Already on the Street

In an amusing follow up to my Apple Watch post from earlier this week, CNN Money is reporting that cheap knock-off versions of the Apple Watch are already on the street in several major Chinese cities. Literally cheap, in this case; some of the knock-offs have been observed selling for as little as $40 US compared to a starting price of $349 for the cheapest model from Apple. The fakes aren’t that sophisticated yet; they’re mostly Android-based devices that don’t look anything like an Apple product or come anywhere near the performance level the Apple Watch is supposed to have. It’s hard to believe that these products are fooling anybody, especially considering that the real Apple Watch isn’t available for sale yet, but it does illustrate just how much of a problem knock-offs are becoming…

Traditionally, when you mention knock-offs, people will assume that you are talking about clothing or fashion accessories that have been made to look like a designer label but are actually just cheap copies made using inferior materials and/or workmanship. Depending on the complexity and quality of the original, it can take months or even years before the knock-off products achieve a fully convincing copy, but eventually many of these items will reach a point at which only an expert will be able to tell the real thing from a sophisticated copy. Knock-offs of electric or electronic products can work the same way, with black-market companies churning out cheap versions intended to fool the customer into believing they are getting the real thing, but there are also cases in which a competitor in the same industry will purchase the original product, take it apart, and then develop their own version of the same technology under their own brand…

How often this happens, and to what extent one product is an unauthorized copy of another, are legal questions that have kept battalions of lawyers busy over the years, and complicated international trade between countries that have strict laws against theft of patents and intellectual properties and nations that do not. What I find remarkable about the story linked above is the speed with which this seems to have happened, and the related factor of how easily the counterfeiters (called “shanzhai” in Chinese) have managed to produce a fake version of an Apple product. Even granted that the counterfeit products don’t begin to have the functionality or style of the real thing, it can no longer be denied that they have gone to market over a month before Apple will be ready to do the same…

Any time a large and powerful company takes forceful action to protect its designs, inventions, or brand image, there always seems to be some amount of push-back, as people assume that the company is being greedy and using its legal power (and money) to destroy potential competitors. And while, at least to some extent, that is probably true, it seems worth pointing out that sometimes the company really is being ripped off by small-time operators who know full well that they are stealing somebody else’s property. I don’t know what Apple is going to do about this rising trend in counterfeiting, or how it is likely to affect their sales in the future – but it does seem as though they should consider getting their products to market a little faster, or at least leaving less time between the introduction and the date the product is made available for sale…