It’s interesting to me how when a Chinese company makes a great product at a great price they get accused of being too incompetent to rip their customers off with customer-hostile features like their Western brand counterparts.
But when Western companies load up their hardware with spyware and adware they are smart and savvy at business.
Isn’t this a little bit backwards? The correct statement is that Dell and HP too incompetent to make money off their computers without spying on their customers.
Maybe at some point we have to just drop the dogwhistling and admit that the Chinese hardware market is a dynamic, competitive market that seems to focus on delivering useful products to their customers rather than trying to make public shareholders happy by squeezing every last time out of them to the edge of their tolerance for such inconveniences.
It's not as overt as I describe it. It's often a subtle bias.
A great example in my own life: people have expressed concern to me when I tell them how I own a Chinese robot vacuum that can map my house. They think it's Chinese spyware.
And yet, iRobot, an American company now owned by Amazon, was the one caught in a privacy and data collection scandal related to test units that leaked interior photos of homes. [1]
