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.
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
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".
That's racist!
^ This is what you sound like ITT...
[1] http://www.gold.org/investment/statistics/demand_and_supply_... [2] http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/08/19/india-gold-timeline...
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.
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.
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.
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?
