
Apple Ran Out Of Gold iPhones Because It Underestimated How Much Asia Likes Gold - shandip
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-out-of-gold-iphone-5s-because-asia-likes-gold-2013-9
======
josefresco
Watched something on TV a while back on how ingrained gold is in the Indian
culture. I don't have any links handy to back up my claims, but I think India
accounts for a majority of the gold market worldwide.

Edit: Quickly searching I found this:
[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57376057/indias-
love-a...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57376057/indias-love-affair-
with-gold/)

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ihsw
It has little to do with the color gold and more to do with the social status.

Money spent on home appliance is minimal and an after-thought, and this is
because you cannot impress people with your home appliances while you're out
of your home. Meanwhile you can flash your _Gold_ iPhone everywhere you go and
it implicitly shows everybody around you that you can afford a _Gold_ iPhone.

Social posturing is a central part of East Asian cultures and the _Gold_
iPhone appeals directly to that mindset. There is no racism but instead it's
just the reality of the situation -- hubris is ingrained and prevalent.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Isn't that prevalent everywhere? Some cultures show off gold, others show off
cars and their accessories, others show off the latest tech toys.

"Look at me, I have so much income, I can afford to spend it frivolously!"

~~~
ihsw
It's especially prevalent in China. Their one child per family policy has
created an entire generation of people with too much money, so extravagance
and opulence are approaching _and exceeding_ interesting levels of absurdity.

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mikeash
The pervasive casual racism when discussing the gold iPhone is just
astounding. If news outlets were talking about black people this way, there
would be riots in the streets. Why is this considered acceptable?

~~~
lnanek2
What exactly is racist about saying one product type appeals to a certain set
of cultures more than others? It is well known the Korean culture values extra
settings and controls as a sign of status, for example, and that Koreans value
replaceable batteries more and carry them around more often. Is it racist to
say replaceable battery phones sell better in Korea than elsewhere? There are
already OEMs that make different SKUs for exactly this reason, like LG.

~~~
mikeash
It's not racist if it's backed up by data.

So far I have seen no data whatsoever to back up this idea that Asian people
prefer gold more than other people in the world.

Articles like these simply take a racial stereotype and run with it to the
conclusion they want to reach. That's racist.

~~~
GFischer
Red and Gold are the Chinese lucky colors.

India values gold disproportionately as well.

Those are such well known facts, maybe the authors didn't think they needed to
explain them

[https://www.google.com/search?q=gold%20in%20asian%20culture](https://www.google.com/search?q=gold%20in%20asian%20culture)

[http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Importance-of-Gold-in-
Chinese-...](http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Importance-of-Gold-in-Chinese-
Culture&id=4126178)

[http://heryyansen.hubpages.com/hub/The-significance-of-
the-c...](http://heryyansen.hubpages.com/hub/The-significance-of-the-colors-
red--gold-in-Chinese-culture)

In India, gold is usually part of dowrys. (I read a great National Geographic
article which I can't find online)

Edit:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431446)

and the sibling comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431521)

~~~
mikeash
Which of these is supposed to support the idea that it's _disproportionate?_

Of course they love gold. Everybody loves gold.

Americans are going crazy over the gold iPhone too. But nobody's talking about
that, because they'd rather talk about Asians.

If it can be demonstrated that cultural preferences have translated into a
disparate demand for gold iPhones in Asian countries, then and only then can
this claim be made with a straight face. As it stands, it's just uninformed
discussion about people who are "different".

~~~
tokenizer
> Americans are going crazy over the gold iPhone too.

That's racist!

^ This is what you sound like ITT...

~~~
mikeash
What's your point?

~~~
tokenizer
That you're just making threads toxic with your white knight attitudes.

Saying that BI is racist because they generalize the Asian market is what's
wrong with the world. Not only do you generalize an entire continent by
reducing it to race (racist against all Asian races?), but you then go on
about how they can't generalize.

Almost all markets generalize. They need to. It's how you do business. If
target age 24-32 female, white, etc...

