users. Then when they fail, they blame everything on the government. The Chinese government certainly have different values and believes from western society, so do the 1 billion Chinese people.

The truth is, Chinese government treats foreign companies much better than local ones. Foreign companies are much easier to get loans and tons of other resources. But it certainly defines rules that all players in the market needs to obey. Do Chinese people buy Apple products because Cook has been sleeping with Chinese gov? Did Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba all succeed because they followed instructions of Chinese gov?

Here in Russia we have a (somewhat niche) meme "we've only won" (keeping the good look to the bad play, typically used ironically).

Each time our wise government protects us from something unnecessary or dangerous (like ban on European dairy products or LinkedIn storing data abroad) we're only winning from this, as almost no one needed that anyway, and that now our own positions are even stronger, etc.

I can't help myself but find very close resemblance here. ;)

Just saying.

As of December 2017, iOS had around 19.7% of China's mobile web browsing market. That is unexpectedly huge, is there a large enough middle class to support that many iPhones?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/262176/market-share-held...

Sales in China have been expanding, though it goes up and down with new iPhone releases:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/01/13/apples-ne...

Samsung has absolutely gotten killed in China recently, but I don't think Apple has.

It’s not killed for sure, but it used to have bigger market share

Not according to the forbes article, but that is indicating sales in quarter rather than overall marketshare (Apple sold more phones than Xiaomi in Q4 17, see https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/25/chinas-smartphone-market-i...).

Apple is not doing poorly in China by any economic measure, but ya they don't sell many $200 Xiaomi/Huawei phones. I'm sure that Apple wins consistently based on phone sales revenue, even if they trail in total units sold.

Apple got some good number with iPhoneX launch it seems, after several years' of decline in market share. They're no where close to getting killed though.

The fact it's moving servers to China is most likely going to have positive effect on their sales, not negative.

The X was basically designed for China, you can’t show off with a design that is 3 generations old already! Apple didn’t bother updating their ID for 3 years (6, 6s, 7), which is why sales were so tepid in China for the last two years. The X fixed that.

The effect of iCloud moving will be mostly neutral. As long as WeChat continues to work on iPhone, whatever iCloud does won’t be very significant. I doubt most iPhone users in china even know what iCloud is.

it depends on your definition of market share - whether it is quarterly shipment or % of phones on carrier networks.

apple devices are a few times more expensive than say Xiaomi, they thus stay in people's pocket for much longer. for shipment data, Apple's figure is not that fancy any more, they count for only 8% of the shipment in Q2 2017.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-and-samsung-are-losing-...

It does fall and rise on any quarter given apple’s predictable release schedule. Still, 20% sustained marketshare for China at the price they are selling compared to local competitors is quite the feat.

Apple shipped 18% of phones worldwide, but when it comes to the Chinese market, it counts only 8%. You need a lots of explanations if you refuse to acknowledge the obvious here.

https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3859963

Before start to waste your time, the 8% shipment in China figure was >14% just 24 months ago.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/11/8584277/smartphone-shipme...

To give you some extra details - I live in downtown Shanghai, as of writing, several months after IPhone X's release, I have not even seen the IPhone X yet as not any single one of my families, friends or colleagues has switched to that.

That is why i wasn't very optimistic in iPhone X China figures. I dont see them around in China much as well. And the craze was no where near my expectation, and nothing compared to iPhone 6. But the sales figure was very different when announced.

You are not the only one with this observation as well. Most of my friends and colleagues in different area of China had the same observation as well. I wonder why.

So where did they go? 8% is a lot.

I think parent just doesn't hang around Xintiandi very much.

Similar finding here. Lost quite some market shares is what we "felt" was happening around out circles, although the stats usually tells a slightly different story. Especially when you are suppose to be using Chinese Brand if you are in business and have any relationship to political circles.

And may be given a lot of these phones are likely being used to do App Store Reviews, ranks, Gaming levels, etc. May be that is why we see them less around us but sales figure tells a different story.

Totally agree! I would have already switched if I hadn't bought so many iOS apps.