By Herman Lai, posted Apr 9, 2010 at 11:08 PM, 5,992 views,

Hong Kong Guy Proudly Selling iPads Illegally

iPad is on sale in Hong Kong with an extreme price!!! In fact, Apple didn’t provide any iPads to the Hong Kong’s retail shops, the reason for that is because the iPad’s UI doesn’t have Chinese Traditional language, therefore we are pretty sure that Apple’s iPad will not appear in Hong Kong and Taiwan. So, how come there is iPad in Hong Kong? How do those retailers get them? And what do people think of its price?

Thank you to WinAndMac.

The retailers get the iPads directly from US, but how can they get about 100 of them back to Hong Kong when the apple store restricted a person can only buy 2 iPads at a time?

Actually, those retailers had a group of people (mostly Chinese students) prepared in the US, and maybe around 50 people of them are hired or gathered to carry out the task. Therefore, if this is the case, they can get a maximum of 100 iPads and get a person to pack them up and bring back to Hong Kong and sell them. In this black market capital of Asia, the retailers get to sell the iPad on the 2nd day after the launch. This is pretty fast.

So what the locals think about the iPad? One of them said that without the Chinese Traditional language support, the iPad is useless to him since it only allows him to read e-books. Another said that he can buy it without taking a flight to the States to own one.

However, the iPad is so expensive in Hong Kong, selling for almost twice of the official price. The cheapest one you can find in HK is around $5200 HKD (about $742) for a 16GB in Hong Kong’s online forums or in Yahoo-HK. In the retail shops, you will find that they are selling around $6800HKD (about $971) for 16GB, $7600HKD (about $980) for 32GB, $8400HKD (about $1080!) for 64GB. There were only 60 iPads available on the first day and the boss successfully sold half of them. Until now, the boss sells about 50-100 iPads per day.

Anyway, I think it’s tooooo expensive and it’s better to wait until we can buy from the Apple store in Hong Kong or call up friends over the States to pick up one.

UPDATE: iPads are Okay to Sell in Hong Kong Gray Market !