Apple's Vision Pro will go on sale in the U.S. on Feb. 2, and iPhone sales in China are likely to drop sharply this year

Hot spotlight

The Apple Vision Pro will be available in the United States on February 2 with a starting price of $3,499

According to Apple's official website, the Apple Vision Pro will be available in all Apple retail stores in the United States and the Apple online store in the United States on February 2, with a starting price of $3,499 (about 25,000 yuan), and pre-orders will start at 5 a.m. local time on January 19. (Tencent Technology)

iPhone sales in China may decline sharply this year, and Huawei and Xiaomi are coming to grab users

Jefferies analysts recently said in a report that Apple's sales of Apple's new iPhone series in China started unfavorably last year, with a decline of about 30% compared with the previous year, and a double-digit decline is expected in 2024. (Interface News)

Technology companies

Nvidia's "castrated version" chip, "Chinese buyers are not enthusiastic"

China's largest cloud computing company has been testing Nvidia's samples since last November. Alibaba and Tencent have told Nvidia that the number of chips they order this year will be much lower than originally planned, according to people familiar with the matter. (Observer.com)

Pinduoduo collects troops for local life, but a new round of "Hundred Regiments War" is on the way

Pinduoduo's local life business, Duoduo Maicai, was temporarily closed after more than a month, and due to the complexity of the business delivery process, it required a deeper understanding and understanding of the offline business scenario, which was seen as a challenge for Pinduoduo. Despite the temporary closure, this could be a more in-depth restructuring in the face of the enormous potential of the local life sector. It is estimated that from 2020 to 2025, the online penetration rate of local life will increase from 24.3% to 30.8%, and the local living market will usher in more fierce competition. (Titanium Media)

JD.com: Dada, a consolidated subsidiary, announced that it had found suspicious behavior during the internal audit process

Dada, a subsidiary of JD.com, found in its internal audit that it may have questioned some of its online marketing service revenue and operating costs in the first three quarters of 2023. Dada plans to conduct an independent review, assisted by professional consultants. (Interface News)

Liu Zuohu: OPPO does not make chips, but retains the original architecture team of Zheku

OPPO Find X7 was officially released, and the new machine introduced the self-developed tidal architecture, which is the result of the original Zheku team. Liu Zuohu, chief product officer of OPPO, said that although the previous Zheku Technology was disbanded, OPPO still retained the architecture team and cooperated with MediaTek, Qualcomm and other companies to start from the bottom and open up the channel between terminal requirements and SoC capabilities. But he stressed that OPPO does not make chips, but only conducts chip-related research and evaluation work. (IT House)

Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta are collectively in the dock, and antitrust will break out in 2024

Over the past four years, the United States has filed lawsuits against tech giants such as Meta, Google, and Amazon, and the lawsuit against Apple is now regarded as the most significant antitrust lawsuit in the United States. If it goes to trial this year, it means that the largest U.S. e-commerce platforms, mobile device manufacturers, social networking platforms and search engine companies will face scrutiny from U.S. regulators at the same time. (Power Plant)

AI weather vane

AI track, financing ebb tide

In 2023, the total amount of financing in the AI industry will decline significantly, but compared with other industries, the financing situation of the AI track is better. The popularity of the artificial intelligence field has generally shown a stepwise downward trend, and capital has a more cautious attitude towards investment in the AI industry, preferring to invest in start-up AI chip companies with high growth potential. The AIGC financing environment is more active, with about 131 financing times in the robot industry, and the overall investment scale of the machine vision industry is on the rise. (Semiconductor Industry Vertical)

AI software identifies tuberculosis by the sound of a patient's cough and has passed 33,000 spontaneous cough tests

Researchers have developed a smartphone app that analyzes a patient's cough to identify TB, and although not perfect, it is simpler and less expensive than existing diagnostic methods, and could be a useful screening tool, especially in low-income countries. The mobile phone app was trained and tested with cough records collected at a health care centre in Kenya. (DeepTech)

Intel established a new AI software company, and AIGC applications will usher in an explosion

Intel Corporation and global investment firm DigitalBridge announced the launch of Articul8, an independent company that provides enterprise customers with a full-stack, vertically optimized, and secure generative AI software platform. The platform provides AI capabilities that keep customer data, training, and inference within the enterprise's security perimeter. (Finance Associated Press)

From 267,000 to 700! The number of IT jobs in the U.S. has plunged, and AI has taken over customer service jobs

The U.S. tech industry saw a precipitous decline in job creation at the start of 2023, especially in entry-level IT roles such as human resources, customer service, and data center related jobs, mainly caused by artificial intelligence and automation technologies. Janco, an employment consultancy, points out that job creation is still being created in areas such as cybersecurity, AI and data science, but corporate administrative jobs are more likely to be replaced by cloud software. Many unemployed tech talent has moved to other industries, such as retail, and tech hiring in 2024 will be mainly affected by AI technology. (Finance Associated Press)

Tech figures

Musk denied long-term drug use, saying that he would conduct a random drug test for 3 years as required by NASA

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has denied the Wall Street Journal's explosive report about his long-term drug use. Some reports say that Tesla and SpaceX leadership have expressed concern about Musk's addiction to drugs such as cocaine. Musk responded on social media that this was another attack on him by the mainstream media, and said that he had previously passed a random drug test for 3 years at the request of NASA. (Tencent Technology)

Smart new products

Samsung erected billboards in major cities around the world to warm up the Galaxy S24 series of AI phones

There is still about a week before the 2024 Samsung new product launch conference, and Samsung has launched a global publicity campaign. The protagonists of this event are the Galaxy S24 series of smartphones and the artificial intelligence "Galaxy AI". Samsung's smartphones will bring features such as AI real-time call translation, aiming to break down language barriers and allow users to communicate easily across language boundaries. The event will be held on January 18 at 2 a.m. Beijing time, and Samsung has high hopes for the "Galaxy AI" concept, hoping to lead the market into a new era and bring change. (IT House)