Not far from Shenzhen’s largest consumer electronics mall, in Huaqiangbei, stands a relic:

Fake Apple Stores like this one were ubiquitous across Chinese cities in the early 2010s, most stocked with greymarket products purchased from China’s few official Apple Stores. Once a surefire pick for any Urban China Bingo card, they far outnumbered Apple’s handful of official stores, which remained in the single digits throughout the early 2010s. Today, spotting one in a Tier 1 city requires genuine effort.

Yet this one persists, standing mere feet away from the local flagship of a company that now designs, manufactures, and ships premium phones with hardware specs that Apple (the “real” Apple) will need until 2027 to match. A company that, since US sanctions forced its hand in 2019, has begun to assemble a sprawling network of chip fabrication facilities across Shenzhen’s Guanlan district focused on 7-nanometer chip fabrication (while Apple still outsources to TSMC).

Step into that gleaming Huawei store. Then, step into the Xiaomi store down the block. Besides comparably world-class product design, you will also experience very similar blonde wooden tables with aluminum accents, similarly sparse product layouts, and near-identical backlit product shots on wall-mounted screens. These stores appear to have sourced their furniture from the same factory, hired the same interior designer, and contracted the same product photographer.

You don’t need to have visited China to recognize this layout, either. It’s a near pixel-perfect recreation of Apple’s “Stainless Steel” retail design language, 2007 vintage:

Here’s the puzzle: the objects on and around those uncannily similar tables have never been more distinctive. Xiaomi’s SU7 “Ultra” (yes, they also come in “Pro” and “Max”, trim levels, truly Apple to the core) can run around the Nürburgring faster than any Porsche Taycan or Tesla, and its software, as Marques Brownlee put it, “feels like a preview of what Apple might have done if they’d made an Apple car.” Huawei’s Mate XT tri-fold phone, at 4.8mm unfolded, is thinner than the iPad Pro that Apple bills as “the thinnest Apple product ever.” And as Patrick McGee observed in his excellent book, Apple in China, for the release video of the Mate XT on YouTube, the most-liked comment is: “Now you know why USA banned Huawei.”

Both companies are also executing Apple’s ecosystem integration strategy with increasing precision; Xiaomi with its “Human x Car x Home” strategy, and Huawei with its “Super Device” and “1 + 8 + N” strategies increasingly each frame their products as interwoven systems of personal devices, mobility devices, household appliances, and physical spaces.

Yet both companies’ stores remain frozen in 2007, doggedly seeking to outperform each other as the most dedicated late-2000’s Apple Store cover band. Why?

As Huawei’s HarmonyOS overtakes iOS in Chinese market share, the idea that demand for Apple products would once have inspired the construction of entirely fake stores (some so compelling the employees thought they were actually working for Apple) feels almost laughably distant. While this fake Apple store in Huaqiangbei persists as a monument to a past era, the actual Huawei store next door to it somehow also persists as an even more pristine, almost cargo-cultish homage to that very same bygone era that both Huawei and Xiaomi have long since outgrown.

Hypothesis

These companies are still optimizing for easy comparison shopping, rather than making bold, differentiating statements about their unique ecosystems.

In China, electronics stores historically functioned as spaces for trying out relatively expensive devices before then waiting for discounts (or, more recently, buying them online). This led to a battle for market penetration via mall parity: positioning your shop as close as possible to your competitor’s in the highest-traffic spots to minimize any barriers to trying out your devices alongside theirs’.¹

For a time, this retail model worked well for a product lineup of phones, tablets, and laptops (like the Apple stores it was adapted from). It begins to break when you’re merchandising everything from replacement USB-C cables to electric sports cars. A customer considering Xiaomi’s SU7 Ultra probably isn’t comparison-shopping at the Huawei store next door for a different high-end electric sports car, just as someone shopping for a robo-vacuum probably isn’t going to be as convinced by a wall-mounted Apple-style lightbox photo as much as by something like Dyson’s a dedicated demonstration space, including their “wall of debris.” Realistically, can a salesperson confidently explain the features of a 1500 horsepower electric sports car to one customer, and the features of a hair dryer or water filter to the next?

The sorts of interactive, lifestyle-shaping products that Xiaomi and Huawei are increasingly excelling at creating don’t necessarily conform to neat-and-tidy, showroom-comparison-to-online-purchase journeys. Rather, they lend themselves to hands-on demonstration and smarter spatial storytelling.

What’s driving this?

At least three mutually reinforcing factors contribute to China’s technology retail design entropy:

1. Failures in physical retail are highly visible, and tarnish increasingly valuable brand images,
2. Resources spent on “aesthetics” and retail innovation are seen as siphoning from the perceived sources of “real” competitive differentiation (like hardware spec-maxxing), and perhaps most significantly,
3. Fear that any perceived success will be copied by competitors within months, if not weeks.

Thus, Xiaomi, Huawei, and other leading consumer device companies in China continue to shatter expectations and boundaries nearly everywhere except retail, where they remain stranded in 2007.

Beyond Copyable

I believe retail can evolve to complement and articulate these market-leading companies’ ecosystem visions, rather than pigeonholing their far-distant starting points of 山寨-style Apple-copying and sprawling device lineups into a form factor that’s better suited to late-2000’s suburban American malls.

Xiaomi and Huawei’s release events and press clippings already articulate ambitions that far exceed their scrappy beginnings. Evolving from being seen as “Apple looks without the high price”, they’ve become nodes connecting other personal digital devices, physical spaces, and vehicles, in dogged pursuit of the same level of integration that Apple pioneered with its own lineup (and by some arguments getting even closer).

