Apple Ran Out Of Gold iPhones Because It Underestimated How Much Asia Likes Gold

Watched something on TV a while back on how ingrained gold is in the Indian culture. I don&#x27;t have any links handy to back up my claims, but I think India accounts for a majority of the gold market worldwide.<p>Edit: Quickly searching I found this: <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57376057/indias-love-affair-with-gold/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;8301-18560_162-57376057&#x2F;indias-love-a...</a>

It has little to do with the color gold and more to do with the social status.<p>Money spent on home appliance is minimal and an after-thought, and this is because you cannot impress people with your home appliances while you&#x27;re out of your home. Meanwhile you can flash your <i>Gold</i> iPhone everywhere you go and it implicitly shows everybody around you that you can afford a <i>Gold</i> iPhone.<p>Social posturing is a central part of East Asian cultures and the <i>Gold</i> iPhone appeals directly to that mindset. There is no racism but instead it&#x27;s just the reality of the situation -- hubris is ingrained and prevalent.

The pervasive casual racism when discussing the gold iPhone is just astounding. If news outlets were talking about black people this way, there would be riots in the streets. Why is this considered acceptable?

If gold hadn&#x27;t sold out, it would have been a failure. The only function of the gold iPhone is to be hard to get, if it were common as mud, it&#x27;d be seen as the bedazzled tacky fashion-gadget shit it is.

Nailed it. I knew this was yet another Asian play by Apple. The iPhone is getting long in the tooth in Western markets, but there are still many virgin markets in the East.

Maybe its a marketing thing. I remember the same thing used to happen with white iPhones. They would run out way faster than the black ones.

To be fair, the 5th avenue New York store consistently &quot;over-indexes&quot; (as the article puts it) with shoppers of Asian heritage. Until recently at least, it was not very easy to buy an iPhone of any type in many Asian countries, and as a result, many tourists on vacation to the US would buy multiple devices to take home. Even now many Asian countries are among the last to have new Apple products roll out to them. Certainly don&#x27;t have data to back this up, but I lived in New York for 6 years and took more than the occasional trip to the Apple store and witnessed these types of bulk purchases. Point is, even the &quot;data&quot; this article introduces doesn&#x27;t necessarily have anything to do with gold.

Or, more simply, Apple ran out of gold phones because they were rightfully cautious about over-producing an untested color. Just like the first all-white iPhone, there&#x27;s no rush prioritize the new color while proven ones are already selling as fast as they can be made. Of course, this doesn&#x27;t make for good link bait.<p>Is the article racist? Yes, a bit. Only long-term sales data will reliably tell us which colors are preferred in which markets. Right or wrong, the article is rushing to judgement based on flimsy racial stereotypes.

It always seems Apple has a problem with color production. Don&#x27;t quote me on it, but wasn&#x27;t the white iPhone 4 that was different in color and had a weird yellowish tint to some of the early models? It seems that they have quality down, as of now. It&#x27;s just a matter of quantity by the looks of it.

They call it &quot;gold&quot; because Asia likes gold. But I saw the gold 5S in the store and it is definitely not gold. It is a beautiful, classy champagne color. If I were buying one, I&#x27;d definitely pick &quot;gold&quot;.

Sounds like Apple needs to jack the price on the 5S..