Why do the Japanese hate Apple?

According to this article:

I can’t seem to find any further detail or explanation for this. Does anyone have any insight?

I would imagine that it has something to do with “skis manufactured in the United States are unsuitable for Japanese snow.”
:slight_smile:

This article about the iPhone is a few years old, but contains an important fact:

Apple is a western brand (even if its products are made in places like China), which might explain a large part of its failure to penetrate the Japanese market.

Yep. This is a part of why the Xbox hasn’t gained much traction there either.

It was never quite so bad, but until fairly recently the IT industry in Australia was also quite hostile to Apple (and Linux). Macs would commonly be forbidden from corporate and school networks, excluded from network support and so on. The industry here is (was?) just very Microsoft-centric. There are exceptions of course.

But Macs are so kawaii!!! :slight_smile:

But do Japanese (or anyone) pay attention to national origins? MS and Apple are obvious. But I doubt most westerners know where Nokia is from (no, not Sweden!).

On the other hand, some Japanese brands try to hide their origins, like Matsushita → Panasonic. That was a bigger concern in the 1970s.

Over the past two decades, the US has gone cyclical. I remember labs full of Apple IIEs (IIRC Apple provided them at discount for schools), then later all Windows, then the Powerbook got popular.

I know little of Macs, so they are a pain for me to work on, but Linux is pretty straightforward. Probably because it is used for application servers here and the users can’t dither with them. :slight_smile:

Remember, it wasn’t too long ago that connecting a Mac to a corporate network in North America was also a no-no. It’s a question of market share and of what the executives want to have on their desks.

Beyond the not-invented-here factor, maybe Apple products just don’t have some features that people in Japan find essential.

Still, it says here that Apple sold over 7 million iPhones in Japan in 2011, or 17% of all smartphones. In the United States, apparently, it’s somewhere between 34% and 51%.

Haha what in the fuck? Your basis for the “Japanese hate Apple” is one foreign expatriate worker’s anecdote that his company doesn’t use Macs?

Pretty much no one uses Macs, anywhere, according to wiki worldwide market share is less than 15%. This might be OK if it’s just a child’s toy for you to tinker with at home but what office/corporate environment is going to bother with such a platform?

A google search for iPhone (which is what Apple primarily makes) market share in Japan says as of March 2012 it’s the best selling phone in Japan with a 30% market share.

Boy they sure do hate Apple don’t they? There is a memorable scene in the documentary Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift where schoolchildren get into fisticuffs over an iPod.

One thing most non-economists don’t ever quite “get” about countries like Japan is that their low consumption of imports is just a necessary effect of the nation’s export-oriented economic policies and their repression of consumers in favour of production. Every time the Bank of Japan intervenes in the currency markets to depreciate the yen, it kills domestic consumption and imports while boosting exports, same with VATs (although Japan doesn’t have huge VATs, it’s more popular in Europe). Japan also has a rather severe demographic problem, where there are fewer and fewer people and they are getting older and older. That doesn’t help anyone but it especially doesn’t help foreign makers of cars and electronics, things that old people (who also control the vast majority of savings and spending power) generally have little use for.

This is the reason why there isn’t a Camaro in every Japanese driveway. It’s not because they don’t like Camaros, they do, or that Japan has some kind of high tariff wall against American cars , they don’t. It’s simply pointless investing money, and it costs a massive amount of money to enter a car market anywhere, entering a market that is mostly poorer than America, physically shrinking every year, with an uncertain currency regime that more than likely will erase any profits they do make, and on top of that you have to compete with Honda and Toyota, which are for the most part not incompetently run companies, on their home turf. Who would want to sell anything in Japan? Companies like Honda and Toyota certainly don’t since their domestic market has been shrinking for decades and their profit margins razor thin or non-existant, and they will invest billions in America where they actually sell most of their cars.

It’s not impossible, as Apple obviously shows, and IIRC some countries like France and Switzerland run persistent trade surpluses with Japan on the back of luxury exports like Louis Vuitton and various wines and cheeses, but for the most part it doesn’t work.

iphones took a long time to gain any traction in the Japanese market but they recently have done so in the last 2-3 years. Before then, other phone companies had better plans and better models and better advertising.

Yeah, it is because they don’t like Camaros. There are MANY foreign cars in Japan: Benzes, BMWs, Ferrari. Not many Camaros though.

Thank you. I get weary of the struggle.

