Lessons learned in Asia
- Food is cheap in Taipei and Shanghai
- Alcohol isn't
- US internet connectivity in Taipei is kinda slow and high latency
- US internet connectivity in Shanghai is even worse; barely usable
- An earthquake in Taiwan can make Shanghai's US connectivity completely unusable for days. Going on 6 now; still slower than dial-up 10 years ago.
- The great firewall blocking sites like wikipedia, google's cache and wordpress can get annoying. It's also hard to tell if a site is just unreachable or is blocked by the great firewall.
- Google knows what the hell they're doing (and nobody else seems to). They're the only US company I've found that has maintained a usable infrastructure in Shanghai through this whole mess. Not Yahoo, not Microsoft, just Google. If Google had a proxy, I could've gotten by pretty nicely.
- Localized sites for US companies work fine because they're hosted domestically, but I can't read them (e.g. apple.com.cn).
- MacBook Pro power supplies really do melt, and they cost twice as much in Shanghai than retail from Apple in the US. No wonder people outside the US don't buy Apple!
A reply from Thailand! There is cheap beer. Internet connectivity is slow and with high latency. An earthquake in Taiwan took practically the whole country offline, and it is still degraded. The “decency” firewall is not much of a hassle. Many people were affected by the quake downtime, but some users who use domestic and localized sites noticed little impact.
Finally, prices in Thailand tend to be higher than the US. IMO, the best place in the world to get electronics is the US, considering the low chance of getting burned in one way or another. People say Hong Kong has cheap electronics you can buy without warranty (I’m headed there tomorrow so…). But usually I try to stick with the relatively higher standards and accountability that exists back in the motherland.
Comment by Jason — 2007-01-01 @ 9:43 pm
Never buy an Apple in China. That’s the worst thing anyone can do. It’s cheaper in Singapore, apparently. Apple is picking up quite well in Singapore, sprawling over to HK and Malaysia.
HK is cheap, only if ya know where to go. ;) China is even cheaper, if you know where to go. But more importantly, knowing whether it’s legit or not. But overall, HK is more reliable than China. And, if you’re quoted a price in China, slash it nicely, between 70-90% is a good range. Other than that, you got conned. Alien style. ;)
Comment by KE Liew — 2007-01-18 @ 1:51 pm
Well, I didn’t get conned because I waited until I got back to the states to replace the AC adapter. There wasn’t a whole lot of work I could get done without reliable connectivity to our data center anyway.
Comment by bob — 2007-01-19 @ 12:33 pm