[mikeash]

It's not racist if it's backed up by data.

So far I have seen no data whatsoever to back up this idea that Asian people prefer gold more than other people in the world.

Articles like these simply take a racial stereotype and run with it to the conclusion they want to reach. That's racist.

[GFischer]

Red and Gold are the Chinese lucky colors.

India values gold disproportionately as well.

Those are such well known facts, maybe the authors didn't think they needed to explain them

https://www.google.com/search?q=gold%20in%20asian%20culture

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Importance-of-Gold-in-Chinese-...

http://heryyansen.hubpages.com/hub/The-significance-of-the-c...

In India, gold is usually part of dowrys. (I read a great National Geographic article which I can't find online)

Edit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431446

and the sibling comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431521

[mikeash]

Which of these is supposed to support the idea that it's disproportionate?

Of course they love gold. Everybody loves gold.

Americans are going crazy over the gold iPhone too. But nobody's talking about that, because they'd rather talk about Asians.

If it can be demonstrated that cultural preferences have translated into a disparate demand for gold iPhones in Asian countries, then and only then can this claim be made with a straight face. As it stands, it's just uninformed discussion about people who are "different".

[tokenizer]

> Americans are going crazy over the gold iPhone too.

That's racist!

^ This is what you sound like ITT...

[mikeash]

What's your point?

[tokenizer]

That you're just making threads toxic with your white knight attitudes.

Saying that BI is racist because they generalize the Asian market is what's wrong with the world. Not only do you generalize an entire continent by reducing it to race (racist against all Asian races?), but you then go on about how they can't generalize.

Almost all markets generalize. They need to. It's how you do business. If target age 24-32 female, white, etc...

Stop being such a white knight and attempt to read the article and bring valid points up for discussion instead of derailing it and wasting many a programmers time.

[mikeash]

"White knight"? Sure, because I couldn't possibly be directly affected by issues like these.

Until and unless the assertion is actually supported, it's racist BS.

I read the article. It completely fails to support its assertions. It talks about behavior the entire world appears to be engaging in, but singles out Asians for no reason.

They're telling a story they've basically made up, and are taking advantage of the "mysterious other" to do so.

This story would not pass muster if it were about black people. The author would get run out of town!

I believe that my points are perfectly valid. There's been a whole slew of articles about "Asians love gold" with absolutely no data to back them up, which are clearly based on a racist narrative rather than anything rational. How is that invalid?

"Wasting many a programmer's time"? That's hilarious. Even if the story is completely true, it's a waste of time to read and to comment about.

Personally, I think pointing out how casual racism is tolerated and ignored in certain situations is quite a bit more useful than the other comments on this article.

[option_greek]

India, China are gluttons for gold [1]. So much that Indian government has to impose curbs on gold import to safe guard its national currency [2]. Most of this gold ends in private citizen hands as jewellery or bars and buscuits.

[1] http://www.gold.org/investment/statistics/demand_and_supply_... [2] http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/08/19/india-gold-timeline...

[cocoadog]

Is "Asians love gold" a common racial stereotype? Serious question. Is it common for racist non-Asians to think, "Them Asians, they sure do love cat chow mein, blonde women, and gold"? [EDIT: If you like, substitute "math, martial arts, and gold". I'm asking only about the existence of a stereotype, setting aside how demeaning or inflammatory it's considered to be.]

I've been hesitant to assert cultural differences in another thread, but I think it's safe to say the color gold, like red, has a different significance in China than in the West. (Less sure about other Asian countries.) It's possible some people stupidly associate the preference with race, as if it's genetic, rather than cultural; I've just never encountered that stereotype.

Before the announcement, my overwhelming impression from American writers was not that they love gold. Quite the opposite: they did not expect to like the color, and were trying to come up with an explanation for why Apple would go that way. They were flailing for some conclusion, not rationalizing a conclusion they particularly "want[ed] to reach".

I'm skeptical of the theory myself, for a couple of reasons, but it doesn't strike me as racist. It might if I were convinced the racial stereotype was a common one that I happened to be unaware of.

[the_watcher]

Isn't this data? "In Australia and China, online Apple Store shipping times for the iPhone 5s rapidly slipped to 7–10 days for all colors and capacities, with immediate unavailability of the 64GB gold version."

It's not big data in the Facebook/Twitter sense of the word, but in this case, how quickly unavailability is reached seems to be the best data point.

[mikeash]

This completely ignores the fact that the exact same thing happened in the US and probably every other 5S launch country.

That gold is preferred in Asia is not under dispute. What I dispute is the idea that it is preferred more than in other countries. I've yet to see any evidence for this, but that doesn't stop all of these articles from making the claim anyway.

[cocoadog]

> So far I have seen no data whatsoever to back up this idea that Asian people prefer gold more than other people in the world.

I too would like to see data that supports the theory that a gold iPhone should be expected to do especially well in China. For example, have other companies benefited from making the same decision for their own product lines?

[jiggy2011]

More just an unproven hypothesis. It's not like the article claims that you are a worse human being for preferring a gold iphone.