Alice Han

China is making amazing phones with amazing cameras.

You know, you just look at Xiaomi, you look at Huawei, and they're making great phones for a fraction of the price.

And they have, you know, AI chips installed as well.

So super competitive in the AI domain as well.

I would be worried if I were Apple.

But I think, again, this begs the question, is this sustainable long term?

There seems to be still a market for Apple.

Maybe it's not the aspirational middle class.

Maybe it's the upper echelons of Chinese society that can still afford to buy an Apple iPhone.

But the virality of it was really interesting to me.

So in

In Chinese, the 成色, which is the word for orange, sounds like the word for success, 成功.

So in the year of the horse, a lot of people were talking about this.

This orange-colored phone was seen as being very lucky or auspicious.

So that was part of the virality, certainly, of the iPhone 17 that made it very, very successful as a model.

But longer term, what I worry about is Apple's

place in AI ecosystem.

Because in the US too, I mean, Apple is behind in this horse race compared to the AI providers, the AI downstream and upstream providers, whether it's the LLMs, Frontier Labs, like OpenAI, Claude, or even if it's the data center providers like Oracle or Salesforce.

It's not clear to me that they are going to take advantage of AI.

And more importantly,