In China, Apple makes stoves?
IStove? iDon’t think so.
Chinese officials have confiscated nearly 700 stoves branded with Apple’s trademark logo from two warehouses in Wuhan, a city in the Hubei province in Southeast China, according to Chinese news reports.
In photographs circulating around the Internet, a green sticker affixed to the simple stove top not only has an image of Apple’s apple, but also bears the word “iPhone.”
Apparently it’s no longer enough to do an Apple knockoff, now they are slapping the Apple brand names on products that have nothing to do with what Apple makes.
The small gas stoves, which come with just one burner, were reportedly confiscated because they were deemed unsafe, rather than for ripping off the Apple logo.
After all, this is the country where authorities have seized dozens of real Apple tablet computers from store shelves in northern China over a legal argument over who owns the trademark to the name “iPad.”
The iPhone stove is just the latest in a series of examples of Chinese entrepreneurs’ experiments in counterfeit Apple products.
In August 2011, an American blogger living in China exposed an entire fake Apple store in the city of Kunming. The store looked like an Apple Store — blond wood, workers in those blue T-shirts, but somehow didn’t quite feel like an Apple store. And that’s because it wasn’t.
And it turned out there were at least 25 more fake Apple stores in Yunnan province alone.
Other fake Apple products to come out of China in the past year include Apple-branded high-top sneakers and an Apple-branded USB hub.
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