The android phones chinese bought are very cheap(500yuan to 2,000yuan),and they like free app.They can't afford iphones-5,000yuan(it will be stolen).
Not true. I can see a Samsung Note and an iPhone from where I'm standing in a Shanghai metro carriage. All bar one of the Chinese teachers I work with have an iPhone and they make about a third of what I do per month.
Actually that's only at my M-F job. But iPhones are a majority among the Chinese teachers I work with.
And China, or at least Shanghai, is very, very safe. If you're unlucky you may be pickpocketed but you will not be mugged.
Shanghai is special in china, it's closer to a modern city than anywhere else. iPhone's dominate the high end in Beijing also.
It also doesn't mesh with income levels, unless you're only walking around in very affluent areas, which is why anecdotes are pretty useless to establish popularity.
Or you just notice them more because the people who can afford them like to show off their wealth.
> Keep in mind that most people there are middle class/rich.
According to People's Daily, average salary in Beijing last year was ca. 66000 yuan in non-private companies. It does not give clear numbers for employees of incorporated companies, other than saying it is about 1.2 times the national average. Lets be generous and round it up to 80000 yuan. That's still less than $13,000. And the distribution is extremely uneven - e.g. a lot of restaurant workers and other low level labour in Beijing still live in employer provided dormitories with salaries that wouldn't cover other accommodation.
The Beijing average is certainly well above the average for China, but I still take issue with the original claim that "In Beijing every second person you walk past is casually using an iPhone".
That there's a lot of them, I can buy. But seeing a lot of them in a densely populated city does not mean they actually make up a high percentage.
> But ya, the migrant worker on the street probably has a xiaomi, if that.
Given that Xiaomi phones start at around 3-4 times the low end of the Android market, I'd go for the "if that" for most of them... Amusingly just today Aliexpress has been showing off Xiami Phone 2 ($425-$525 for a quad core dual booting Android and MIUI phone) vs. Samsung Galaxy SIII
(To those not aware of the iPhone-lookalike feature phones I mentioned, here's an example: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Dual-SIM-F8-TV-or-F8-NO-TV-i6... - there's also Android iPhone lookalike phones under brands like Star)
People's Daily doesn't include black/gray income, and for public-owned companies, this is huge where almost everyone is getting income/benefits under the table. They don't need to buy their own iPhone, someone will just "gift" it to them for guanxi reasons.
Finally, any middle class kid working for a private company making more than 6K RMB/month (72K/year) is going to have a iPhone most of the time. And this is why they are so pervasive here.
My(western) girlfriend traveled all China ALONE, and she really felt secure. China is probably the safest country on earth.
This probably will change the moment they embrace democracy and focus on the right of the criminals like they do in the west.
The U.S.?