Eighteen months after the release of the previous generation iPad, Apple finally released a new product.
Yesterday evening, at the Apple special event held by Apple, in just 38 minutes, Apple launched the 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Air, iPad Pro equipped with M4 chip, as well as Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Apple Penci, etc. New.
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Different from previous Apple conferences, in addition to the frequently mentioned AI capabilities, a significant change in this conference is the adjustment of time. The time of this new product release is Pacific (3.380,-0.06,-1.74%) time 5 At 7:00 am on September 7th (22:00 Beijing time), this is 3 hours earlier than previous press conferences and is more friendly to Chinese users.
Just last week, Apple released its second fiscal quarter. As of March 31, Apple's revenue in Greater China was US$20.82 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 13%, making it the weakest performance in Apple's Greater China region since the first quarter of 2020.
Can Apple, which has lowered its profile and actively “please” Chinese consumers, really gain fans for itself again?
iPad Pro: getting more powerful and more expensive
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At 22:00 on May 7, Beijing time, Apple CEO Cook appeared in the new product launch live broadcast room as scheduled. After briefly introducing AppleVision Pro, Cook's topic quickly switched to the protagonist of this conference-the iPad series products.
The first to be released is the new iPad Air. At this year’s press conference, Apple introduced a total of four new iPad Air products in two sizes, 11-inch and 13-inch. In terms of functionality, in addition to improvements in screen size and casing appearance, the newly released iPad Air uses the M2 chip and introduces new artificial intelligence processing capabilities, but overall the functional updates are not outstanding.
In terms of price, the new 11-inch iPad Air starts at $599, and the 13-inch model starts at $799.
The most noteworthy new product at the press conference is undoubtedly the iPad Pro. Because it uses the newly released 3nm process M4 chip, this product integrates 28 billion transistors and has a new display engine. It claims that the CPU speed is 50% higher than that of the M2. It is also equipped with a 10-core GPU, which improves the rendering performance by 4 times compared to the M2, and the computing speed reaches 38 trillion times per second, which is 60 times that of the A11 chip.
However, with the performance improvements brought by the M4 chip, the price of the new iPad Pro has also increased. Among them, the 11-inch model starts at 8,999 yuan, and the 13-inch model starts at 11,499 yuan. Apple said that the new iPad Pro has become the thinnest Apple product.
In addition, Apple also introduced the latest releases of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, bringing software tool-level updates to iPad users, and also introduced Apple Penci accessories. However, compared with the performance brought by iPad Pro, the performance improvements of these products appear “less amazing.”
iPad sales decline, Huawei grabs share?
After the release of the sixth-generation iPad Pro equipped with the M2 processor on October 19, 2022, Apple has not launched a new product. 18 months later, Apple once again launched a series of new products. However, at this time, the market environment has undergone some changes.
According to Canalys data, in the first quarter of 2024, after experiencing four consecutive quarters of decline, global tablet shipments resumed growth, increasing slightly by 1% year-on-year to 33.7 million units. Among them, Apple ranks first with 12 million units shipped, accounting for 36% of the global market share.
However, while occupying the top share, iPad shipments in the first quarter of 2024 decreased by 19.42 million units compared with the same period last year, a year-on-year decrease of 13.9%, making it the only brand among the top five tablet manufacturers in the world to experience a decline in shipments. . Thanks to demand from China's domestic market and the Asia-Pacific region, Huawei ranked third for two consecutive quarters, with shipments reaching 2.7 million units, a year-on-year increase of 70%.
Between an increase and a decrease, Apple's declining share of iPad sales has obviously transformed into Huawei's new growing share.
In fact, for Apple, as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the sudden drop in Huawei's consumer electronics business share due to chip problems, as Huawei's market share gradually returns, the iPad is only one of its affected businesses.
Data released by TechInsights shows that in the first quarter of 2024, China’s smartphone shipments were 63.3 million units, a year-on-year increase of 1%. After ending 11 consecutive quarters of decline, OPPO/OnePlus leads the Chinese smartphone market with a market share of 17.1%; Honor, Huawei and vivo follow closely, ranking second to fourth, with market shares of 16.7% and 16.6 respectively. % and 16.1%. Xiaomi ranks fifth with a market share of 15.0%, while Apple has fallen out of the top five with a market share of 13.7%.
Just last week, Apple released its second fiscal quarter. As of March 31, Apple's total revenue was US$90.753 billion, down 4% year-on-year; net profit was US$23.636 billion, down 2% year-on-year. Among them, Greater China revenue was US$20.82 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 13%, becoming Apple's weakest performance in Greater China since the first quarter of 2020.
Because product development and design are far away from Chinese users, there are certain “localization obstacles” for Apple. Although it has advantages in the performance of some products, it also frequently causes complaints from users due to signal problems, after-sales guarantee and other issues. Faced with local mobile phone manufacturers that understand Chinese users better and have more comprehensive service capabilities, Apple's position in the minds of users is being weakened.
Betting on AI “small models”, Apple still has two major problems
After announcing that it had abandoned its decade-long electric car manufacturing plan, Apple is shifting more of its strategic focus to a new wave of AI technology. At the just-concluded new product launch conference, AI has become a frequently mentioned term for the company.
Because the newly released M4 processor is equipped with a new neural engine, this chip is almost tailor-made for AI capabilities, giving the new iPad Pro more AI capabilities. According to Apple, because the neural network engine installed in the newly released M4 chip “has a neural processing unit that surpasses any AI PC”, this also allows the newly released iPad Pro to “expand its leading position among similar devices.”
In addition, in the newly released new iPad Air, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro models, AI has also become a core highlight when introducing product functions.
Prior to this, Apple also released its self-developed OpenELM model, which contains four parameter versions of 270 million, 450 million, 1.1 billion and 3 billion. It is worth noting that OpenELM is designed specifically for terminal hardware, rather than a large open source model like ChatGPT, which means that Apple has chosen to join the AI ecosystem with a “small terminal model”.
According to industry insiders, after missing out on the big AI model, Apple chose to enter the market with a “small end-to-end model” that requires less investment and is easier to combine its own terminal hardware advantages and user data, which has unique advantages. But for Apple, how to stand out in this “device-to-side model” competition among mobile phone manufacturers still faces a lot of challenges.
At present, leading smartphone hardware manufacturers at home and abroad have begun to develop large-scale models on their own, and are implanting terminal-side large-scale models that can run offline into new-generation models to create so-called “AI large-model smartphones.”
For Apple, on the one hand, it comes from competition among peers;On the other hand, how to ensure that data privacy complies with local regulations and policies will also be a problem that plagues the development of end-side models.