Text丨Ruan Yiling
Editor丨Lu Zheng
At this time last year, Apple was in the negative public opinion of the "squeezing toothpaste" press conference for four consecutive years.
Early this morning, the highly anticipated Apple press conference arrived as scheduled. "Apple fans" stayed up late to watch the live broadcast, wanting to see if Apple could still surprise people.
From the results, Apple's sincerity this time is much more than in previous years. In terms of iPhone appearance, none of the three versions of iPhone lenses have been redesigned in the previous triangular layout. In terms of configuration, this generation of iPhone is more sturdy, has a longer battery life, faster charging, and better heat dissipation. It starts at 256GB, and the entire series is equipped with a 120Hz high refresh screen, which has changed the stinginess of "changing a few colors to be considered an upgrade" in previous years.
The most concerned is the iPhone Air, a new member of the iPhone family.
From the naming, it can be seen that Apple's positioning of iPhone Air and MacBook Air Benchmark: thinner, lighter, and more popular.
The thickness of the iPhone Air is only 5.64 mm, about one-third thinner than the base model, is thinner than the 5.84mm of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, another ultra-thin phone released this year.
However, in order to make room for thinness and lightness, iPhone Air has made more subtraction and sacrifices physically. Apart from a single camera and a single speaker, there is no physical SIM card slot. (China Unicom eSIM is only supported in China). Originally, Apple planned to cancel the USB-C interface, but perhaps due to regulatory concerns, this version was retained.
Apple hopes to set off a new trend with iPhone Air and drive sales. But will consumers pay for the thinness and thinness? Can the iPhone Air win the market that the Plus series has not been pleased with? What are the more important trends in this press conference?
"Three-year plan", Apple drew a big pie
This seems like a huge update, but in fact it is just a small step in Apple's huge plan.
This plan is called the "Three-Year Plan", and comes from an article published by Mark Gulman, a well-known technology journalist who reported on Apple on August 24. This year is the first year, and the new thin and light line product 17 Air has been launched. Next year will be Apple's first folding screen phone, and 2027 will be the anniversary "all-glass iPhone", with a four-curved curved screen, perfectly reflecting the "liquid glass" design concept of iOS 26.
Apple drew a big pie, and in order to give the market and consumers who have been disappointed for four years, she said, "We are still innovating."
All has always been the saying of "big and big years". The release of iPhone 4, iPhone 6, iPhone X, and iPhone 12 Pro are all big years, with no more than three years between big years. However, since the release of Apple Intelligence failed last year, Apple has spent four little years, and this year Apple Intelligence is still not available. If you can't come up with something decent, Apple's market share will continue to be eroded.
End in 2027 because 2027 is the 20th anniversary of the release of the iPhone. In May this year, the Global Developer Conference (WWDC2025) A month before the Global Developer Conference was held, Apple has revealed that it will bring a landmark new device in 2027. Now, the market generally believes that Apple is entering its fourth critical cycle, and 2027 is a cyclical graduation show.
This plan is not sudden. Late last year, the Wall Street Journal first reported on two foldable iPhones and said Apple will create another iPhone that is thinner than the current model. And at WWDC2025, when talking about the liquid glass design of IOS 26, the reporter asked marketing director Greg Joswiak, "Is this a preparation for a larger screen? Is the folding iPhone coming?" Joswiak did not answer clearly, "I don't know, who is right?"
● Apple launches the thinnest iPhone Air in history. Source: Visual China
iPhone17 Air It is an experimental product in the "Three-Year Plan". From the simultaneous launch of design direction and various new technologies, it can also be seen that it represents Apple's future update direction. The new internal design saves space, increases the speed of the A19 Pro chip by 40%, wireless connection of the N1 chip, and reduces the energy consumption of the C1X modem by 30%. Apple believes that it is "the most energy-efficient iPhone to date."
When a single screen is light and thin, the thickness of the folding screen can be controlled so as not to be too bulky; when the folding screen technology is stable, the curved screen is a further form, upgrading wrap-around touch, linking with other devices such as Vision Pro to enhance the unique ecosystem.
In recent years, the innovation space of mobile phones has become smaller and smaller, and basically they can only continue to increase their investment around battery life, images, screens, ecology, etc. The folding screen is one of the few innovative innovations that are compact and portable, while also turning a mobile phone into a Pad or even a PC at any time, opening up all ecology.
