Apple Bringing iPad Mini And iPhone To Mainland China This Month

If you've paid any attention to Apple's obscene quarterly profits here lately, you may have noticed a trend: an increasingly gigantic portion of those profits are coming from sales in mainland China. The same country responsible for ripping off countless Apple products seemingly has a huge amount of citizens willing to pay for the real deal, and that single nation is quickly becoming one of the most important in Apple's sales channel. Just in time for the holidays, Apple has announced that the Wi-Fi iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad (with Lightning port) will be available in China starting Friday, December 7.

Moreover, the new iPhone 5 will be on sale there starting December 14. iPad mini and the new fourth generation iPad with Retina display are currently available in 42 countries, and iPhone 5 is available in 47 countries, including the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK.


The announcement is significant in a couple of ways. For starters, China is bound to buy a huge, huge share of these products, and secondly, it's mighty bold of Apple to open up supply to China with the holidays approaching in other key markets, when demand is expected to be at a record high. Perhaps it has found a few more production plants to bring online in order to make supply meet demand, but either way, it's looking like that Q1 2013 earnings call will be quite the celebration.