The Issue with Premium Asia
You look across the landscape — the laptops, the flagship phones, the “pro” tablets — and what you see is a strange mimicry of Apple’s pricing without Apple’s coherence.
They charge premium-tier prices, but the products themselves feel like patchworks of good intentions and unforced errors.
It’s not that these devices are bad. Some of them have flashes of brilliance. But when you dig in — when you actually use them — the flaws stand out so clearly it’s almost insulting.
Poor keyboard layouts. Unrefined thermals. Display panels that should’ve been class-leading but aren’t. It’s as if the manufacturers can’t just finish the job — can’t bring a single SKU to its full potential.
The irony, of course, is that Apple’s own products are assembled in Asia. But Apple’s difference isn’t geography — it’s philosophy. You don’t have to agree with everything Apple does, but you can at least understand it. Their design decisions, even the controversial ones, have an internal logic. There’s a narrative thread: focus, hierarchy, ecosystem. You may not like the trade-offs, but you know they were deliberate.
Meanwhile, most premium Asian manufacturers seem to throw features together like ingredients without a recipe.
They’re selling specifications, not experiences.
And the result is fragmentation — devices that look promising on paper but lack cohesion in practice.
Add in uneven customer service, quality-control inconsistencies, and firmware glitches that feel never-ending, and the “premium” label starts to sound like a dare.
You realize how risky these purchases are for the average consumer — how much you’re gambling on something that should’ve been refined before it ever hit the shelf.
Contrast that with products that are manufactured in Japan — often with quieter marketing but far higher durability and precision. Those products rarely chase the buzzwords. They chase longevity.