Chinese Buys a MacBook Pro. Why? To Run Windows XP.
My sister-in-law’s boyfriend is off to college this fall and has bought a new laptop. Specifically, a top of the line 15″ MacBook Pro. He’s Chinese. Let me repeat that. He’s Chinese!
So, I now know one mainland Chinese guy who has a Mac. I have seen Macs before in China, in Apple authorized retail stores and in the hands of foreigners, but never before in the hands of a typical middle-class mainland Chinese guy.
When I asked him about the software he was planning on getting for it, he said he planned to get all the software in China, because he could get cheap pirated copies of things.
“Yes, that’s true, but pirated software for OS X is still far more expensive than pirated software for XP,” I said, speaking from experience.
“I mean Windows software,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea. What about OS X software, are you planning on getting any OS X software?”
“Well, it comes with OS X and a suite of software out of the box, right? I’ll just get that. I don’t think I’ll be using the Apple stuff much anyway.”
“What? You’re spending $2500 on a MacBook Pro and you’re only going to run Windows!?” I asked, astonished.
“I’m more familiar with Windows.”
“Yes, it’s certainly nice that you’ll be able to run Windows, but then why not just get a Dell? Not all Windows drivers work on BootCamp yet.”
… no answer. The answer, I think, is that an Apple notebook is a big fashion statement nowadays. He also happens to be a big gamer, so I think that probably he is mostly interested in the high end hardware for gaming.
He’s going to uni in England though, so I suspect he’ll find that most other MacBook users only use XP when they need to, and will thus find himself peer-pressured into trying out OS X. He’s big into computers too, so digging into UNIX and learning the Terminal would seem a natural course for him to take, if he’s serious about computing.
Anyway, a few posts back I wrote about John C. Dvorak being more or less right about Apple becoming a major PC vendor. If my sister-in-law’s boyfriend is typical, then most Chinese who buy a Mac will be running XP as their main OS.
July 20, 2006 at 7:13 pm
I dare say once he boots up MacOS X and plays around with “the Apple stuff”, he’s hooked. Sooner or later he will find that some things are much nicer on a Mac…
July 20, 2006 at 11:26 pm
His logic is unbelievable. It makes no sense.
July 20, 2006 at 11:33 pm
“So, I now know one mainland Chinese guy who has a Mac. I have seen Macs before in China, in Apple authorized retail stores and in the hands of foreigners, but never before in the hands of a typical middle-class mainland Chinese guy.”
I guess that depends on what kind of crowd you’re in.
When I stayed in China, namely Beijing and Shanghai, I knew quite a few people who were in the graphic design business and I would say 9 out of 10 of them had Macs, not just for business use but also personal as well.
July 21, 2006 at 12:36 am
http://www.beimac.com/
I study at beijing University and I would say about 40% of my peers have macs. I guess the typical middle class mainland chinese guys you hang around with are just typical of your friends and are not an indicator of the current trends in China.
July 21, 2006 at 1:32 am
Your brother’s wife has a boyfriend?
July 21, 2006 at 2:11 am
“sister-in-law’s boyfriend”
Married brother’s wife’s sister’s boyfriend?
July 21, 2006 at 2:46 am
From a sample size of one you extrapolated for the entire population of 1.3 billion Chinese?
Great!
July 21, 2006 at 4:19 am
Buying a dell is just as illogical. XD
July 21, 2006 at 4:53 am
Well in a way that just might be a great advertising tool for Apple. All the arrogant gamers I know have dissed my Macs for not being able to play their games. This will certainly shut them up big time. They just may reconsider the next time they need a new laptop. Hmm…run Windows, OSX and Linux all on a single machine, sure that sounds cool.
July 21, 2006 at 6:51 am
My wife’s sister is my sister-in-law.
I completely agree with you guys about extrapolating out from 1 guy to make a prediction about the majority of Chinese consumers of Apple notebooks. It’s completely unscientific and fairly ridiculous.
July 21, 2006 at 7:16 am
[...] 看到一篇文章是說為啥華人買新一代的 MACBOOK PRO 還要裝 WINDOWS 系統呢？既然都買 APPLE 的筆記型電腦為何不用 MACOS 呢？ [...]
July 21, 2006 at 7:27 am
谁说的？我很明白人家为什么想装Windows系统，但是我是不明白为什么他只想用Windows，一点都不想用OS X。
July 21, 2006 at 7:35 am
SORRY，我會錯意，文章已經改過，希望你不要介意。
PS：你中文好棒阿
July 21, 2006 at 7:44 am
没事，我不介意。
July 21, 2006 at 9:46 am
SO he gets a Mac to use XP. I got a version of OSX that I van install on my Dell…I use Linux instead tho, lol. Just plain cheaper and more secure.
July 21, 2006 at 9:52 am
Well, I think it is a waste of money buying a Mac to run Windows. It is like buying a Honda Rune for delivering newspapers.
July 21, 2006 at 12:44 pm
You be surprise that the new generations have a strong buying powers. Who cares if it is a Mac that run XP or Window runs XP. As long as their buying power is strong…they are willing to spend it.
Is all about trend.
HUKES. I agree with you but is not on our hand or comments to say about the buying power.
Well… here are some advices:
Use what is neccesary and use it smart.
July 21, 2006 at 1:27 pm
I guess that must be one of the reasons the ppl at Apple came up with bootcamp in the first place.
July 21, 2006 at 4:32 pm
This is his right.
Ok?
I can’t believe that u made a prejudice about the majority of Chinese just from 1 guy around u.
“He’s Chinese. Let me repeat that. He’s Chinese!”
hey,man!What’s your problem?
July 21, 2006 at 6:08 pm
@BtYung, I would hardly call extrapolating a preference for one OS over another racial prejudice.
As for “He’s Chinese!”, I was simply quite surprised that a Chinese guy, from Weifang no less, a small city by Chinese standards, bought a Mac. As I stated before, I don’t personally know any other Chinese person who owns a Mac.
July 21, 2006 at 7:29 pm
I’m still stuck on the brother’s wife having a boyfriend…this is far more interesting than this Mac/PC stuff…
July 21, 2006 at 10:08 pm
I can see how BtYung found that comment offensive. As a Chinese myself (more specifically, Taiwan-born Chinese-American), I, too, at first found it offensive.
But then I realized the author wasn’t talking about ALL Chinese in the world, including those from Taiwan, Hong Kong, various parts of the world, or even those from cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but just from the author’s own small circle of Chinese.
July 25, 2006 at 9:16 am
[...] And lest I be accused of being an ignorant, arrogant, racist jerk who has “problems“, I’d just like to point out that it was my wife, a mainland Chinese girl, who encouraged me to write this on my blog. [...]
July 26, 2006 at 9:09 pm
You said he’s a big gamer? I thought Macs only support limited games. This guy really doesn’t know what he’s doing.
July 30, 2006 at 5:31 pm
I’ve gotten yet another comment, on my old The Weifang Radish blog (which lives at http://homepage.mac.com/kevinjamessmith/iblog until the end of August 2006 when my .Mac account expires) accusing me of “bias” towards Chinese people, so let me try again to clear things up, this time more fully.
First, the comment, from Nancy:
And here’s my response:
July 23, 2006 at 3:11 pm
This made its way around the blogsphere pretty fast, but in case you missed it:
href=”http://www.onemanbandwidth.com/wordpress/?p=674
I love my MAC, but I have to go to HK for service or licensed software…All they seem to sell in Guangzhou is low end hardware…
July 22, 2006 at 4:26 am
Hey Kevin, du -s * | sort -nr > $HOME/space_report.txt This is the command line I leaned. It used command line scripting to create a text file.
It took me forever to figure out what it did, but as soon as I found out I was happy. I could perform queries and either print them to the screen or print to files. And it’s all command line! It seems like you have so much information available to you in a fairly quick amount of time when you learn the terminal. there is no clicking and dragging. It’s fun.
AJM
September 21, 2006 at 3:21 pm
I m Chinese.
I m a film student in Canada.
I own a Macbook Pro.
And I repeat, I M CHINESE!
October 6, 2006 at 12:35 pm
[...] Finally, just as a side note, I think another reason why more Chinese don’t use Macs, or wouldn’t choose a Mac if they began to consider getting one, is due to the poor performance of Chinese websites on Mac-based browsers. My wife is eternally complaining about how terrible my iBook is at surfing the Chinese internet, and she’s right. Safari is a nightmare on Chinese websites, and Firefox and Camino for the Mac aren’t much better. This is totally not the fault of Apple or the Mozilla Foundation. Those browsers are built to handle web standards, such as valid HTML, XHTML and CSS. The problem is that Chinese web developers, from what I can see, don’t give a damn about web standards. The web standard for a Chinese web developer is, “Can I get this site that has a gazillion flashy beeping thingies on it to work alright on a buggy pirated copy of IE for WinXP? Yes? Okay, it is ‘web standards compliant’.” The solution, I hope, will be that Internet Explorer 7 will break a bunch of their quirky code and they’ll have to rewrite it to get it to work on IE7, and the rewrite will just happen to fix many of the Mac-browsers issues too. I don’t know how realistic an idea this is though, so I’m not getting my hopes up. Explore posts in the same categories: Technology [...]
June 5, 2008 at 9:05 am
I’m Chinese.
I own 3 Macbook Pros, each 17”, 2.6 C2D, 4GB RAM, ONLY XP.
And I repeat 10 TIMES UNTIL YOU REALISE, IM CHINESE!
June 5, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Great for you, Sebestian. Check out the comments above yours for a better understanding of this article.
November 10, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I’m Chinese. I’ve been using Macbook/Macbook Pro for years. And I never installed a windows system on my macbook.
Looking at the time of when this posted, I could understand why people used windows more than Mac. I have a simple question here, did SPSS have Mac edition in 2006? what about WinRat and Maple? How many softwares excepts for Office have Mac version in 2006? And how much do you know about Chinese software? Do you know how many of them support Mac? In 2006, as I remember, NONE Chinese software had Mac version. People buy a Macbook have their reasons and it’s all up to them.
Even by now, Chinese CANNOT do online stock exchange using a Mac.
Is it strange when you see a Chinese install windows on their macbook?
I dont really think so.