"Core Tips"
Without a Pura 70 phone and a new iPhone, what does it mean for Huawei and Apple to "crash" again?
#华为发布会 ##下一部手机, will you buy Huawei or Apple ##苹果发布会#
Author | Chen Fashan
Edit | Liu Yang
Huawei's "most mysterious press conference" collides with Apple's "earliest press conference", what will happen?
On May 7, Apple and Huawei successively held product launch conferences, releasing tablets, stylus, watches, laptops and other devices. Whether it is time or product type, the overlap between the two press conferences is quite high, and the two old rivals once again rubbed a strong smell of gunpowder.
As early as September 2023, the two companies tacitly chose the same day to release their respective flagship mobile phones, the Mate 60 and iPhone 15 series, which were jokingly called "Huawei's face to Apple".
Huawei has always been considered one of the companies that can challenge Apple in the high-end market, although it was once seen as declining due to the chip being "stuck in the neck" halfway, but with the comeback of the Mate 60 with Kirin 9000S chip, Huawei is regaining the market that has been lost for a short time. Under pressure, Apple specially advanced the time of the conference by about 3 hours to 7 a.m. local time (10 p.m. Beijing time) to take care of the daily life of domestic users.
At a time when Apple's sales have suffered successive setbacks, Huawei's "innovative product launch" held in Dubai implies the ambition of restarting the overseas market, and the two companies will match up in all aspects from hardware equipment to AI applications, and similar "tacit understanding" will continue to repeat.
1. Another "twin" press conference
This is perhaps Huawei's most mysterious recent press conference.
As early as the end of April, it was revealed on the Internet that Huawei would hold a press conference in Dubai, but until May 7, there was no latest news about the conference in news, social platforms, or IT industry websites.
Since noon on May 7, netizens have been asking about the time and link of the press conference on social media, but no one has responded. At 8 o'clock that night, many people still complained that they didn't know where to learn about the press conference. It wasn't until later that some photos and videos of the scene posted by users were circulating.
An employee of Huawei's consumer terminal told "Leopard Change" that the company did not notify the specific time, and it usually starts at half past two in the afternoon, and has recently released a lot of new products, and is busy publicizing them, and the outside news is even more accurate than employees know. An employee of HUAWEI CLOUD also said that he did not know, saying that "Digital China" and "Huawei Developer Conference" are more influential events to be held in the near future, and the press conference in Dubai is "not a conference".
In line with Huawei's teaser, the conference focused on the new MateBook, MatePad, Watch Fit3, 3rd generation M-Pencil, FreeBuds 6i, and self-developed painting software GoPaint. The new Pura 70 phone, which has been very popular recently, did not appear at the launch event.
Among them, the MateBook X Pro 2024 notebook is already available in China, with a lightweight body of 980 grams and a high-performance Intel Ultra 9 processor as the two major selling points. The wearable Watch Fit 3, on the other hand, has a square dial with a striking red rotary button and function keys, and has a design that bears a strong resemblance to the Apple Watch.
In addition, Huawei also brought a new self-developed tablet painting software "Born to Draw", which can be used with the third-generation M-Pencil, which can use richer brushes and bring more powerful drawing functions to ordinary people's creations.
And Pencil is also the highlight of Apple's press conference, in Apple's teaser poster, the C position is a Pencil, and it is also the only product on the poster that can see the appearance.
The newly released Apple Pencil Pro is arguably the biggest upgrade to the product in nearly six years: the "squeeze" new gesture unlocks signatures, adds shapes, stickers and more. At the same time, for the first time, the Pencil Pro will be equipped with vibration feedback, making the writing experience of the stylus closer to that of real banknotes. Huawei chose to release the "Born to Draw" and the third-generation M-Pencil at this time, which means that the-for-tat is obvious.
Apple Pencil Pro
Compared with Huawei's mystery, in recent years, Apple's press conference has no secrets at all, and before the press conference, the product information has been almost spoiled. Apple's "Let's Fly" conference features a variety of new products in the iPad ecosystem, including iPad Pro and Air, the upgraded Apple Pencil Pro, and the Magic Keyboard that turns the iPad into a notebook.
Among them, the iPad Pro directly skips the M3 chip and is equipped with Apple's latest M4 processor, which will significantly enhance AI capabilities. In February this year, Apple officially announced that it would stop making cars and add AI research and development, and the new iPad Pro can be regarded as Apple's pioneer in the AI era.
Compared with the current 11-inch iPad Pro with LCD screen and 12.9-inch with miniLED screen, the new iPad Pro has been upgraded to OLED screen in both versions. In the past, users who bought a small-sized iPad Pro could only use a castrated screen, but the new model can get a full-blooded version of the screen experience, which is undoubtedly a good thing for the "small screen party".
In addition to the 11-inch, the iPad Air has also added a 13-inch version, satisfying the appetite of the "big screen party", while continuing the convention of "laggard" in the processor, upgrading from M1 to M2 chip.
2. Giants are-for-tat
The two companies, which held the launch event almost at the same time, have performed very differently recently.
Due to the decline in stock prices, declining sales, and being reduced by Warren Buffett, Apple has been stumbled by many people in recent years.
Warren Buffett's movements have always been regarded by the market as an investment vane. In the first quarter of this year, Buffett reduced his holdings of Apple stock by about 13%, and for a while, Apple seemed to have become Buffett's "outcast". In this regard, at Buffett's shareholder meeting on May 4, Buffett said that the reduction of Apple holdings is for tax reasons, because the investment has made a significant return, rather than any judgment based on a long-term view of the stock. Even after the reduction, Apple is still Berkshire's largest investor.
