Yesterday I talked about the Chinese regulatory delays that created the conditions necessary for a gray market in iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices to flourish. I felt like this information added context to Casey Neistat’s film, and was worthy of a full blog post here.
Some other prominent bloggers agreed. For instance, my post was discussed in a full article on The Loop. This greatly helped get the ideas I expressed into the larger discussion about Neistat’s film, which I greatly appreciated.
I think you can raise issues like the delayed network access license in the People’s Republic of China without criticizing Neistat’s film for being racist or somehow shortsighted. If he hadn’t made that film, I would never have known that the lines at New York City Apple Stores had so many people in them who were buying multiple unlocked iPhones with the intention of immediately re-selling them.
Furthermore, I was also only write my article and get it noticed because Neistat focused so intently on the fact that a lot of these purchasers were elderly Asian people. So my reaction, when Casey Neistat contacted me later was to thank him, rather than directly criticize him:
@CaseyNeistat Thanks for pointing out what happened. I wasn’t in NYC and might never have seen the magnitude of gray market activity. @5tu
— Dave Aiello (@daveaiello) September 22, 2014
Sometimes a newsworthy event occurs, and it isn’t possible for the people on the scene to put everything they see into full context. That doesn’t mean that we should criticize the final product, or go back and insert every possible contextual angle to a larger story.
People who have the foresight to get out their cameras and be a witness to history for us deserve our thanks.