In February 2019, Samsung and Huawei successively released their first large-scale mass-produced folding phones Galaxy Fold and Mate X. More than five years have passed, Samsung accounts for 35.4% of the folding screen market share, Huawei is unwilling to fall behind by 34.3%, and Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo and others have also joined the battlefield. Folding screen mobile phones have become the fastest growing model in the industry, but their market share is expected to reach 3-5% this year. Although Apple is late, there is still a chance.
Some people believe that this year, the latest Z Fold, is the first foldable phone that "really has mainstream potential." After a long period of research and development and testing, from a scale perspective, foldable screen mobile phones may have just started, and this is why Apple has just joined the battlefield now - the original products cannot meet the standards.
● On July 8, 2025, US time, Samsung Electronics released its new foldable smartphone "Galaxy Z Fold 7". Source: Visual China
In the next few years, the competition and reshuffle of the smartphone market will enter a white-hot stage. The pressure of the market and the development of the industry have forced Apple to speed up its pace in hardware innovation, but it will not make Apple give up its strategy of only launching stable products.
Not being the first to try new things is the style that Apple has always implemented. Apple in the Cook era is not about innovation from scratch, but about realizing immature ideas in a more mature form - Apple is "small steps" to catch up with the progress of its peers.
But the "overturned lottery" in the market is getting more and more intense, and the "taught" of peers is becoming more and more unconcealed, and it is difficult for Apple to sit still.
All Apple has been releasing new iPhones in September, and Samsung has launched new Galaxy S series phones in January or February , Google launches its new Pixel sometime in the late summer - this pace may change.
According to Gulman and Tianfeng International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, 2025 is the same as Apple launches a new iPhone in the fall The final year of the series entry-level and high-end phones. Starting from 2026, after foldable screen phones are added to iPhones, Apple will change to release iPhones every six months. The more expensive "high-end" iPhone models will be launched in the fall, while the cheaper "entry-level" and "cheap" iPhone models will be launched in the first half of the following year.
This three-year plan once again demonstrates Apple's emphasis on mobile phone series. Although wearable devices carry the expectation of a major change in daily use of electronic products, especially smart glasses, CEO Tim Cook(Tim Cook)(Tim Cook) refuted concerns that new AI devices could replace iPhones, which he believes are complementary rather than competitive.
Apple is rare and exciting again.
AI, you can only take it slowly
This new product launch conference also introduced Apple Intelligence Some functions of: visual intelligence, real-time translation, picture cleaning PS, free generation of emoji, AI proofreading and rewriting text, not many updates.
Compared with the AI tools that have appeared, these functions are not smarter and smarter.
2024 Annual Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple's first preview of Apple Intelligence, through Demo Showcased the new features of Siri after being loaded with AI. Last October, Apple launched another round of advertising, and it was not available at the spring conference this year, and it still cannot be released this time.
At WWDC2024, Apple once said that the company has a clear plan for the combination of AI functions and products, but the various deeds over the past year show that the authenticity of this sentence is questionable.
The release of AI version Siri has been postponed twice, and there have been doubts about fraud. Apple executives at WWDC 2024 gave a demonstration of the AI-planning process, but reports said the Siri team said they "have never seen these available versions of the display capabilities before." In response, at WWDC 2025, software managers Craig Federighi and Joswiak denied this statement, saying that there was indeed a version available at that time, but later thought that AI was not good enough, so they gave up the release twice.
Consumers feel cheated. There are class-action lawsuits filed in the United States and Canada accusing Apple of violating false advertising and unfair competition laws through marketing features that have not yet been launched. Assuming that the judge found Apple illegal, the company might need to compensate all litigants who purchased the iPhone 16 and want to experience the new Siri feature.
Investors also lost confidence. Since the beginning of this year, Apple's stock price has fallen by about 15%, and Buffett has sold Apple's stock many times in recent years.
In comparison, the progress of the peers seems to be more substantial. On September 5, 2025, Samsung Electronics announced its goal at CES2025 to bring 1 billion artificial intelligence devices to homes around the world in the next three years, and announced its bold "AI Home" vision on the eve of IFA 2025 in Berlin.
The full version of Apple Intelligence and AI version of Siri seem to be far away. Federighi told employees that Apple is rebuilding Siri from scratch on a unified architecture, and a new version is expected to be launched in spring 2026.
● Apple iPhone displayed in an Apple retail store. Source: Visual China
Everyone has been waiting for too long since the first announcement. In the eyes of many people, as far as AI is concerned, Apple has fallen behind.
