Tech blog

From beyondbrics

This Saturday, Apple will open its second set of doors to 1.3bn potential Chinese iGeeks – this time in Shanghai. The store, which sits right next to the gleaming Shanghai Financial Centre in Puding, bears a strikingly resemblance to the company’s flagship outlet on New York’s 5th Avenue.

Yesterday the Oriental Morning Post reported that Apple will aim to match Louis Vuitton’s China presence – suggesting another 23 stores in the pipeline by 2012. China Tech News says that the second Shanghai store – in the Hong Kong plaza – will open over the summer too. Apple’s first Chinese store opened two years ago in Beijing (pictured) just in time for the 2008 Olympics.

If you were investing in an initial public offering, would you not want the company’s chairman, chief executive and “product architect” – the most important individual to the enterprise – at least to work full-time?

I ask this because Elon Musk, the chairman and chief executive of Tesla Motors, the electric car maker that held its Nasdaq IPO successfully on Tuesday, does not.

Mr Musk is already a controversial figure, having admitted just before the IPO that he had run out of cash as a result of investing $74m of his money into Tesla, and being in the middle of a messy divorce. His wife Justine Musk has been adding her own thoughts about Tesla on her blog.

A little while ago I thought that Apple had slipped up with the iPad. Based on what I’d read, it looked too big, too heavy, not a laptop replacement, not a Kindle replacement, neither one thing nor the other. Even so, knowing myself quite well, I guessed I’d soon be an owner of the fatally flawed device.

So it proved. A couple of weeks ago I surrendered to gadget lust. A meaningful relationship has since developed.