Their retail spaces would be the natural venue to demonstrate their respective ecosystems’ high degree of integration. Yet instead, these titans of modern product design compete for wooden-table parity and mall placement, with the same “spray-and-pray” approach to site selection, with stores that remain nearly indistinguishable from one other’s.

These nearly identical Oppo and Honor (once Huawei-owned) stores are right next to each other, and are both in turn right next to a nearly identical looking Xiaomi store.

When speaking with other retail stakeholders in China, while some combination of all three “reinforcing factors” above play a role, the third factor remains the most stubbornly difficult to overturn; the assumption that any retail “innovation” would invite instant copying from competitors, thus quickly undoing any competitive advantage. Partially, this belief is a holdover from these companies’ earlier days where the ability to quickly adapt international hardware companies’ designs for the Chinese market helped cement their competitive position. This fear persists today, as what’s trivially copyable is conflated with what these companies’ competitors are unable to replicate. But old habits die hard.

The mature device ecosystems each company has built required years of platform development, supplier relationships, and software architecture work. Xiaomi’s ability to have your car adjust your home’s climate control before you arrive home didn’t emerge from a competitor visiting their store, just as Huawei’s chip fabrication network in Guanlan wasn’t successfully assembled by copying competitors’ floor plans. These capabilities took years of capital investment, engineering talent accumulation, and deep manufacturer partnerships to develop.

So yes, lightbox-style photos of one’s products and blonde wood tables with aluminum accents can be sourced within days (if not hours) but the mature device ecosystem that these companies have built can’t be ripped off simply by visiting a competitor’s store with a tape measure.

Walk into a Xiaomi store in Leshan, a tier-3 city of around 3 million people in Sichuan known for having the world’s largest stone Buddha statue. There, you’ll find a Nürburgring record-setting SU7 parked in the middle of the floor. Surrounding it: neatly knolled shelves of air purifiers, stick vacuums, and curling irons. No demonstration of how the car integrates with the phone in your pocket or your home’s climate control system (even though it actually does, quite elegantly) or other tangible articulations “HUMAN X CAR X HOME.” Instead, there’s this:

Several $43,000 record-shattering electric sports cars, parked on the floor like oversized toys. How would Apple have merchandised Project Titan if they’d actually shipped it? Probably not like this. For Xiaomi in particular, the breadth of its ecosystem has outgrown this sort of “mall showroom model” entirely.

Next to the SU7 are Xiaomi’s latest tablets and laptops, and next to them are security cameras, smart doorbells and locks, bathroom scales, rice cookers, air purifiers, etc.

When you’re selling everything from hair dryers to printers to vacuum cleaners to water purifiers to electric sports cars, “mall parity” stops making sense as a strategy. Yet walk into one of these near-identical stores and they remain formatted as if everyone is still competing for the same smartphone buyers that they were in 2012.²

What I’d Investigate Next

This piece rests on field observation across Shenzhen stores. I’ve identified patterns here, but haven’t validated them systematically. To move further:

The global perspective. The above stores are located in Shenzhen (a “Tier 1” city) and Leshan (a “Tier 3” city). Are patterns this consistent in Huawei and Xiaomi stores across other cultures and countries? Are there format experiments I’m missing due to sampling bias?

The user perspective. Do Chinese consumers register the Apple resemblance, or is that an outsider’s observation? Exit interviews, sentiment analysis of Xiaohongshu posts, and store observation studies would surface whether customers recognize or think about the thread I’ve pulled here. If “showrooming” dominates and stores are considered lead generation for e-commerce, then one person’s “boring retail” might be another’s “optimized retail.”

The decision-maker perspective. Who decides on store format: HQ brand teams, regional franchisees, or external agencies? What internal discussion happened before landing on the current format? “What are the key unit economics driving these decisions? Real estate costs, foot traffic conversion, and online/offline attribution would reveal whether this uniformity is considered a bug or a feature.

Up next

Even if Chinese consumers do genuinely prefer utilitarian showrooms over ecosystem storytelling, and will always treat stores as pre-purchase testing centers before converting online, that retail logic breaks down completely in the face of these tech titans’ rapid global expansions.

Xiaomi and Huawei are now opening these identical blonde-wood-table formats across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Markets where consumers have never experienced the original Apple Store era that these store formats reference, where mall ecosystems don’t support cross-store comparison shopping, where ‘try in-person then buy online’ behavior is nascent or nonexistent.

So then what happens when a format that originated for suburban US malls and retrofitted to Chinese tier-1 city malls gets exported to markets where the products they sell matter to customers for completely different reasons?

---

¹ It could be said that China’s tech retail scene operates under intense “involutionary” pressure, what Jasmine Sun describes as “acceleration without a destination, progress without a purpose.” She notes the phenomenon extends beyond China:

“AI model providers pour billions into outcompeting each other by 0.1% gains on benchmarks consumers will never see; college graduates apply to hundreds of entry-level software jobs to land a single interview… increasing competition, decreasing returns… The difference, rather, is who makes the market. In China, this is the state. Declare semiconductors or drones or lithium-ion batteries a national strategic priority, and companies will flow into the space. In the US, it’s private investors.”
– Jasmine Sun, America Against China Against America

² I will concede: Huawei’s store in this particular Shenzhen mall stood apart, featuring very chipper greeters and a convincing barista-staffed espresso bar (even if the stools in their “learning area” are near-perfect rip-offs of Apple’s signature brown leather).

Apple called, and they’d appreciate their stools back. But they love what you’ve done with the espresso machines.