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Comment by itg | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising when phones coming from Chinese brands have on par/better specs for a quarter of the price.

Yes not surprising when Huawei and others have been accused of stealing trade secrets. Why invest in R&D when you can just steal the IP from others?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...

Precisely. When you can manufacture dirt cheap, steal the innovation of others, then work your white collar to the bone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system). It is not surprising they can afford to undercut competitors and dump goods onto the market.

Would you expect any developing country to not take advantage advantage in the same situation? At a state level, it would be stupid to attract manufacturing with cheap labor, materials, lax ambient laws and low taxes and not copy the technology.

Only an inept government would willingly stall the development of its own country to honorably respect those trade secrets. Everybody doing business with China knew, but the economical incentive was too great to pass.

“Developing”. They are the #2 economy.

It doesn't make sense to look at the absolute size of an economy to determine development status. A country full of subsistence farmers can be #1 economy if they're numerous enough. China's GDP per capita (PPP) is still less than a third of that of the US, somewhere between Azerbaijan and the Dominican Republic.

I couldn’t disagree more. We live on a finite planet with limited resources. It hardly matters what the PPP is if they destroy the oceans we all use. The planet is only capable of sustaining so much. Having more people doesn’t give a nation some sort ethical imperative to have a higher GDP.

That you think China achieving a standard of living like current developed countries wouldn't be sustainable doesn't change anything about the fact that they're still developing.

FWIW, polluting water ecosystems is more common in developing countries (because they don't have the money to care about luxuries like environmental protection) and they've been slowly regenerating in developed countries, so from that perspective you should hope for China to become developed faster rather than slower.

I didn’t say that, but thanks for putting words in my mouth that make this somehow about nationality. I said that achieving a target PPP before expecting some restraint on the environment is a ludicrous goal in the face of the impending environmental cliff. You basically aren’t arguing, but telling me I’m just wrong and then making me out to really be on about keeping China down. Maybe try some intellectual honesty.

My point has everything to do with what the global ecosystem can take, and how much of an impact any nation has on it. As a species we need to figure out how to develop societies and countries without poisoning the planet.

The concept that because a country hasn’t reached PPP with the US it’s developing and can do what it pleases is patently insane. The Earth just doesn’t have the environmental resources for that, it’s already painfully apparent if you aren’t covering your eyes and ears. The human race can’t wait for countries to completely develop to play by the rules. Sucks.

Meanwhile China has demonstrably better infrastructure and more development in terms of cities than the US. I think by a lot of measures the US is still “developing”, we certainly lack the rail infrastructure of other “developed” countries for example, and our cities lack the dense, efficient urban cores of highly developed old world.

To boil my argument down, if China can build an extensive high speed rail network and capture the global electronics and PV markets they’ve moved beyond a “developing” economy, regardless of how well off or not the majority of their populace is.

Didn't the US "steal" the mechanisms behind the mechanical looms in the 19th century? I understand the concern that if no one is safe to invest in R&D without others immediately copying their tech (and therefore they won't receive a return on investment, which disincentivises future R&D), but aren't some phone manufacturers sitting on giant piles of money from their profit margins (Apple)? At the end of the day you end up with phones with more features being more affordable for the masses.

Who buys phones by their specs? I'm guessing most people have no idea even how much RAM is in their phone.

I bought a Pixel because it's from Google so it gets security patches and has a decent camera.

I've always wondered why none of these Chinese companies have tried to make something as good as an iPad. I had one of the venerable Nexus 7 tablets a long time ago and since then all the iPad competitors, with the exception of Amazon, haven't basically given up. I have a 10.5" iPad Pro and it's probably my favorite computer to use.

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