Charges Filed After Chinese Teenager Sells Kidney to Purchase iPhone and iPad
Reuters reports that five people have been charged with intentional injury in southern China after a teenager sold one of his kidneys in order to purchase an iPad and iPhone. According to the report, those charged include the surgeon who removed the kidney and another person who arranged for the transplant into an undisclosed recipient.
The boy, identified only by his surname Wang, now suffers from renal deficiency, Xinhua quoted prosecutors in Chenzhou city, Hunan province as saying.
According to the Xinhua account, one of the defendants received about 220,000 yuan (about $35,000) to arrange the transplant. He paid Wang 22,000 yuan and split the rest with the surgeon, the three other defendants and other medical staff.
The iPad 2 in Apple's Chinese online store ranges from 2,988-5,499 yuan, while iPhone pricing begins at 2,888 yuan for an unlocked iPhone 3GS and goes up to 6,788 yuan for a 64 GB iPhone 4S.
The report indicates that Wang is from Anhui, one of the poorest provinces in China, and that he is suffering from renal deficiency since the transplant, a condition that is continuing to worsen. Interestingly, a nearly identical story surfaced last June, and while the teenager in that case was identified by a surname of "Zheng", the cases are so similar in their details that they may be referring to the same event.
Trading and sale of human organs is banned in China, where low organ donation rates have led those in need of transplants to seek out alternatives to established organ matching programs.
(Image from Kidney News [App Store])
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments