I’m just beginning a short little contract here in China for a month or so to pay some bills and help a friend out. Part of doing work in the computer industry in China is that 1000$ USD for a computer is an outrageous sum of money. Those of us with Apples are either reckless spendthrifts or simply lucky beyond belief (Mac OS X itself is simply not understood … is that a program that runs on top of Windows?). So, this morning, when one of my coworker’s computer broke, I groaned. Not only was it likely to be a huge hassle, but the likelihood of having spare parts or another working computer were quite remote.
In short, he had no network. The cable lights simply did not come on. We switched cables. We unplugged and re-plugged in everything in the office. We uninstalled and re-installed drivers. We fiddled and diddled with Windows ad nauseum. We stole other departments’ switches. No joy.
Finally, in an act of desperation, I opened the computer up, tapped the network port aluminum housing a few times, looked sagely at at the current state of affordable PC hardware (it is pretty cool looking inside those things), and then tried again …. it works fine now.
What the—???
It sounds like the network connector has a flakey solder connection. Time to heat up the iron, or if you are like the techs in most of the shops around here, rip out the network card and install a new one, $15 for the card and $55 to put it in. And the cost of this little foul-up also includes your time and effort in finding/fixing the problem, at whatever price you attach to that.
It's too bad that OS X isn't understood in China -- when you consider the extended fonts that are included with the system can cost over 500$ USD *each*, and there are what, 6 shipped with the system, the cost really doesn't equal the price.
China is pretty overwhelmingly Windows. And perhaps 5% of it legitimately purchased Windows.
The computer geeks I've met here know of Linux, but that's about it ... they immediately freak out when presented with a command line or terminal shell.
Macs are kind of the same way -- About a third of the intel macs I see here are actually just running Windows XP. I don't think the average person is savvy enough to understand that there are different operating systems. If it doesn't look exactly the same as every single other computer they've seen so far in their life, they get confused.
m.
Yah, in a lot of ways, 1 RMB ( == 1/8th of US $) is like a dollar here -- the average person earns about 2000RMB a month in the city, and probably a quarter of that in the country side. IT workers in the city are up to maybe 4-5000 a month.
So, an 8000RMB (1000$ USD) computer is a luxury here and a 10000RMB (once you add enough RAM and/or a monitor) is simply considered a waste of money.
In general, I get the impression that the culture is still learning about the concept of quality, and as everybody starts to get the average stuff (read: junk) and wealth continues to grow, more and more people will start looking for better quality products. In the meantime, those of us with Macs will just be eccentric weirdos :-).
I am disappointed too. There is a mac mini in my office. It doesn't boot now because some one tried to install windows xp on it!!!
the average macbook ships with 512MB of RAM, and you seriously can't do anything with that at all. OS X is pretty porky, and really requires 1GB+ to do anything well. i had thought that 768MB of RAM was enough but my sister recently upgraded hers beyond that just because it was too painful.
so, the 1.5GHz core-single mac mini with 512MB of RAM ("Mini-mac", as the office madam calls them) here is just a complete nightmare to use. Commodore 64s were faster than this thing.
Only the new MBPs with the 2GB RAM truly fly right out of the box.