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Apple’s Sales in China Are Stalling. What Will It Sacrifice to Turn Things Around?

With iPhone sales down and Apple Intelligence banned, Apple looks ready to compromise.

Despite clawing its way back into the top five manufacturers (having slipped out of it entirely earlier this year), it's still losing a worrying amount of market share to growth from domestic brands like Huawei, OPPO, Honor, and Xiaomi. “The regulation includes a number of vague censorship requirements, such as that deep synthesis content ‘adhere to the correct political direction,’ not ‘disturb economic and social order,’ and not be used to generate fake news,” reads Carnegie Endowment’s paper on the state of affairs in 2023. In August, Zhuang Rongwen, director of the Cyberspace Administration of China, said generative AI, such as chatbots, was “forcefully driving economic and societal growth.” The New York Times’ 2021 report suggested the government didn’t really need Chinese iPhone users' data to surveil its citizens, as it already had stronger methods.

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