The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant · 19 Jun 2017 · 416pp · 129,308 words
garage. Chips, circuit boards, sensors, casings, cameras, even raw plastics and metals—it’s all here. And if you want to prototype a new product, Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronics market is the place to come. I’d heard that you could build a whole iPhone from scratch there, and I wanted to try
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. Huaqiangbei is a bustling downtown bazaar: crowded streets, neon lights, sidewalk vendors, and chain smokers. My fixer Wang and I wander into SEG Electronics Plaza, a
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series of gadget markets surrounding a towering ten-story Best-Buy-on-acid on Huaqiangbei Road. Drones whir, high-end gaming consoles flash, and customers inspect cases of chips. Someone bumbles by on a Hoverboard. A couple shops over, a
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’ll throw in a SIM card. Deal, I say. Without warning, he stands up and takes off. He’s cruising—out to the street onto Huaqiangbei Market Road, below an underpass, up across the street, past an upscale-looking McDonald’s, down a side street, and into a giant shop space
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang · 12 Oct 2020 · 196pp · 61,981 words
“attractive women” first in search results. Naomi wants to show up first. In an ideal universe, she says, she would have a shop at Huaqiangbei, the famed electronics market of Shenzhen, known as “the market of the future.” She would sell body parts, just like computer cases. Want a better arm? Ask her. A
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property. The designers and engineers of new shanzhai products build on each other’s work, co-opting, repurposing, and remixing in a decentralized way. At Huaqiangbei electronics market, where Naomi wants her body-parts stall, companies compete and cooperate with one another in a fast-paced dance. Wandering through the stalls
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.” 3. Zhuji is proud of its status as a pearl city, and it even includes the Angel’s Tears Pearl Museum. Like Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei for electronics, Zhuji’s pearl market is a dizzying array of stalls and booths. The pearl market is filled with the loud noises of yelling and bargaining, bright fluorescent
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the market feeling a buzz, uncertain how much time passed between when you first entered and when you left. In places like Shanxiahu, Yiwu, or Huaqiangbei, in Shenzhen, what I experience as the market flu, others experience as the smell of money and hustle. Anywhere there is money to be made
Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy · 6 Jan 2011 · 269pp · 77,876 words
in the Four Seasons lobby. That can only happen in the Silicon Val ey scene, and the Barnes & Noble example can only happen in Shenzhen. The SEG electronics market is a physical metaphor for this kind of people-coded infrastructure: You can go to each floor buying components, and by the time you
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
by Stephen Witt · 8 Apr 2025 · 260pp · 82,629 words
the ban, high-end chips continued to find their way into China. In June 2023, Reuters reported that in the stalls of the massive electronics marketplace in Shenzhen, black-market vendors were offering A100s for double their retail price. Huang told me his first priority, above all, was to obey the law—but
Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time
by Steven Osborn · 17 Sep 2013 · 310pp · 34,482 words
’s why I’m in Shenzhen now, because here I can take care of those things so fast. I live a five-minute walk from Huaqiangbei, the huge electronics parts markets and wholesale markets, so now when I need an extra header, when I’m missing something, when I need a
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wholesale distributors with little offices that sell components and microchips. Korea of course is also a big manufacturing hub. But nowhere is bigger than China. Huaqiangbei, a neighborhood in Shenzhen, China, is probably the world’s largest electronics wholesale market. It’s certainly the largest one I’ve seen. It’s
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manufacturing going on all over this region, and when the manufacturer needs a header or when they need parts, they send a kid out to Huaqiangbei to finds a good price, and then the supplier ships over what they need. What was the question you were asking? Osborn: Really, just describe
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more for small manufacturers, and it’s becoming outdated. There’s no doubt that eventually all of this is going to move somewhere else. Someday Huaqiangbei could be Akihabara. It will be a has-been. It will be where people used to go to source things. But right now, right now
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more and more really amazing Chinese engineers just because they have access to it. People going to the Shenzhen universities, they can roll down to Huaqiangbei and pick up a soldering iron when they need to. They don’t have to delay three days for shipping. They don’t have to
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else besides the availability of parts that makes the environment in China unique? Lesnet: One of the things that I think is so amazing about Huaqiangbei that I don’t hear anyone talk about is that the whole cycle of electronics life happens here. You can get the little tiny components
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move up. You can find computers and all sorts of consumer electronics. There’s a huge consumer electronics market. It’s not just parts in Huaqiangbei. There are computers and televisions and radios and DVD players. Then you move up another level, and you find stuff to repair things. There are
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a few thousand dollars. That seems like a potential game-changer for people building electronics in small batches. Lesnet: They even sell those at the Huaqiangbei market now. You can do cash and carry on that. You can walk down the street and buy a tabletop pick-and-place machine here
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packing tape. Osborn: I wish there was a way to capture some of these sounds in the book. Lesnet: I’m making the “sounds of Huaqiangbei” record. I don’t know how you can capture it in a book, but I can give you an MP3. There’s that sound, and
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issuing a receipt. Osborn: A lottery ticket on your receipts? Lesnet: Yeah, but there are dozens of people at every subway station and all throughout Huaqiangbei that sell false tax receipts. So you buy something, you don’t pay your tax, and then you buy a fapiao, and then you either
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Shenzhen? Lesnet: I tell people I’m here making wine. What I love about coming to markets, and that’s all markets in the world. Huaqiangbei is obviously the biggest—is the hands-on part, the playing, the touching, knowing a part before you use it in your design. I find
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to the vineyard, I’m plucking the choicest grapes off the vines, and I’m making wine. I’m trying to distill the best of Huaqiangbei, but not just any part. I touch all the parts. I feel all the parts. I say, “This connector is a good connector. It’s
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off. I don’t know the volume, but he wanted me to get him, I believe, a thousand or five thousand quality-control stickers in Huaqiangbei and bring them to him at the Singapore Maker Faire later this month. He must be doing quite well at it, and I’m excited