[FirmwareBurner]

Because 1989 China didn't have the knowhow and industrial capability to reverse engineer, copy and manufacture your cutting edge HW designs and then undercut you, so there was no risk in publishing your know-how out in the open.

It's no coincidence the rise of Huawei coincided with the fall of Nortel.

I recently saw a tech youtuber from my home country review a bootleg iPhone 15 Pro Max, and it was very difficult to tell them apart HW wise unless you really knew what to look for.

Same with bootleg AirPods Pros, they even automatically connect to your genuine iPhone when you flip open their case, and only with a recent iOS update does the iPhone warn you they are not genuine AirPods Pros. Insane.

[gosub100]

Good, that's a free, efficient market. If airpods cost $22 to make, they shouldn't sell them for $200. If you do, don't be surprised when someone sells them for $60. The whole reason they manufacture in China in the first place is to avoid paying livable wages in a free society that has environmental protection laws. Screw them.

[vbezhenar]

https://youtu.be/_yU4dSE1HTQ

This video is Russian, but you can discard voice. It's pirate copy of iPhone 14. I couldn't tell the difference, at least from that video. That's really lot of effort gone to copy. Those who did that really deserve a respect.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Those who did that really deserve a respect.

Yes, same how a lot of fancy non-state-sponsored malware is developed by russian/chinese/iranian hackers. Obviously those skills could be put to much better use for good causes than bootlegging iPhones or writing malware, but that's what happens when you're born in a country with no good honest economic opportunities: crime is much more lucrative as no matter how smart and hard working you are, the local legal jobs and business opportunities are still shit.

[user_7832]

> I couldn't tell the difference, at least from that video.

Here's an easy giveaway - the bottom bezel isn't symmetrical in width.

Getting uniform bezels requires flexible OLED screens (and a few other oled adjectives I've forgotten), and all this is much harder to engineer and a fair bit more expensive. So far other than Apple, only Samsung and Google Pixels appear to be capable of having uniform bezels.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Here's an easy giveaway - the bottom bezel isn't symmetrical in width.

Sure, but they're not designed to fool those who already owned a recent iPhone, but to fool those that never owned a recent iPhone and are just buying their first iPhone now which so are easily fooled if they only get to play with it for a couple of minutes in a parking lot somewhere, before handing over the cash.

It's how this scam works in developing countries. You buy bootleg iPhones from Alibaba for $150 and sell them for $800 in a parking lot to a clueless dude looking to buy his first iPhone who can't afford the $1400 sticker price because that's way more than his monthly wage.

[user_7832]

That's understandable and very likely true, HN has nearly a 100% rate of tech geeks/nerds compared to the real world. However at least in some places in India it's often implicitly understood that such a phone sold below market cost is some kind of fake or refurb or b/c stock etc.

[FirmwareBurner]

I pulled those sales prices out of my ass as I don't follow second hand iPhone market prices but the real world scammers do and they make sure to advertise the correct market prices in line with genuine second hand iPhones, to not look suspicious as being too good to be true.