Compared with its opponents, Apple has not taken it seriously enough. In order to make up for the investment in manpower and material resources, 40% of the 12,000 new employees hired by Apple have joined the R&D department in the past year.
According to the Information reported that Siri's AI embedding process was blocked, on the one hand, because of insufficient leadership in management: John Giannandrea, head of the company's AI team, failed to seize the opportunity to develop a big model that can compete with OpenAI, and failed to obtain more funds in management; while Robby Walker, head of daily business at Siri It was considered by an employee to "lack of vision and unwilling to take the risk of designing a future voice assistant."
The previous idea of management was that Siri The AI capabilities must come from Apple's self-developed big model, led by Pang Ruoming and formed a basic model team of about 100 people. Apple has also developed the first AI server chip codenamed "Baltra". Although Federighi said that the current model is close to the GPT-4o level, the display effect of self-developed big models is not ideal. It turns out that the planning of using only self-developed big models seems to be difficult to advance, and he asked to evaluate the possibility of using external models.
The idea of switching to third-party models hit the enthusiasm of the AFM team, July 8, Pang Ruoming joined Meta after resigning. On July 19, team members Mark Lee and Tom Gunter also changed jobs one after another. In the past two months, Apple has lost about 10 senior AI employees.
So far, whether Siri uses self-developed models or external models has not been determined. The team has planned two Siri transformation plans, one is the "Linwood" code version based on Apple Foundation Models, and the other is the "Glenwood" code version that uses external technology.
Apple has previously negotiated cooperation with three companies, Google, Anthropic PBC and OpenAI. The assessment originally thought Anthropic's Claude model was more suitable, but according to people familiar with the matter, Apple has been more inclined toward long-term partner Google, which built the basic model for Siri to run by Gemini.
The greater possibility is that Apple will take a compromise. It involves user privacy and data search, using independently developed AI models, while others use third-party technology.
In addition to the blurred route, the team's turmoil has also dragged down Apple's AI development. In the development of the Siri project, the AI team and the software engineering department team have always had constant conflicts, but in the end the software engineering team took the lead. This spring, Giannandrea no longer served as the head of the Siri project and was deprived of Apple's Robotics division's role. Siri's regulatory responsibilities were returned to Federighi, and Walker's responsibilities were replaced by Mike Rockwell, the former head of development at Vision Pro, to report to Federighi.
● Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, delivered a speech at the 2025 Apple Global Developers Conference (WWDC).
But Giannandrea believes that data can make the model better. The contradictory reality leads to unstable decisions and a slow and fruitless status quo.
This also involves another value of Apple: rather than doing it badly. They don't want to make chatbots, but want to deeply embed the operating system and use it without dialogue. Joswiak emphasized that Apple Intelligence is not a product, but a system capability. "We are not chasing GPT, but making AI that is more suitable for the Apple ecosystem."
What kind of AI effect can be considered a "deep embedded operating system"?
According to Gulman, Apple is reshaping Siri around three core components: a planner, web pages and devices' search system, and a summaryr. The planner is responsible for interpreting voice or text input and deciding how to respond; the search system is responsible for scanning web pages or user data; the digester integrates all of this to form an answer.
Apple attaches great importance to AI search. In addition to the acquisition plan for startup Perplexity, Apple has also established a _Answers, Knowledge and Information this year.(Answers, Knowledge and Information, AKI)
In addition, in addition to the AI version of Siri, Apple also plans to apply Apple Intelligence from the field of smart homes. It includes HomePod with a screen, desktop robot, the first smart glasses, the "Pixar lamp" that can act, and the "surveillance camera" that serves the whole family.
Apple's emphasis on AI and long-term planning are beyond doubt, but it is constrained by reality, so we can only take it slowly now.
Escape while defending
In the past two years, Apple has been under pressure in the Chinese market. In 2024, iPhone shipments in the Chinese market fell by 9% year-on-year. In the first quarter of this year, Apple became the only major mobile phone manufacturer with a decline in shipments; in the second quarter of this year, Apple ranked fifth with a market share of 13.9%.
According to the financial report, Apple's revenue from Greater China has continued to decline since the second half of 2023. The decline in the fourth quarter of 2023 was once as high as 12.91%; in the four quarters of 2024, it fell by 8.1%, 6.5%, 0.34% and 11.0% year-on-year respectively, and the decline narrowed to 2.3% in the first quarter of this year.
