[amurmann]

Is that distinction into two parts, how you are seeing the world, or are you quoting the Chinese government? If it's your view, can you please elaborate, why you see this as the way to spli up the world, rather than let's say "the world is split up into EMEA, Americas and Asia, to give another arbitrary split.

As to the features Apple announced: There are multiple parts that play into this: First the completely different character set, which requires it's own input system and secondly that the Chinese government try's to cut foreign Internet services off and encourages local solutions it can control/manipulate. Those two issues require to address this market separately. Similar things, however might be true for other markets as well (maybe for different root causes) like let's say in Japan or North Korea. However, these markets aren't big enough to warrant effort on this scale. So I see this as a bad indicator to substantiate separating the world this way. If there was higher monetary value for Apple in this, weight see theworldseparated into Butan andtherest, with the same argument.