In China, an Empire Built by Aping Apple | Hacker News Reader

In China, an Empire Built by Aping Apple

nytimes.com

69 pointsdanso45 comments

The article has a bit of American Bias towards it (probably because it's the NY Times).

Xiaomi have developed their own UI (with some similaroties to Apple) called MIUI which you can download and install on your Android if you wish. They are galvanizing the market in China because they are pushing home the 'China-built, High standard' message. In other words, they are playing the patriotism button and in the main, it's working.

The main issue is whether they can push beyond China.

Is it a issue if they don't push beyond China just yet? Maybe they can sell a lot of these devices to a inspired domestic market, and once they have enough clout release a device with Apple level quality to the whole world.

In the 1st tier cities at least, Xiaomi's are phones you buy if you can't afford a Samsung or iPhone. I have yet to see one of my friends with one. Honestly, for value + good design, Nokia's Asha phones would be a better choice. We are thinking about getting my wife's mom one since she finds her Chinese-brand Android phone too hard to use.

Woah, Xiaomi is behind MIUI? I had no idea. I'm impressed, it's refreshing to see Chinese tech companies pushing innovation and quality to compete instead of half-assed clones.

It should be noted that MIUI is also a rampant GPL violator. They have taken a lot of open source stuff under the GPL, among other licenses, and closed it off or even claimed as their own. This probably isn't shocking given the article.

http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/11/android-community-demand...

"A lot" and "rampant" seem like exaggerations. Based on that link, most of MIUI's changes are to the Android source code, which licensed under the permissive Apache license.

Only their modifications to the linux kernel need to comply with the GPL license.

edit: Here is the relevant quote from the parent's link

>While the kernel modifications [to the GPL licensed Linux kernel] are only a small part of the modifications Xioami has done to create MIUI, it does include the low-level work Xioami has done to push things like performance and energy efficiency.

If you were to look hard enough, you'd see that you can find plenty of MIUI source code for kernels, patches, etc... Most of the documentation is in Chinese, and the websites aren't in English either, but they seem to comply with their GPL requirements.

They also aren't obligated to release the source for all the Android modifications (Apache licensed).

I have one. They just cloned some of iOS with even a similar form factor. This is pretty much what the article is about. Theming is probably the biggest innovation.

Thanks for pointing that out, while I was reading the article I was wondering how they could brand themselves as apple-like when they must surely be selling and Android phone.

It's sad that every tech story about China has to be given an anti-Chinese spin, to the extent that the tech angle is completely overlooked.

Especially the NYT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5755627

Having tested MIUI compared to stock android on my mother in law, MIUI was much easier for her to understand and use... So, I don't think it's fair to say that Xiaomi is not innovative, it's actually one of the very few android phone maker that actually cares about the software side of things and built a really good interface.

Westerners seem to get majorly hung up on the "China copying" meme and miss the bigger picture--China is incredibly focused on technology and there are huge sums of money and a strong cultural impetus for home-grown innovation. As an analogy, China is at the stage where they have learned the major rules for a programming language, and are now copying and pasting advanced code from stackexchange or other places.

Let's not forget historical context either: Japan and S.Korea were once known as knockoff central, and now produce extremely advanced products in their own right.

> Westerners seem to get majorly hung up on the "China copying" meme

Huh? Nytimes seem to be hung up, yes. 'Westerners' seems to have slipped out.

Just from reading the comments here you can get an idea it's more than the NY Times, the assumption of westerners is an assumption, but do you seriously think it's a bad one?

I'm painting with a broad brush :). The extremely negative and short-sighted attitude about Chinese knockoffs is (in my experience) most prevalent in 'western' countries: USA, Canada, UK, Western Europe. I have less contact with Eastern Europe, South America or Africa so I can't comment on their reactions.

Attitudes toward copying are very cultural. In China, it stems from pragmatism and a greater focus on the ends rather than the means (winning trumps winning well) whereas in the US--and West--winning is important, but so is "playing fair".

So are china:

BYD, Baidu, QQ, Weibo, PPS

Some of those products have no equivalent in the West, namely BYD and PPS.

Others are significantly different to our equivalents (Google/Baidu, BYD/Tesla(?), Weibo/(Twitter/Facebook))...

Douban, where I work, has no real equivalent outside of China, even if obviously everyone in China is looking closely at new things from the US.

The copying phase is indeed common in nations that are developing their economies. The U.S. is just eager for China to get past it and start developing and protecting their own innovations. That will be better for everyone.

They obviously chose the word "aping" for a reason, but it strikes me as a poor word choice here.

These aren't pocket calculators with "I-PHone" rubber-stamped on the cover.

From the article:

"Skeptics say the company produces low-price iPhone imitations with no significant software or hardware advantages."

So where are the disadvantages, other than the "they're copying Apple" problem?

I suspect that if they stay more or less on the right side of copyright/patent law in the west, they'll capitalize on the "lower price/equivalent hardware" combination that apparently even the skeptics mention. And with the capabilities to build the next big idea, all it really takes then is enough of a break from traditional company culture to let new, good ideas bubble up and/or be sought out (and hey look, the Xiaomi CEO seems to be going for that).

For some perspective on his background, Kingsoft makes the most popular Chinese/English dictionary software in China - a really great product, ahead of its time. Joyo is not unheard of either... so he hasn't exactly come out of nowhere. Furthermore, hassling someone because he uses tried and true marketing techniques or happens to wear a black shirt while presenting is a bit extreme.

