iPhone Shipments Crash 50% In China As Local Brands Dominate (macrumors.com) 42
Apple's smartphone shipments in China plunged nearly 50% year-over-year in March 2025, as domestic brands like Huawei and Vivo surged ahead -- now controlling 92% of the market. MacRumors reports: The steep decline saw shipments fall to just 1.89 million units, down from 3.75 million during the same period last year. That shrinks Apple's share of the Chinese market to approximately 8%, while domestic brands now control 92% of smartphone shipments. For the entire first quarter, non-Chinese brand shipments declined over 25%, while total smartphone shipments in China actually increased by 3.3%.
Apple's struggles come as domestic competitors have gained ground. Counterpoint Research reports Huawei now leads with a 19.4% share, followed by Vivo (17%), Xiaomi (16.6%), and Oppo (14.6%). Apple has slipped to fifth place with 14.1%. Several factors are driving Apple's declining fortunes. The company faces competition from rejuvenated local brands like Huawei, which has rebounded with proprietary chips and its HarmonyOS Next software. Chinese government policies appear to be playing a role too. Under government subsidies, consumers of electronics get a 15% refund of products that are priced under 6,000 yuan ($820). Apple's standard iPhone 16 starts at 5,999 yuan.
Apple's struggles come as domestic competitors have gained ground. Counterpoint Research reports Huawei now leads with a 19.4% share, followed by Vivo (17%), Xiaomi (16.6%), and Oppo (14.6%). Apple has slipped to fifth place with 14.1%. Several factors are driving Apple's declining fortunes. The company faces competition from rejuvenated local brands like Huawei, which has rebounded with proprietary chips and its HarmonyOS Next software. Chinese government policies appear to be playing a role too. Under government subsidies, consumers of electronics get a 15% refund of products that are priced under 6,000 yuan ($820). Apple's standard iPhone 16 starts at 5,999 yuan.
Of course (Score:3)
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
As the article said, domestic phones are subsidized. 15% off is going to shift units.
What has changed, though, is that I think recent American stupidity has changed perceptions. Watching Clown Shoes repeatedly humiliate himself is hurting the American Brand(tm). The iPhone is probably the most recognizable "American" product worldwide at the moment, and your average citizen of the world doesn't think of Steve Jobs, they think of Emperor Tang being a stupid asshole.
When you tell the world to fuck off and back that middle finger up with masked thugs disappearing visitors, don't be surprised when they indeed fuck off and want nothing to do with you.
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What has changed, though, is that I think recent American stupidity has changed perceptions.
That's not new. The rest of the world has seen Americans as this [imgur.com] for quite awhile now. What is new is Trump's escalation of the trade war, and with war there's always casualties on both sides. We've managed to piss off Canada pretty good too with idiotic trade war escalations, I wonder how iPhone sales are doing there?
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I was interested enough to do a quick one-shot web search, and found this [freedomhacker.net] and this [nbcnews.com], and also this [pcmag.com].
None of these are a slide from the leaks, and none of these are proof of the poster's claim. Maybe it's out there, maybe it's not, but I am tired of looking.
Be that as it may, anyone who doesn't assume that the NSA has their nose in your phone, pc, tablet, and smart tv, is a fool. Similar for the Chinese government and probably a few others. The hardware manufacturing and distribution chain is full of opport
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
The first problem is this stuff is super opaque to normal people. They aren't used to thinking about surveillance technology, or government agencies, or the distinction between wiretapping US Americans on purpose vs. incidentally when tapping foreign trunks, or...
Then, even if you can educate them sufficiently for them to make sense of what's going on, the next comment is, but they're not targeting me. And they're right. I expect this will change as Trump works on domestically weaponizing intelligence, but NSA doesn't care about anything the vast majority of folks are up to. Putting aside FBI's FISA access and some probably-illegal collab with the DEA, NSA has generally not shared with domestic law enforcement or the IRS. Normies have had no practical reason to care.
But suppose you find a kindred spirit, and they care on principle and/or because of potential future misuse. The next question is, OK, what do I do about it?
And, well, what is the answer?
Vote? For whom, exactly?
Burn your tech, move to rural Montana and run sheep for food? Even if that would work for you, Montana doesn't scale to a homestead for each iPhone user.
Smash the state? Well, rock on, dude.
Honestly, I don't have one. If you do, please share.
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it's not Snowden revelations, but it's really shocking, we all remember reading this last year-ish
more
https://securelist.com/operation-triangulation-the-last-hardware-mystery/111669/
I dozed off somewhere down the page, but the complexity of the exploit is effing impressive
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As the article said, domestic phones are subsidized. 15% off is going to shift units.
