The new Apple Watch won’t go on sale until April 24, but fake lookalikes of the latest gadget are already selling in China just a day after its official debut this week.
Knockoffs of the Apple watch were being sold online and at a Shenzhen city electronics market,
CNN reported. The copies were selling for $40 to $80, a much cheaper price than the real thing, which will retail in the United States for $349.
The watches were running on Android operating systems but were coded to look like an Apple environment, CNN said.
“These guys are specialists,” Laurent Le Pen, CEO of smartwatch maker Omate in Shenzhen, told CNN of the people who craft the fake products. “The speed at which they can bring copies on the market is amazing."
Apple announced the April release date on Monday.
“We can’t wait for people to start wearing Apple Watch to easily access information that matters, to interact with the world, and to live a better day by being more aware of their daily activity than ever before,” CEO Tim Cook said in a
news release.
As debate heated up in the electronics community about whether the Apple Watch will see the amazing sales of the iPhones, TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino was hopeful: “If you argue the Watch isn’t going to sell or do well, it’s worth pointing out that there are very, very, very few products that allow you to hand someone cash and be given back TIME. This will be the Apple Watch metric to track: time saved.”
He pointed to initial users of the watch who said they didn’t pull their phones out of their pockets as much when they wore it.
That idea, and others, generated some online humor related to the watch:
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