Article | New Sound of the Yuan Universe
With the arrival of the 618 Shopping Festival, it can be expected that many consumer electronics manufacturers will participate in it and launch price reduction promotions. This time, we found Apple in this list.
At present, the flagship store of Tmall Apple has launched a limited time discount. From 8:00 p.m. on May 20 to May 28, the price of the iPhone 15 series began to be reduced. Among them, the maximum discount range was the 1TB version of the iPhone 15 Pro, which was directly reduced from the original price of 12999 yuan to 10699 yuan, with a price difference of 2300 yuan.
To be specific, the price of iPhone 15 coupons starts at 4599 yuan, with a discount of 1400 yuan; The post price of iPhone 15 Plus coupon starts from 5599 yuan, and 1400 yuan is discounted; The price of iPhone 15 Pro coupon starts from 6099 yuan, with a discount of 1900 yuan; The iPhone 15 ProMax offers the most discounts, up to 2050 yuan, starting at 7949 yuan.
From this round of price reduction, we can see that Apple's "gold sucking beast" seems to have gone out of fashion. Such a large-scale price reduction was unimaginable before. How should Apple deal with the downturn in consumer electronics? When AI is not fully deployed, does Apple's future also cause concern?
Huawei returns to the top of the sales list, and Apple panics?
In fact, not only the iPhone 15 series, but also the iPhone 14 series, Apple Watch S9/SE, the tenth generation of iPad, iPad mini 6, MacBook Air, the second generation of AirPods Pro, the third generation of AirPods and other products have all participated in Tmall 618 time limited preferential activities in the official flagship store of Apple's Tmall Store. Such a large-scale price reduction activity is definitely the first time in Apple's history.
This is not the first time that the price of iPhone 15 has been lowered since its release. As early as the end of October 2023, Apple will rarely adjust the price of iPhone 15 series models that have just been released for more than a month. At that time, the coupon for iPhone 15 series phones in Apple Jingdong's flagship store was at most 801 yuan; The official flagship store of Apple Tmall can use a coupon of 700 yuan; The iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max can use a coupon of 500 yuan. This is also the first batch of new iPhones to cut prices in recent years.
Apple's two sharp price cuts are naturally related to the fact that the sales volume of the iPhone 15 series is far lower than before. According to Apple's official financial report for the second fiscal quarter of 2024, the revenue in Greater China is $16.372 billion, down 8% year on year. The main reason is that the sales volume of the iPhone 15 series has declined significantly, with the overall sales volume declining by nearly 20%, and the revenue has also decreased by more than 10 billion yuan.
From the perspective of sales in the domestic market, Apple is also far less powerful than in previous years. The report on the first quarter of 2024 released by Canalys, a market research organization, shows that the first quarter of 2024 in China's smartphone market will recover for the first time in two years, and the shipment volume will be the same as that of the same period last year, reaching 67.7 million units.
Among them, Huawei regained the first place in the Chinese market, with 11.7 million units shipped and a market share of 17%. OPPO ranked second with 10.9 million units shipped; Glory ranked third with 10.6 million units shipped, up 9% year on year; Vivo ranked fourth with 10.3 million units shipped; Apple dropped the most among the top five manufacturers, ranking fifth with 10 million units shipped, down 25% year on year.
Huawei stood out among all mobile phone brand manufacturers in the first quarter, with a year-on-year growth of 69.7%. Huawei's growth is largely due to the hot sales of its Mate 60 series, which supports 5G, and the popularity of its own brand, which has greatly increased its high-end market share above $600.
In fact, in addition to the iPhone suffering "Waterloo", Apple's shipments in the tablet market also suffered a significant decline, let alone the Vision Pro released at the beginning of the year. It seems that consumers have forgotten about it in just a few months.
Yuantianxinsheng believes that for Apple, it is obviously just drinking poison to quench thirst by continuously relying on price reduction promotion. Looking at the consumer electronics market in the past two years, despite the negative impact of the overall economic environment, other manufacturers still try their best to attract consumers through innovation. A variety of innovations such as generative AI, aesthetics, imaging, satellite communications, and folding screens also dwarf Apple's uniform appearance and micro innovation.
