While the hi-tech world is swooning at Steve Jobs’ feet after the dramatic unveiling of Apple’s iPhone, your correspondent is cursing and swearing in front of his Mac keyboard, wishing that Apple’s famous engineers and designers would turn their attention to some very real Mac problems that beset users in China.
These problems concern me a lot more than the stuff on the iPhone, which looks cool and all but does not really offer anything that a SonyEricsson 910c cannot already do. The Mac problems that the engineers need to solve are pretty basic:
• Many Mainland Chinese websites do not load properly on a Mac, no matter whether you use IE, Safari or Firefox as a browser. I have completely abandoned IE, but usually have both Safari and Firefox running all the time because some Chinese websites work on one but not the other. The problem is especially grave with online video: files for Microsoft’s popular Media Player are very tricky, and require Mac users to download dodgy bits of shareware to view.
• The Chinese language input system is clunky.
• There is no always-on point and translate software; there are dozens for PCs.
Finally, these problems are nothing compared to the hassle of buying a Mac in China and maintaining it. There is no decent Mac service in China, unless you find a solitary good guy working for a Mac shop who actually cares about his customers (in Beijing try Mr Hao who can also sell you the modem mentioned below – 1380 116 0509).
Finally, after a long wait, in China you can buy a CDMA modem that works with the new Intel Macs: the Vtion V1819. Nobody at Apple’s customer hotline actually knows how to set the thing up, but thanks to Dan Washburn of Shanghaiist for telling me how to do it. Nationwide unlimited wireless on the CDMA mobile network, for 198 yuan (USD 25) a month.