Stop being such a white knight and attempt to read the article and bring valid
points up for discussion instead of derailing it and wasting many a
programmers time.

~~~
mikeash
"White knight"? Sure, because I couldn't _possibly_ be directly affected by
issues like these.

Until and unless the assertion is actually _supported_ , it's racist BS.

I read the article. It completely fails to support its assertions. It talks
about behavior the entire world appears to be engaging in, but singles out
Asians for no reason.

They're telling a story they've basically made up, and are taking advantage of
the "mysterious other" to do so.

This story would not pass muster if it were about black people. The author
would get run out of town!

I believe that my points are perfectly valid. There's been a whole slew of
articles about "Asians love gold" with absolutely no data to back them up,
which are clearly based on a racist narrative rather than anything rational.
How is that invalid?

"Wasting many a programmer's time"? That's hilarious. Even if the story is
completely true, it's a waste of time to read and to comment about.

Personally, I think pointing out how casual racism is tolerated and ignored in
certain situations is quite a bit more useful than the other comments on this
article.

~~~
jiggy2011
They're talking about geographical markets, not categories of people.

Saying "X is popular in africa" would not be racist either.

~~~
tokenizer
Thanks for the ray of logic.

Personally, I find it more offensive when people get offended by non offensive
things than by ignorant generalizations, like grouping all Asians into a race,
by grouping all black people into a culture, by mixing up culture and race
(this one is tricky however), etc..

------
pessimizer
If gold hadn't sold out, it would have been a failure. The only function of
the gold iPhone is to be hard to get, if it were common as mud, it'd be seen
as the bedazzled tacky fashion-gadget shit it is.

~~~
glhaynes
I bet you gold isn't going to stay hard to get (harder to get than any other
5s, at least) for very long at all.

~~~
pessimizer
Not for too much longer than it takes for the new iPhone to come out, I think.

------
twistedpair
Nailed it. I knew this was yet another Asian play by Apple. The iPhone is
getting long in the tooth in Western markets, but there are still many virgin
markets in the East.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Really? Because like every other person has an iPhone here in Beijing. I saw a
gold one on a flight last night from Singapore, I think this is purely a
Chinese thing; weird that they said Asian and not Chinese.

------
solvemenow
Maybe its a marketing thing. I remember the same thing used to happen with
white iPhones. They would run out way faster than the black ones.

~~~
kamjam
I would really be surprised if they underestimated the demand, Asia is known
for loving gold. I would bet more likely it is a marketing thing, the news
that they have all sold out pushes up demand even further and also hits all
the headlines. How many people are going around now saying "I have one of the
new gold iPhones" to all their friends and colleagues.

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itsmequinn
To be fair, the 5th avenue New York store consistently "over-indexes" (as the
article puts it) with shoppers of Asian heritage. Until recently at least, it
was not very easy to buy an iPhone of any type in many Asian countries, and as
a result, many tourists on vacation to the US would buy multiple devices to
take home. Even now many Asian countries are among the last to have new Apple
products roll out to them. Certainly don't have data to back this up, but I
lived in New York for 6 years and took more than the occasional trip to the
Apple store and witnessed these types of bulk purchases. Point is, even the
"data" this article introduces doesn't necessarily have anything to do with
gold.

------
akamaka
Or, more simply, Apple ran out of gold phones because they were rightfully
cautious about over-producing an untested color. Just like the first all-white
iPhone, there's no rush prioritize the new color while proven ones are already
selling as fast as they can be made. Of course, this doesn't make for good
link bait.

Is the article racist? Yes, a bit. Only long-term sales data will reliably
tell us which colors are preferred in which markets. Right or wrong, the
article is rushing to judgement based on flimsy racial stereotypes.

~~~
the_watcher
I don't think the article is racist. Just poorly sourced. It's rushing to
judgement based on anecdotes (which are probably rooted in a bit of
stereotyping - just in the case, there is some data backing up the
stereotype). This comment has a good round-up of evidence that gold is more
popular in Asia than elsewhere:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431520).

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eugeneross
It always seems Apple has a problem with color production. Don't quote me on
it, but wasn't the white iPhone 4 that was different in color and had a weird
yellowish tint to some of the early models? It seems that they have quality
down, as of now. It's just a matter of quantity by the looks of it.

~~~
adestefan
Supposedly there were production problems that came up when the white iPhones
were released. It was a couple months until that all ironed out.

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acchow
They call it "gold" because Asia likes gold. But I saw the gold 5S in the
store and it is definitely not gold. It is a beautiful, classy champagne
color. If I were buying one, I'd definitely pick "gold".

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btbuildem
Sounds like Apple needs to jack the price on the 5S..