I can't speak for their dictionary, but KingSoft has an antivirus/internet security program which is nigh on impossible to uninstall, including extremely misleading messages on their uninstall screen.

I wouldn't touch any of their other stuff for that reason alone.

Fair enough. The golden era of their mouseover dictionary was ~2000.

Their office suites for Windows and Android rock!

In China, the user base is its advantage. With the manufacturing skills, they are just Aping now, give it 10-15 more years, those might just grow into another Samsung, Amazon. In fact, last year two of Alibaba’s portals together handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in sales, more than eBay and Amazon combined (Economists - http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21573981-chinas-e-comm...)

"Skeptics say the company produces low-price iPhone imitations with no significant software or hardware advantages."

I must say that compared to other low-price phones in china like Lenovo, ZTE, Huawei and Hisense I'd rather take Xiaomi. They seem to pay more attention to quality than others and they do show innovativeness with MIUI for example. And more importantly they seem to have more and more of their own innovation in each product generation. For example their MI2S offers exchangeable colored backs that I haven't seen with many other companies (Nokia maybe).

I used to think NYT is respectable paper, but with words like "aping" in the title of an article like this I'm giving up on that thought.

"He is also selling millions of mobile phones that look a lot like iPhones [...] his company sold seven million mobile phones last year by using designs that mimic the look and feel of the iPhone and using marketing that seems right out of Apple’s playbook."

A bit like the Samsung Galaxy S3/S4 are resembling the iPhone. The Xiaomi M1/M2 are far from copycat GooPhone and the like, while the specification of the latest device from Xiaomi are matching or surpassing the Android competition (checking for yourself the different review on the internet) and the price is one of the lowest for this type of high end hand held device (we are talking about ~300 USD here).

I can not remember as well when Apple played so well on scarcity of supply for a new product, like Xiaomi and their flash sales.

Yes, I agree that nobody would mistake Xiaomi for an iPhone so it's hard to call it a clone. They have clear logo, different button positions and the back looks totally different. It didn't seem like the author had actually used a Xiaomi phone himself.

The Chinese seem to think that integrity and respect are mutually exclusive. When you are poor or middle class, starting a business that is inspired by other products on the market is pragmatic. When you are wealthy, blatantly cloning other businesses with no significant improvements makes you a thief and a profiteer. This guy sounds like a scumbag that gives business a bad name.

Meh...I have to see him doing something that Apple isn't - in a unique way...before I believe he can even look at S. Job's shoes.

He claims to be looking at TV - if they release a TV BEFORE Apple, that is as good as Apple's version (or even better) then I will stop being skeptical.

Until then, chalk me up as one of those "skeptical Westerners".

They look like iPhones but are running Android ... and as it mentions at the bottom of the article, they release an updated OS version every week.

Its simple money, dear NYT. He can be Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer or whoever, as long as his shit is selling. Innovation? oh c'mon, there has been no innovation since Einstein.

shameless... i dont understand how these people can sleep at night.

The same way good old Benjamin Franklin did as he pirated the works of British authors: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva75.html

Not exactly, Ben wasn't asserting that he created the works.

So like Steve Jobs, who accused Microsoft of stealing "his" ideas when in fact he stole those ideas from Xerox?

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_N...

bought those ideas from Xerox and then added a whole load of extra stuff to them (icons, pull-down menus)

The same way anybody learning anything starts out. Imitation happens every single time someone learns anything. Read the early works of any writer, look at the early work of any painter. You'll find imitation. Look at a child pretending that he's a policeman. Look at Jackson Pollock's early work and compare it to Benton's. I don't know why people look down on imitation. Everyone in the world is an imitator. You have to start somewhere. Even an entire nation has to start somewhere.

Did you read a different article than I did?

They make an Android-based phone, like 10+ other companies (Samsung, HTC, Sony, Lenovo, LG etc.). What is shameless about that?

I think chourobin is talking about how the CEO aspires to be like Steve and even dresses like him... The ultimate Chinese copycat?

(I disagree but I think thats the jist of what chourobin meant)

Because every one in black turtleneck, blue jeans and grey sneakers is aping Steve Jobs.

The article was rather clear that he does it intentionally in the style of SJ.

This guy should be embarrassed. Why is he trying to copy Steve Jobs? I think down the road the Chinese will be stuck in a very hard place after decades of copying. Without innovation, it's hard to develop new ideas and technologies.

The Chinese desperately need a cultural revolution to understand that stealing is not an acceptable way to do business. Until that happens it will be hard for any Western company to take them seriously.

"The Chinese desperately need a cultural revolution "

Terrible choice of terms, not sure if you are intentionally trolling or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

> Until that happens it will be hard for any Western company to take them seriously.

this begs the question of whether they really give a shit if western companies take them seriously

obviously you, being in the west, think that the western opinion is the most important in the world, but unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't necessarily agree with you.

... and they also have $Trillions.

Are you seriously saying they need to have a "cultural revolution"? are you ignorant? or is your humour just really bad taste?

What did they steal?

Why do Chinese care what western companies think? (They have the biggest market, not us).

Why do you think western companies don't steal?

Have you used MIUI? it isn't a copy, and it is innovative.

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