Apple iPhone 11 Becomes ‘Laughingstock’ Of Asia

Apple has become the ‘laughingstock’ of Asia with both consumers and Huawei’s CEO taking pot shots at the Companies latest iPhone 11.

Not only does the new Apple offering lack 5G technology Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group has moved to what one Chinese newspaper said was to ‘rubbish Apple CEO Tim Cook by pointing out that Huawei has had many of Apple’s “new features for years”.

Asian consumers are pointing out on social media that cheaper and more feature-packed handsets from rivals are already available across Asia and in many other parts of the world including Australia where superior Samsung and Huawei handsets are sold.

The iPhone 11, launched on Tuesday night at prices cheaper than last year’s base XR model, was met with a limp response from social media. “Apple’s new phones were no surprise at all. Only tangible change is having an additional camera on their premium model,” said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Seoul-based Cape Investment & Securities.

“However, it is noticeable that Apple has made a price cut for the newest iPhone for about $50, which is a very rare move for the company. The move might be aiming to manage and reduce potential risks drawn by the US-China trade war.”

“Since we still have to wait a year for 5G, why not just buy Huawei on Monday,” said one user on China’s Twitter-like service Weibo. Huawei and smaller rival Vivo have already released 5G models in China, and Samsung in South Korea.

A meme doing the rounds on Chinese social media featured Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook bragging about the new features and

“(Apple) just added one more camera lens and called it a new feature, meanwhile it is still too pricey,” said a user on South Korea’s Naver.com web portal. Equipment to install.

Huawei has developed a technique called “polar codes”, which it says will give 5G devices longer battery life than an alternative favoured by many Western firms called “low density parity check”.

If polar codes are widely adopted, Huawei will earn more patent fees from device-makers that support them.

“Huawei misunderstands the underlying problem,” Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, from the European Centre for International Political Economy, told the BBC.

“The issue is not the trustworthiness of Huawei as a vendor but the legal obligations that the Chinese government imposes on it.

“China’s National Intelligence Law requires Chinese businesses and citizens to surrender any data or ‘communication tools’ they may have access to, under strict punitive sanctions.

“Any equipment or software that Huawei licenses to an US entity would still fall under this obligation, and there is no way that the licensing entity or the intelligence agencies could scrutinise millions of lines of code for potential backdoors.”