Apple Rolls Out Installment Payment Plan in China – Quoted – Forbes

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Apple Rolls Out Installment Payment Plan in China

Scott Testa spent a good part of 2011 and 2012 visiting universities and high schools in Zhenghou, China on behalf of China Hope Project. His mission was to act as evangelist for U.S. education and technology.

In that role Testa couldn’t help but notice what type of mobile devices the students sported – invariably they would be handsets made by Asian manufacturers. Once in a blue moon, he tells me, he saw an iPhone. It’s not that students didn’t like Apple products, Testa says—they just couldn’t afford them.

(As a completely unrelated but very interesting side note, Zhenghou is also home to the Foxconn manufacturing facility that makes Apple iPhone 5 devices, a factory that experienced a lot of labor unrest in recent years. In other words, Zhenghou residents can make the devices but apparently can’t afford them).

“My experience was that Apple was viewed as a highly desired brand by Chinese students but it was out of reach for a lot of them,” Testa says.

Apple is trying to remedy that with a new installment payment plan it has introduced in China for buyers of iPhones and MacBook laptops, Bloomberg‘s BusinessWeek reports. It is offering such terms as $48 monthly payments spread out over two years in order to better compete with low-cost devices on the market.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikamorphy/2013/01/16/apple-rolls-out-installment-payment-plan-in-china/

Former CEO John Sculley Says Apple Needs Cheaper iPhone For Emerging Markets (appadvice.com)
Apple courts Chinese customers with new interest-free payment plans (thenextweb.com)
Apple’s Chinese Web Store Adds Credit Facility As iPhone-Maker Battles Cheap Androids (techcrunch.com)

Quoted – Apple’s Leaky Vietnamese Connection

: Image by The Pug Father via Flickr

Why so many Apple leaks from Vietnam? Once again, the Vietnamese blog Tinhte has revealed what could be a real-deal upcoming Apple product. The blog recently showed a new MacBook days before Apple announced it, as well as an iPhone prototype that looks very much like the 4th-gen device Gizmodo obtained last month. This time, Tinthe has shown an iPod touch with a 2MP camera.

Since tight control over new product information is an important part of Apple’s success strategy in its markets, this latest rash of leaks — multiple fourth-generation iPhones, information on MacBooks and now this supposed iPod — must be disturbing to the company. However, it shouldn’t be surprising, according to Scott Testa, a professor of business administration at Cabrini College in Philadelphia.

“If you’re a large company, and you’re outsourcing R&D and manufacturing, you’re going to have leaks,” he told MacNewsWorld. “That stuff is going to happen.”

While the Tinhte leaks may have minimal impact on Apple’s marketing strategy, Cabrini contended, that’s not the case with another lapse in the company’s information control: the obtaining of an iPhone prototype by the gadget website Gizmodo.

“Apple gains a lot marketing firepower from the secrecy of their products,” he asserted. “The loss of the prototype did much more damage than the other [leaks].”

http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/Apples-Leaky-Vietnamese-Connection-70042.html

Quoted – Amazon’s Kindle May Crash at the iPad (scotttesta.com)
Quoted – Microsoft Trots Out Office for Mac 2011 – MacNewsWorld (scotttesta.com)