I woke early today, went to the gym, skipped breakfast, and headed straight to the new Apple Shop, the company's first store-in-store outlet in China, at the Best Buy in Shanghai's Xujiahui (I also had time to snap a pic of the front door). I was not impressed.

Covering an expanse of 10 square meters, Apple's Apple Shop contained only two tables with about 6-8 Mac desktops and laptops on each. It was more of a showcase than anything else. Apple's resellers in China have much more impressive features and a greater array of goods.

But I guess I should not have expected so much. Apple was our client briefly a few years ago and had previously, and subsequently, schizophrenic activities in China. Apple is finally going to open two self-owned stores in Beijing this year. I personally just switched from a PC to a Mac a few weeks ago, so I was eager to visit this store-in-store in Shanghai today to get advice on networking printing. Our company technicians have had zero luck in networking my Mac to either our office Windows server or our Linux server. We have both Canon and HP printers in the office and neither can connect after a few downloads of drivers and a re-installation of my computer.

More disappointing was that I went to the store-in-store today to seek good Chinese-language advice on a solution to our office's printer networking needs. The Best Buy people and the lone Apple rep responded with a frustrating "bu keneng" when I explained that my new Macbook was unable to connect to the office's network and my technicians had already phoned Apple's support helpline many times for advice.

I generally like my new Macbook. It's definitely not a computer that lives up to anywhere near the hype Apple has created, but I'm still tentatively pleased I made the switch. Actually, during the course of scribbling this blog post, I attached my SD card to retrieve the pic above and my computer froze for 15 minutes — I had to soft reset the Macbook but then the Macbook said my SD card was corrupt and not usable; but when I used my old PC to view the SD card, all was fine and I ultimately transferred the pic from my PC to my new Mac via Wi-Fi. Why do I need to use my PC to open some JPEG images when the Mac claims to handle audio/video so much better? My Entourage 2008 also does not sync with my Blackberry…

Apple's failed negotiations with China Mobile are a bummer, as I was hoping to have good use of the full services in China. Apple should silently push for more bootleg iPhones to enter China. With the introduction of its iPhone and already many Chinese using the iPod, it's a good way to get eventual business users to buy a Mac. Unless Apple scraps its worldwide pricing policies for the Mac in China, the computer will still be prohibitively expensive for the average Chinese consumer, so by getting more Chinese business people using the iPhone is perhaps a good way into the enterprise. But then again, Macs don't seem built for the enterprise, so I worry Mac will always be a very American-centric computer that can't gain any momentum in growth areas like Asia.