I am pretty sure a large majority of Chinese people buy phones much cheaper than $820, or even $697, so that 15% don't matter much in their choice of not buying Apple
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Headlines (erroneously) say iphones were backdoored; Snowden's words were less affirmative:
The iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him
It was not made clear what "special software" lies within the iPhone making it similar to a backdoor, or if the NSA found an easy way to compromise the iOS operating system. https://freedomhacker.net/edwa... [freedomhacker.net]
iPhone & Watch Analytics, configure during set (Score:3)
Headlines (erroneously) say iphones were backdoored; Snowden's words were less affirmative:
The iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him It was not made clear what "special software" lies within the iPhone making it similar to a backdoor, or if the NSA found an easy way to compromise the iOS operating system. https://freedomhacker.net/edwa... [freedomhacker.net]
It's the "iPhone & Watch Analytics". Apple analyzes how people use their devices so they know how best to spend they development dollars and their marketing dollars. Its something users can configure during their initial setup, the default option is "on", ie to "share" this info with Apple.
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It's not that special and it's not just iPhones it works on Android as well.
Your carrier (AT&T/Verizon/T-Mo/MVMO's) can install non-GUI software on any phone in the network without your permission or knowledge.
This software is always analytical - as in gathering data for said carrier or whoever is paying them shit tons of money (like 3 letter agencies).
To make that phone work on a network you've given them half your key from the jump the only way to half ass stop it is to install something like Graphite
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The NSA, the CCP, etc. At least the Chinese population isn't fooling themselves about who might be listening in on their calls. In that sense, they are more enlightened than we are.
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I just need one look at the price tag to not care about the iphone, never mind care about whose backdoors are on it.
It costs probably less than 80 euros to make, but cook is asking for at least 1.1k so that he can bribe trump better.
Some other time, tim, the value proposition to me in this is deeply negative, buddy.
They are centrally planned economy (Score:2)
Doesn't really help the people any. But it means the ruling class gets to stay in charge and doesn't have to put up with economic imperialism. The United States isn't going to be bringi
Trump is a genius (Score:5, Funny)
If Trump were president he'd never have let this happen.
8% or 14.1%? (Score:2)
The summary says two conflicting things:
(1) Apple's sales dropped around 50%, from 3.75 million to 1.89 million units and is currently at 8% market share. Meanwhile, the total market expanded by 3.3%. That means that Apple's market share a year ago was 16.4%.
(2) Apple's market share dropped from 15.7% to 14.1%, while the total market increased by 2.5%.
Maybe this discrepancy suggests that getting accurate numbers on market share is really hard. Or the definitions for these numbers are not consistent. Sti
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Some do, otherwise the iPhone market share would be much lower.
China imperialism (Score:2)
China is intensely imperialist and deep down believe they should be the world’s leading nation. They feel like they have a multi thousand year history of being the global superpower and their weakness for the last century was a temporary mishap. The long term plan since they opened up to Nixon was always to adopt western technology then drive out western companies with their own home grown brands and products.
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China is intensely imperialist and deep down believe they should be the world’s leading nation.
Phew, I was a little worried there. As long as they don't believe they have some kind of manifest destiny. Then they'd end up with some kind of orange jesus trying to take over the world
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Yeah I don’t think the US has a history of massacring its own people by the tens of millions. Sure republicans might fantasize about it, but that’s as far as it goes.
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No, he's thinking of Mao's Great Leap Forward.
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The United States of Amurrikah are intensely imperialist and deep down believe they should be the world’s leading nation. They feel like they have a multi hundred year history of being the global superpower, and their growing weakness in this century is a temporary mishap. The long term plan since they embraced absolute corruption during the Reagan presidency was always to use military power to coerce economic subversion and then drive out domestic companies in the dependent territories with their own home grown brands and products.
See how easy it is to turn a piece of bullshit into something that is a lot closer to the truth?
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You china bots are so stupid. What you wrote doesn’t even make sense.
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Not really my problem that you are so ignorant of the history of the world and the foreign policies of your country that you cannot follow a simple recount of the latter.
Non-localised mobile services are a vulnerability (Score:3)
You'd be crazy to buy an iPhone in the knowledge that someone in Washington can on a whim block updates to Chinese users, close the App Store to Chinese users and block all purchasing by Chinese users. The first two are merely inconveniences, but the last is strategically important given how China's economy is built around electronic payment systems and the sudden widespread loss of payment processing would hit the domestic economy.
The risk is not just theoretical. When the US blocked Mastercard and Visa from Russia, the move had been countered 10 years earlier when Russia made the policy decision that all card transaction processing had to be done using a Russian bank in Russia. That one decision allowed Russia's central bank to walk in as MC and Visa walked out, turn back on the lights and restart transaction processing. In turn, Russian domestic transactions continued with barely a hiccup giving time for MC and Visa to be permanently replaced by the fully domestic Mir card system.
Every sophisticated country will be looking hard at service localisation requirements. Even the tame Europeans are taking notice.
iPhones are expensive in China⦠(Score:2)