Apple unveils iPhone 11 amid pressure

▶ US giant shows growing awareness of competition from Huawei

Apple unveiled its new iPhone 11 on Tuesday in California, featuring an A13 Bionic chipset which Apple compared to Huawei’s Kirin 980 in performance, and analysts said the comparison reflects the US tech giant’s awareness of a growing existential crisis.

The iPhone 11 has six colors, an extra camera, and a 12-MP front camera with a wider sensor for better selfies, according to media reports. The new smartphone has the A13 Bionic chip, which Apple claimed is the fastest CPU and GPU ever in a smartphone, surpassing Samsung’s Galaxy S10+, which uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855, and Huawei’s P30 Pro, which uses the Kirin 980.

The topic with the hashtag of “Apple compares itself with Huawei” has become one of the most viewed on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform on Wednesday.

The comparison reflects Apple’s growing crisis awareness, industry observers said, as Chinese tech firm Huawei is now a strong rival, and some Chinese consumers have shown dwindling interest in Apple’s products amid the deepening China-US trade war.

“It’s unusual to see Apple directly compare its chipset to Huawei’s, showing that the US tech giant cares a lot about the Chinese market,” James Yan, Beijing-based research director at Counterpoint, told the Global Times.

As Chinese smartphone users pay more attention to chipset performance, Apple needed to say that its core CPU and GPU are stronger than Huawei’s, because Apple has been facing tremendous pressure in the Chinese market lately, Yan noted.

Apple shipped 36 million iPhones in the second quarter of 2019, representing a 13 percent drop year-on-year, according to a report by research firm Canalys.

It was Apple’s third consecutive quarter of shipment declines, and the Chinese mainland ranked as the secondlargest market for the US tech giant’s sales in terms of iPhone shipments in the first half of 2019, the report said.

“Before, it was Huawei comparing its core technologies with Apple’s; now it’s the other way around,” said Fang Jing, an industry analyst at China Merchants Securities.

Apple has felt pressure from Huawei not only in the Chinese market but also in Europe. But for the trade spat launched by the US, the Chinese tech firm would have won a bigger stake in smartphone markets overseas, Fang said.

Apple did not come up with a new 5G smartphone product this year, which will affect its sales, Fang predicted.

About 682,000 online users participated in a survey launched on Weibo on Wednesday, and about 70 percent of the respondents said that they would not consider buying a new iPhone as of press time.

A widely circulated photo also showed a detailed comparison between the new iPhones and Huawei’s products.