It is an indisputable fact that the sales of Apple's hardware products have declined, but in the world's hot AI field, as the world's leading technology company, Apple's sense of existence is not high, which may cast a shadow on their future development. So, how much power does Apple play in the AI field? It is a problem worth exploring.
Self research is the way out for Apple AI
In fact, Apple has now come to a crossroads, and Cook has also recently expressed his attitude, saying: "We will seize the development opportunities in the field of generative AI. We make major investments and look forward to sharing some very exciting things with our customers soon."
Previously, some media reported that the big model idea of the next generation iPhone operating system might adopt cooperation to find partners to help with the chat robot function of ChatGPT similar to OpenAI.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is about to reach an agreement with OpenAI to use OpenAI related technologies on the iPhone and put ChatGPT on the iPhone. According to this agreement, Apple will use the ChatGPT function in iOS 18 to be released in the future. At present, the negotiations between the two sides are still in progress, and the agreement has not been finally reached.
ChatGPT has been available for download in Apple's App Store for a long time. This time, Apple's cooperation with OpenAI may focus more on the model behind it and connect more "ChatGPT capabilities" to the iPhone.
In addition, Apple is also negotiating with Google, and may also introduce Gemini to further strengthen Siri, but the agreement has not yet been finalized.
However, in order to go further in the AI wave, Meta Universe Xinsheng believes that Apple should finally get rid of the way of cooperation, focus on building its own AI technology, and then deeply integrate it into its own products, and then improve the speed of technology iteration, and finally have the opportunity to achieve curve overtaking.
Although Apple's current technology has not been able to quickly build its own chat robot, Apple's executives are also afraid that the chat robot created in a hurry will appear various bugs, like Google's first Gemini rollover, which will damage Apple's reputation.
Search, system and hardware will become the focus of Apple's AI efforts
For Apple, their biggest advantage is that they have "vast wealth" and ecosystem, which will also enable them to have stronger sustainability in the AI era. An analyst said: "Next, Apple's AI strategy will focus on search, system update speed and hardware update."
For a long time, Apple has wanted to build its own search engine, a search engine with user privacy protection function, rather than Google or Bing, but this is costly and will directly target Google, the "big player" who has focused on AI search.
In this context, since 2022, Google has paid Apple billions of dollars every year, making Google's search engine the default search engine for Apple's Safari browser, which has reduced the power to build an independent search engine.
Now the rapid development of AI has forced Apple to make more changes, because in the long run, Apple has its own AI search engine that will have more development potential, but whether this is Apple's choice depends on their future development.
In addition, the speed at which Apple updates its system will also be a problem and opportunity for them. Basically, Apple will update its iOS and MacOS systems once a year, but with the current development of AI, the speed at which Apple updates its systems in the past year has not kept pace. Therefore, we believe that if Apple needs to catch up with the first echelon of AI, it must accelerate the update speed of iOS system integrating generative AI technology.
On the other hand, Apple has gone very smoothly on the way of hardware AI. Not long ago, they launched a new iPad Pro with M4 chip. One of the highlights of M4 is its NPU (neural network engine). Apple expects that by 2025, M4 chip will enter every Mac product and comprehensively upgrade the product line.
Although in the past two years, Apple has often been criticized for its slow action in the AI field, perhaps Apple is waiting for the right time to join the war. Today, the multimodal technology is mature, especially the text input, voice and visual interaction and mobile phones and other hardware are naturally adapted, which is also the best time for Apple to enter the market. Meta Universe News believes that search, system and hardware will be the focus of Apple's surprise attack in the AI era.
At present, there are differences in the development of AI applications such as big language models and voice assistants in different cultural markets. How to effectively integrate these universal or localized AI technologies into the brand's own products and ecosystems will be the key to future market competition. From the current development, although OpenAI, Google and others are in the leading position in the development of generative AI, we believe that Apple is still the closest manufacturer to integrate AI into products and ecology.
Many years ago, when Apple launched the cross era iPhone 4, Jobs also faced a lot of pressure. Then he opened the era of smart phones belonging to Apple. Now the pressure is on Cook. What can he bring to us in the AI era?
