When I opened Safari on my brand new iPad Air, I was surprised to see that all the bookmarks were in Chinese. The first thought that popped into my head was: did I just buy a gray market iPad?
I saved over $100 on my iPad Air by buying it from BestBuy in Oregon, WA.
- Washington state has no sales tax
- Buying an iPad in the US is $20 cheaper than in Canada
- Walmart was offering iPads for $20 cheaper than in Apple stores, which Best Buyprice-matched.
And so there was every reason to drive all the way down to Oregon from Vancouver BC to go on a shopping spree of sorts.
When I unboxed my brand new iPad Air in the car, the first thing I noticed was how the front of the screen was smudged and dusty even though it’s brand new out of the box. My husband attributed to the car being super bright so you’d see a lot of dust you’d otherwise not see. Also, since the iPad is assembled in China, probably some factory in Shenzhen was just dusty when they boxed it. This bothered me. But since all the protective plastic cover was still on there (even though the plastic wrap on the top corner was a little crinkled) I though it’s fine.
After being weirded out by Safari’s Chinese bookmarks, I did a google search but saw that no one had any real answers. Some people asked questions like Why are the apps on my Safari home screen in Chinese, or Why safari bookmarks displayed in Chinese. But the only thing to do is simply delete the Chinese bookmarks and ignore them.
Worst case scenario, this is a gray market iPad, and that’s how BestBuy and other stores are able to offer it for cheaper than in Apple stores. But I’m thinking that perhaps this was one of the iPads meant to be launched in the China market but got accidentally shipped to the States.
So far the only technical issue I’ve had is in the cursor system not working properly at all as I write in wordpress now. Word not being selected, cursor always jumping to previous paragraphs when I click on any words I want to edit. But this is my first time owning an iPad, so maybe this is a normal bug withing the wordpress system? I’ll have to keep an eye out for it and see…
