BEIJING — If you are a young man in Beijing and you can’t afford a car or an apartment, the next best thing is an iPhone, or better yet an iPad.
The cult of Apple reigns supreme in China, to the extent that people like Alex Xing, who works in his family’s medical supply business, call it “the era of Apple.”
“Only the old guys, like 20 years older than me, still use Nokias,” said Xing, a 26-year- old hipster who wears self-consciously nerdy black eyeglasses, jeans and sneakers. He cradled his own prized telephone close to his heart as he spoke. “Even the girls I meet in the nightclubs have iPhones.”
The extremes to which people will go to get their hands on the Apple brand are legendary. A 17-year-old high school student from rural China made headlines in June when he reportedly sold a kidney to buy an iPad 2. State news media reported in September that a 16-year- old girl in Guangzhou was killed in a fight with her mother over whether she could get money for an Apple computer.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple reported recently that sales in China rose to $13 billion from $3 billion for the fiscal year ended Sept. 24.
“I’ve never seen a country with as many people rising into the middle class that aspire to buy products that Apple makes,” chief executive Tim Cook said in a conference call with analysts. “China — the sky’s the limit there.”
Apple’s first store in Beijing, a big glass cube in a modernist shopping mall, is believed to be the highest-grossing Apple Store in the world. Security guards with earpieces now patrol the front door after a stampede ensued in May as people tried to get their hands on the iPad 2.
Demand for the iPhone 4 was so keen that Apple Stores required would-be buyers to show identification cards to prevent scalpers from buying up the phones and selling them at a premium. A new Apple Store that opened in Shanghai in September drew 100,000 visitors the first weekend, some waiting in line for days to get in.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Apple has it in droves. The relatively slow pace of opening stores — only four so far in China — has led to knockoff Apple outlets, complete with stark white walls and the logo of an apple with a bite out of it.