Even on August 9 this year, Apple closed a Chinese retail store in Dalian for the first time. From Apple's first store in China on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to now there are about 56 stores in Greater China, Apple is facing a crisis in the Chinese market for the first time.
Tariff storm and fierce competition from domestic mobile phones have seriously affected the market share of the iPhone. The Apple ecosystem has always been one of the advantages of Apple mobile phones, but Android manufacturers such as vivo, OPPO, and Xiaomi have gradually actively compatible with Apple, launching functions such as file transfer, remote control, and clipboard synchronization.
Apple had to put down its high-end attitude and join the subsidy war. Around 2018, Apple began to frequently lower its prices, and since last year, it has taken a bigger step.
Add from 618, 2024, Apple increased its promotions. Taking Tmall Apple flagship store as an example, the cheapest iPhone 15 is discounted by 1,400 yuan, and the iPhone 15 Pro 1TB version is discounted by 2,300 yuan, which is the greatest strength. During the same period this year, Apple issued a price adjustment notice as early as early May, with a maximum discount of 2,000 yuan. The iPhone 16 Pro 128GB version also participated in national subsidies for the first time.
Under the price reduction promotion, the third fiscal quarter of 2025 announced on July 31 this year (as of June 28) shows that Apple's revenue in Greater China rebounded by 4% year-on-year, the first increase since the fourth quarter of 2023.
Not only price, Apple is exploring adjustments to sales channels to cope with competitive pressure.
Before this press conference, Apple The official flagship store of the Store has entered the Douyin Mall, selling all Apple products such as iPhone, iPad, MacBook, etc.
● Apple store in a square. Source: Visual China
But for Apple, China is a product export place that must not be ignored and a manufacturing place that urgently needs to get rid of dependence.
As Apple's heavy dependence on the Chinese market and the continuous escalation of Sino-US trade frictions, Apple has to adjust the layout of its industrial chain. In 2017, Apple produced the entry-level iPhone SE for the first time in India. From 2021 to 2023, Apple's production pace in India accelerated, and by the second quarter of 2025, most iPhones sold in the United States will be produced in India.
According to statistics, an iPhone 15 Pro Max In this regard, the supply ratio in the United States, South Korea and other countries and regions has been increased, and the dependence on parts in mainland China has been reduced. Data shows that the proportion of parts in mainland China has shrunk to 2%.
But it is not realistic for Apple to break away from China's supply chain. Most of the industrial chains that moved from China to Southeast Asia are only engaged in parts assembly. Most of the "Fruit Chain" companies in mainland China are providing core components. Among the three giants of the Total Chain, Luxshare Precision, in addition to engaging in the entire iPhone assembly with a 20% share, also provides AirPods series OEM, creates core components of Apple Watch, and participates in the research and development of AI glasses structural parts; Lens Technology is the exclusive supplier of Super Porcelain Crystal Glass; Goertek provides key components for AirPods series products.
The Greater China market provides Apple with 16% revenue, and Apple cannot give up, but can only defend; China's supply chain provides Apple with the most important efficiency, and Apple cannot escape, and can only adjust slowly through trade-offs.
Apple still has a long way to go.
References
AiFaner: "Four "Little New Years" passed, iPhone Finally, welcoming three consecutive "New Years"》
Titanium Media: "Get up early and go to the market late, why is Apple's folding screen so "difficult"? 》
Point: "iPhone AI fraud?" The latest in-depth interview with Apple executives, responding to the inside story of Siri delay for the first time (full record)》
Snow Leopard Finance and Economics: "Apple Users, Android Comes to "Steal Heart""
List list: "The battle of iPhone 17, Apple will fight on Douyin"
IT Home: "The Truth Behind "Made in India" Apple iPhone: Parts Still From China"
Bloomberg: "Apple to Kick Off Three-Year Plan to Reinvent Its Iconic iPhone》
THE DECODER: "Tim Cook tells Apple employees that AI is as pivotal as the internet or the smartphone》
Bloomberg: "Apple Loses Fourth AI Researcher in a Month to Meta’s Superintelligence Team》
Bloomberg: "Apple’s New ‘Answers’ Team Eyes ChatGPT-Like Product in AI Push》
Bloomberg: "Apple Plans AI-Powered Web Search Tool for Siri to Rival OpenAI, Perplexity》
Bloomberg: Why Apple Still Hasn’t Cracked AI 》
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