

Smartphones that look almost exactly like Apple’s newest must-have mobile masterpiece, the iPhone 6s, are going for the low, low, low, low price of under 600 yuan at electronics stores in Shenzhen.



One area in downtown Shenzhen is crowded with some 30 Apple stores in a one-kilometer radius. This is pretty darn impressive since Shenzhen has a grand total of one official Apple store and five authorized dealers in the area.



These shops are selling knockoff iPhone 6s models that are incredibly difficult to tell apart from the genuine article, complete with the same logo and charging mechanism. The notable differences are that the phone runs Android and is also supa cheap. Seriously, you could buy like 10 of these for just one of your kidneys!

But maybe hold off on scheduling that operation, enterprising Reuters reporters also found that they take kind of fuzzy pictures:

Priced at 580 yuan ($121 Cdn), a tenth of the price of a real phone at 6088 yuan ($1,271), the gold phone appears authentic, complete with the letter S engraved on the back.

The sellers said it runs on the Android system even though its display appears similar to iOS.

But it is slow for a new phone and the photos it takes appear fuzzy.

The sellers also described their sales as mediocre, having sold fewer than 100 units since they arrived less than a week ago.

While fake Apple store owners might not be raking it in, the Apple brand sure is in China. It has doubled its revenue in the third quarter from the year before to more than $13 billion. According to Reuters, some analysts believe that the increase in copycat stores may actually help Apple in China by promoting brand recognition as it plans to expand from 22 official stores to 40 by mid-2016.



Netizens joked that the reason the knockoff iPhone 6s looks so very similar to the genuine article is that they were both cast from the same mold, made in China.