MacKay had first visited China as a nineteen-year-old in 1979 and attended university there in the 1980s. When he was a student, he says, everyone dressed in proletariat blue or People’s Liberation Army green. “There were no private cars, very few private restaurants. If they had ten items on the menu, they may have actually had two in the restaurant.” So when people in China started to make money, he says, “they really didn’t know how to display it, how to control it. And Apple,” he goes on, “was in the middle of that. Not only were they manufacturing there, but they were selling this product on a retail level that was in such high demand. And it was every time Apple launched something. It was what the Chinese with money wanted. Because it was a symbol. It wasn’t even the phone—it was the symbol of the phone.” MacKay tries to think of a Western analogy that might convey the feeling but can’t. “You’d have to go back to the 1880s, when the first cars came out,” he says. “It’d be like being one of the first people with a car instead of riding a horse on a muddy stream.”
Thousands of people who couldn’t afford iPhone found ways to buy them anyway. China Daily reported that a study of college students in Wuhan found that 20,000 had taken out loans with twelve-month interest rates as high as 47 percent to buy “fancy electronic products,” 90 percent of which were Apple. Perhaps the most widely publicized incident was that of a seventeen-year-old who underwent black market surgery to sell his kidney in exchange for enough cash to buy a new iPhone and an iPad.
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