VIDEO: Market tips for foreign buyers

Recently we posted a stealth video we filmed of the Huaqiang Bei street markets in Shenzhen, China showing off all the amazing shanzhai phones. There is another seedier side to the market experience that we thought might be useful for some of you to understand should you be planning a visit to the market.


Fake “refurbished” notebooks!
One strange phenomenon we encountered outside on the market streets were guys with notebooks trying to encourage us to buy them off them. We were offered Sony VAIOs, IBM ThinkPads and Toshiba Protégés. The chassis for the products were almost certainly genuine. What was inside them… well that’s another story. The vendors were eager to show us that the notebooks contained the latest greatest Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors, 4G of RAM, ATI graphics and 160GB hard drives. We purchased the IBM ThinkPad that you can see in the video for US$80.00. You’ll also be able to note from the video that when we installed a CPU ID program on the machine the specs told a distinctly different story. I’m not sure what museum they raided to get the components for this machine b

Pirated Software
I’ve encountered copied software (and just anything else available in the digital medium) just about everywhere I’ve traveled in Asia and the markets in Shenzhen are the same. Outside on the streets we were harried by several women walking around offering primarily Windows 7 for sale. A copy of Windows 7 and a set of DVDs with the entire Adobe product line for US12.00 was the asking price, we didn’t even haggle. Amazingly when we tested the software later and it all actually installed properly and the key generators were current enough to activate the software. We certainly don’t endorse this kind of purchase and our local contacts have told us that usually the disks are blank or the software unstable.

Articles - Op-Ed