Huawei mimics Apple retail stores to peddle its iPhone knockoffs in China
Huawei is revamping its retail strategy and aggressively opening stores in China, with some nearby to the Apple retail stores it’s attempting to mimic (just as it attempts to mimic the iPhone itself) as it seeks to better compete in the world’s biggest smartphone market.
Situated directly across from Apple’s Shanghai flagship store, Huawei’s recently renovated shop spans three floors of a famous heritage architecture building in the financial hub’s busy shopping district and includes a coffee shop and a gym.
Huawei opened four such stores in major Chinese cities between December and February, an aggressive marketing blitz by a company that had largely relied on licensed distributors… “The Huawei flagship store is very nice. It looks much brighter inside compared to the Apple Store across the street,” said Amy Chen, a 27-year-old physiotherapist who visited the Shanghai store this week to switch to Huawei’s top-end Pura 70 Ultra from the iPhone 15 Pro in hopes of better mobile reception.
MacDailyNews Take: Imagine the lack of brainpower required to downgrade oneself from an iPhone 15 Pro to a slow CCP tracking device! It’s amazing Amy’s limited brain can even handle basic involuntary actions like breathing in order to keep her alive to make such spectacularly bad decisions.
Apple has 47 stores in mainland China. Huawei, which did not open a flagship store until 2019, now has 11 of them… More than 5,200 stores licensed to sell Huawei products sprang up through the first 10 months of 2023, with more than half of them in third and fourth-tier cities, according to market research firm GeoQ, helping Huawei expand its army of distribution partners nationwide.
MacDailyNews Take: Huawei’s overhyped claim to fame is the Mate 60 with a “Kirin 9000s” chip and its new Pura 70 Ultra with a “Kirin 9010” 7nm chip, each of which are generations behind Apple. The Kirin 9000s is a 7nm chip that has a Single-Core Score of 1267 and a Multi-Core Score of 3533 in Geekbench 6 benchmarks. Apple’s A17 Pro is a 3nm chip that has a Single-Core Score of 2902 and a Multi-Core Score of 7221 in Geekbench 6 benchmarks.
It’s not even close. It’s a 2019 Toyota Yaris vs. a 2023 Bugatti Chiron Super Sport sort of affair. It’d be a joke if it weren’t so sad.
Huawei’s flagship phones are trounced even by Apple’s entry-level iPhone SE (third generation) which offers the 5nm A15 Bionic launched in September 2021 (Single-Core Score: 2237, Multi-Core Score: 5173 in Geekbench 6 benchmarks).
Plus, Huawei’s slow outmoded crap is hobbled with HarmonyOS (which is surely in perfect “harmony” with Chinese Communist Party surveillance).
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