Sure about that? You can buy feature-phones for ~$20 from China via Aliexpress.com that mimic iPhone 4's look very closely (including directly copying the UI), as well as a bunch of low end Android phones that also look like iPhone's at slightly higher price.
It also doesn't mesh with income levels, unless you're only walking around in very affluent areas, which is why anecdotes are pretty useless to establish popularity.
We can tell the shanzhai phones from the real ones. I concur with parent, iPhones are ubiquitous in Beijing. Keep in mind that most people there are middle class/rich. You have to travel outside the core...maybe 5th ring road before you get to poorer sections. But ya, the migrant worker on the street probably has a xiaomi, if that.
> I concur with parent, iPhones are ubiquitous in Beijing
Or you just notice them more because the people who can afford them like to show off their wealth.
> Keep in mind that most people there are middle class/rich.
According to People's Daily, average salary in Beijing last year was ca. 66000 yuan in non-private companies. It does not give clear numbers for employees of incorporated companies, other than saying it is about 1.2 times the national average. Lets be generous and round it up to 80000 yuan. That's still less than $13,000. And the distribution is extremely uneven - e.g. a lot of restaurant workers and other low level labour in Beijing still live in employer provided dormitories with salaries that wouldn't cover other accommodation.
The Beijing average is certainly well above the average for China, but I still take issue with the original claim that "In Beijing every second person you walk past is casually using an iPhone".
That there's a lot of them, I can buy. But seeing a lot of them in a densely populated city does not mean they actually make up a high percentage.
> But ya, the migrant worker on the street probably has a xiaomi, if that.
Given that Xiaomi phones start at around 3-4 times the low end of the Android market, I'd go for the "if that" for most of them... Amusingly just today Aliexpress has been showing off Xiami Phone 2 ($425-$525 for a quad core dual booting Android and MIUI phone) vs. Samsung Galaxy SIII
People's Daily doesn't include black/gray income, and for public-owned companies, this is huge where almost everyone is getting income/benefits under the table. They don't need to buy their own iPhone, someone will just "gift" it to them for guanxi reasons.
Finally, any middle class kid working for a private company making more than 6K RMB/month (72K/year) is going to have a iPhone most of the time. And this is why they are so pervasive here.
You'll see lots of iPhones in second tier cities, kunming, chengdu, Changsha....not to mention anywhere in jiangsu/zhejiang. Only in the third tier cities or countryside do iPhones become rare.
Bejing, is a subset of China, so it's not a good representation of total population. I bet most of China's population is (still) in rural areas (migrating occasionally to the city).