The day before Warren Buffett's shareholder meeting, Apple announced its results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, with revenue of $90.75 billion for the quarter, a year-on-year decrease of about 4.3%; net profit was 23.64 billion US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of about 2.2%. The decline in iPhone sales in China is considered to be a key factor affecting Apple's stock price and revenue.
According to data from Canalys, a market research agency, in the first quarter of 2024, Huawei won the first place in China's smartphone market, with 11.7 million units shipped and a market share of 17%; Apple shipped 10 million mobile phones, down 25% year-on-year, with a market share of 15%, ranking fifth in the industry.
From the point of view of product price, Huawei's flagship mobile phone Mate 60 series, Pura 70 series and iPhone 15 series are highly overlapped, from the entry model of about 6000 yuan to the top version of tens of thousands of yuan, each price range is-for-tat. In the battle of mobile phones, Huawei is obviously stronger, which can be seen from the price of the two.
At present, Huawei Mate 60 and Pura 70 series are still hard to find, and there are few price concessions, while the price of the iPhone 15 entry model on the e-commerce platform has dropped to about 4600 yuan, which is about 1400 yuan lower than the official price. It can be said that after Huawei's comeback, it has changed the pattern of the high-end market.
However, due to well-known reasons, the Huawei Mate 60 series has not been officially launched abroad, and the current sales mainly rely on the domestic market. This is also a big reason why the recently released Pura 70 series was not unveiled in Dubai.
Dubai has always been regarded as a key hub for entering the European and African markets due to its free and open economic and trade environment and special geographical location. In December 2023, Huawei has already held a new product launch conference in Dubai, and this conference has been interpreted by the outside world as Huawei's intention to rebuild its distribution channels and pave the way for its return to the European market. At present, the pre-sale of the Pura 70 series has started in Malaysia and Europe.
Huawei's mobile phones and other products have the confidence to restart the overseas market, not only from breaking through the "stuck neck", but also because of the "money bag". In the first quarter of 2024, Huawei's total revenue was 178.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37%. net profit was 19.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 557%.
3. Who can be far ahead of AI changes?
In addition to competing for overseas markets, Huawei and Apple will look more at AI in the future.
As soon as the Huawei Pura 70 was launched, its AI function was pushed to the hot search by netizens, and the most eye-catching thing is the powerful cutout function. When a user takes a photo and doesn't want some of the frames on the photo, they can circle it with their finger, and the AI will erase it and automatically fill in the blanks. Judging from the practical operation video taken by netizens, the response speed and processing effect of Pura 70 belong to the first echelon of products in the same level.
However, this function was "broken" by some people with ulterior motives: enclosing the position of the woman's chest, this part of the dress was P. Huawei had to respond urgently, which is a loophole in AI, and quickly updated the AI to prohibit users from doing such operations.
In Huawei's offline stores, AI has become an important selling point for mobile phones. In a Huawei store in Wenzhou, there is a high-speed rotating disc next to the Pura 70, and the pattern on the disc cannot be seen by the naked eye, but after shooting with the Pura 70, it can be left for a few seconds, and the AI will restore a clear pattern. This can greatly improve the success rate of users in low-light, high-speed, and hand-shaking environments.
At a time when hardware configurations have been piled up to the ceiling and flagship models are homogeneous, AI has become a breakthrough for mobile phone manufacturers to break the bottleneck. "Leopard Change" has been seen in Xiaomi, Honor, OPPO, VIVO and other brand stores, large models have become standard, and flagship models are equipped with AI functions, realizing human-computer intelligent interaction, one-click video editing, text generation and other functions.
Chen Ming, founder and CEO of OPPO, even said in a letter to all employees that AI mobile phones will become the third stage of the mobile phone industry after feature phones and smart phones. 2024 is the first year of AI mobile phones, and in the next five years, the impact of AI on the mobile phone industry can be compared to the replacement of feature phones by smartphones in the next five years.
When domestic mobile phones are scrambling to enter the AI era, Apple's AI products are a little late. After the official announcement in February that it would stop making cars, Apple transferred many of its engineers to the AI department and increased its investment in research and development of generative AI. The new iPad Pro has become the first move in Apple's AI strategy.
The reason why the iPad Pro unconventionally skips the M3 and directly uses the M4 chip is because of AI. M4 is equipped with a neural engine tailored for AI, which increases the computing power by 10%-15% compared with M3. The Neural Engine is mainly responsible for the machine learning part such as graphics processing and face unlocking, which will greatly improve the efficiency of products equipped with the M4 chip when handling these tasks. These use cases are where the iPad comes in.
Previously, the upgrade interval between each generation of M-series chips was about a year and a half, with the M3 chip being launched at the end of October 2023, and the M4 series chip is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2025, according to the timeline predicted by Canalys. The early launch of the M4 means that Apple will accelerate the pace of AI applications.
In February, at Apple's annual shareholder meeting, Apple CEO Tim Cook responded to the outside world's perception that Apple is lagging behind in AI. He said that Apple is making significant investments in AI with many AI-powered devices, and believes that generative AI has the potential to be a breakthrough.
Previously, Apple has released the OpenELM model based on terminal hardware, and AI functions running locally on mobile phones are considered to be more effective in protecting information security and user privacy than open-source large models such as ChatGPT. The combination of hardware, software, and services has always been Apple's strength.
However, "Leopard Change" learned from the communication with dealers and users during the visit that at present, users buy mobile phones, mainly looking at the core configuration such as cameras, chips, and screens, and AI is a selling point, but it is not a key variable that affects consumption decisions. From this point of view, the role of AI is not in the present, but in the imagination of the future.