Apple Watch customers in China no longer able to sign up for cellular connection service, analysts say likely due to government concerns over tracking users
BEIJING— Apple Inc. AAPL -0.44% has another headache in China: this time with its latest watch.
Context & Ripple Effects
The cellular Apple Watch was a long-gestating product: Apple spent 2016 building toward cell-network connectivity before an initial launch was delayed over battery life. Once the connected Watch finally reached China, the state-side friction surfaced fast — months earlier, police arrested 22 people for selling Apple customers' names and phone numbers, with 20 of them working at firms selling Apple devices or as Apple contractors (the customer-data arrests).
Now carriers in China have stopped accepting new sign-ups for Apple Watch cellular service, which analysts read as authorities moving against a device that pairs location tracking with a network connection. The block lands on a company already navigating a tightening relationship with Beijing.
First-order effects
- Chinese buyers of the latest Apple Watch lose the headline feature of the product: without carrier sign-ups, new activations cannot get cellular service, leaving GPS-only functionality as the practical default.
- Apple's cellular Watch launch in its second-largest market is effectively frozen at the carrier gate — no new subscribers means the connectivity investment Apple made across 2016-2017 yields nothing incremental there.
Second-order effects
- Apple is pushed toward divergent hardware for China: by the following year it ships iPhone Xs models without eSIM technology there, since carriers had stopped serving eSIM-based Watch models — a split SKU strategy that adds cost and complexity to every subsequent China launch.
- Rival wearable makers with domestic Chinese supply chains and carrier relationships gain a structural opening in the connected-watch category, since their connectivity approvals do not run through the same foreign-device review.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, connectivity itself becomes a regulatory checkpoint for foreign consumer devices in China — a preview of the broader posture seen later when Beijing orders central-government officials not to use iPhones or other foreign-branded devices at work (the official-device ban).
- For Apple, the longer arc points to designing products around state-granted feature access rather than a single global spec, entrenching a two-track hardware world where what a device can do depends on where it is sold.
The trend: China is treating device-level connectivity and tracking capability as a state-controlled permission layer, progressively narrowing what foreign hardware like Apple's can do on its networks.