The articled linked in the OP is another whiny rant by a kid wet behind the years. Japan isn’t like home. Waw.

Yup, if you want to live in a country in which all homes comes with ovens, don’t get on the fucking plane. Japan is different. It’s not a Shangri La, and has more than its share of problems, but still can we got over this already?

It’s pretty remarkable given how badly its Japanese predictive texting is. If Apple were to have tried a little better its share could have been so much higher.

Oh, the word for apple is ringo (リンゴ). Maybe the Japanese are John or Paul fans.

I’ll let myself out…

I’ve worked in importing into Japan for 17 years and can’t agree with your assessment.

While doing business in Japan is difficult, some companies do it very well. Coke, McDonald’s and Seven Eleven are market leaders, for example. McDonald’s is the classic case of how a company changed its core concept of how to do business in order to become successful. When it first come, it was spectacularly mediocre, but changed some of its fundamentals and really took off. I’ve talked to a top vendor to one of these companies and he says that its relationship is completely different than with the parent company back in the States.

Doing business is very hard here, but it’s also hard for new Japanese companies as well. In my experience, most of the companies don’t really want to do what’s necessary in order to succeed, and often because they aren’t comfortable outside of their environment. One company I worked with was the exception and we increased sales by 30 times. But then it stopped flying under the radar and the various VPs in head quarters wanted to get Japan to be like America and we started to struggle again.

It’s too bad.

I wonder if it’s like Korea - Korean websites are notoriously Mac unfriendly, and because nowadays there’s so much shit people do online (banking, taxes, shopping, asking for official documents, etc) getting a PC makes one’s life much easier. I would never ever consider getting a Mac in Korea.

I was in Korea in April and saw a lot less Iphones there than I was expecting. For some reason, I saw a huge amount of Samsungs. :slight_smile:

Still, I did expect to see Apple have some market share, but it was small based on my limited observations. I was on the Seoul subway a ton and everyone had their phones out, though.

Your hostile and sarcastic tone is unnecessary. If you have information that’s better than that article, why not just convey it without being obnoxious?

I don’t understand why it should be so offensive for a person from country X to write to other people from country X how the experience of living in country Y might not meet assumptions and expectations. Not everyone has had the opportunity to have been in Japan for the second time.

And this article from October says the iPhone5 accounted for 50% of smartphone sales in Japan at that time (this was 2 to 3 weeks after the iPhone5 release), with the iPhone4 accounting for another 7% or so.

This article says the iPad has 50% of the tablet market in Japan, down from 65% a few months earlier.

And this article says Apple has 11.6% of the notebook computer market in Japan (as of June 2012).

So it’s quite a stretch to claim that the “Japanese hate Apple.”

(Sorry the links are all in Japanese, that was the quickest way to find these numbers.)

It’s because the article is shit. Complete utter shit. I could go through and fact check it line by line, but it gets so much wrong that it leaves me wanting to throw my ultra light weight, long-lasting battery Panasonic Let’s Note computer out the window of the bus I’m riding.

If the author had simply stayed within the comfort of her own precious bubble in bumfuck, Isolationville Northern Japan and didn’t have pretensions of knowledge of anything more about Japan as a nation than she actually does – which is so pitifully little a quick glance instantly betrays her complete ignorance – then it would still be nothing more than a half-ass blog entry. But she invokes words such as “Japan” and “Japanese” as if she knew something more than simply parroting along what the other English teachers bitched about.

There isn’t a single Japanese person quoted in the whole fucking article. Not one. Why? Because the author likely doesn’t speak Japanese and spends all of time with other foreigners. That’s not a crime. But don’t pretend you know what’s going on either.

If a foreigner were to come to the States, live somewhere out in the sticks with a only a few friends from the home country, spoke no English, would we accept his pronouncements on what America is?

But stop writing shit like “It is true that Japan has contributed technological advancements to the world, but Japanese technology should come with a warning label, “For Export Only.” In reality, everyday Japan is far from cutting edge.” What the fuck did you expect? That you’d be given a robot when you landed? How many did you play with back at home?

The problem is that the article offers no evidence that she was in the country for more than a week. No insight other than what other English teachers passed along.

The reason this irks me is that I’ve just seen far too much of this. People come over for three months and think they’re experts on the culture and the economy. The part about Japan “hating” Apple is the perfect example. A friend of a friend said this, so it must be true.

Yawn. Stick to travel blogs.

Welp, I’ve just crossed Japan off my vacation list. No free personal robots? :frowning: