Apple’s Mac event has Chinese fans thinking about buying a Surface

Apple’s Mac event last week didn’t look great in comparison with Microsoft’s surprisingly great event the day before. On Friday I wrote that Microsoft is the new Apple, and it seems like China’s tech community may be thinking the same thing.

Apple’s upgraded MacBook Pro line obviously made headlines across all of China’s tech news sites, but commenters seem decidedly underwhelmed by Apple’s innovations this go-round. For example, one popular comment on Sina Tech reads:

Apple’s launch events are getting more and more disappointing. Originally I was thinking I’d wait for the upgraded MacBook Pro, but it turns out all they “upgraded” was the price. It’s just not worth it. Can Apple get back to the transformative way it was in the Steve Jobs era? Now it seems its attempts at change are very stiff. Like the ports. In the Jobs era, everybody was excited by the changes Apple made. If you just keep slowly chewing through your capital, it’s just a matter of time before Chinese machines surpass you guys [at Apple].

But if Chinese machines are on the verge of surpassing Apple, it seems for some commenters Microsoft’s machines already have. One of the most popular comments on Sina Tech reads: “Compared to the Surface Book, this is totally unattractive.” And over on Netease Tech, when one commenter listed some upsides of the new MacBook Pro, another commenter replied: “I think those upsides you mentioned are all even better on the Surface.” That reply received five times as many upvotes as the MacBook-praising comment it was responding to.

“With the pricing so similar, I choose the Surface,” wrote another commenter.

Of course, there were also numerous comments across all of China’s tech sites praising Apple’s newest machines, but the overall mood was decidedly negative. In a Sina Tech poll asking users whether they wanted to buy the new MacBook Pro, only 14.3 percent (as of this writing) said yes. 49.3 percent said they wouldn’t buy it, and the other 36.3 percent were undecided.

It would be foolish to draw any hard conclusions based on such a limited sample of customer sentiment, but the mood of China’s tech site commenters also shouldn’t be ignored. After all, commenters were also pretty negative after Apple’s iPhone 7 launch, and a month later, analysts were saying China had only “tepid” interest in the new phone. If the same proves true for these new MacBooks, Apple could be in for yet another quarter of scary drops in its China market. And after Microsoft’s impressive event last week, it looks likely that Apple loss could end up being Microsoft’s gain.