Finance
Chinese smartphones tout AI ahead of Apple Intelligence launch
Chinese smartphone company Honor on Wednesday revealed new AI features. Pictured here is CEO George Zhao speaking in Shanghai on June 26, 2024.
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Honor, a spinoff from Huawei that focuses on higher-end devices, revealed Wednesday the latest version of its Android-based Magic operating system would focus on AI as an assistant.
A company demo showed how even with a vague voice command — such as “I’m tired, order something” — the phone was able to automatically order coffee without requiring the user to touch the device. It used AI to mimic actions on a touchscreen. Human intervention was only needed to complete the payment.
The AI assistant could also identify documents and send them to contacts, or make calls via social media app WeChat, all without requiring the user to touch the phone.
For devices in China, Honor works with Baidu and other Chinese companies for some AI functions, while developing others on its own. Honor works with Google for devices sold overseas.
The new AI features are slated for release on Honor’s forthcoming Magic 7 smartphone, due for launch on Oct. 30. Honor plans to roll out AI capabilities to all its devices by the first few months of next year.
The Magic 7 will use Qualcomm‘s newly announced Snapdragon Elite 8 chip for phones. Honor on Monday had teased its new AI features at the chipmaker’s annual event.
Chinese home appliance and smartphone company Xiaomi will also launch a new phone this month that uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite 8 chip. Xiaomi has been less vocal about its AI features for smartphones.
The AI features have climbed to a new level, Toby Zhu, senior analyst, Canalys, said in a phone interview Wednesday after Honor’s event. He said the new features have greater potential to convince consumers to switch to another device.
“Apple faces challenges in China but from our data it won’t face a significant decline,” he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.
Apple’s falling China sales
Honor, Xiaomi and Huawei have all launched foldables, a category Apple has yet to enter.
About 17% of Apple’s revenue came from Greater China in the quarter ended June 29. That’s down from 19% in the year-ago period. Apple is scheduled to release quarterly results on Oct. 31 local time.
Apple CEO Tim Cook met with China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology Jin Zhuanglong on Wednesday to discuss data security and cloud services, according to the ministry. Apple did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
Since launching on Sept. 20, Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro Max has dropped slightly in value on second-hand shopping platform Xianyu. The device was selling between 8,000 Chinese yuan ($1,122) and 10,000 yuan Wednesday, compared with 10,500 yuan to 16,300 yuan last month.
Huawei had launched its trifold Mate XT on the same day. As of Wednesday, second-hand prices for the device had dropped to the mid-20,000 yuan range, nearly half the price it was selling for on Sept. 20.
— CNBC’s Dylan Butts and Sonia Heng contributed to this report.
The bitcoin rally is generating a false sense of security among investors, according to the strategist behind the so-called granddaddy of gold exchange-traded funds.
State Street Global Advisors’ George Milling-Stanley warns cryptocurrency plays don’t offer the stability of gold.
“Bitcoin, pure and simple, it’s a return play, and I think that people have been jumping onto the return plays,” the firm’s chief gold strategist said on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.
Milling-Stanley’s comments came as his firm’s SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) celebrated its 20-year anniversary this week. It is the world’s largest physically backed gold ETF, and it’s up more than 30% in 2024.
“Gold was $450 an ounce [20 years ago],” said Milling-Stanley. “It’s now five times what that price was then. If you look at a five-times price, then gold should be somewhere over $100,000 in twenty years’ time.”
Gold just had its best weekly performance since March 2023. Gold futures settled at $2,712.20 on Friday, the highest settle since Nov. 5. Gold prices are now just 3% below the record high hit on Oct. 30.
Bitcoin, which has surged since the Nov. 5 election, is having a banner year, too. It hit an all-time high on Friday.
Milling-Stanley thinks investors who treasure gold’s safety qualities should reconsider piling into bitcoin. He suggests the crypto world is trying to manipulate them.
“This is why they [bitcoin promoters] called it mining. There’s no mining involved. This is a computer operation, pure and simple,” he said. “But they called it mining because they wanted to seem like gold — maybe take some of the aura away from the gold.”
Yet, he acknowledges it is unclear how high the yellow metal can actually go.
“I have no idea what’s going to happen over the next 20 years except it’s going to be a fun ride,” Milling-Stanley said. “I think that gold is going to do well.”
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