عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Technology

Apple Offers iPhone Discounts in China as Competition Intensifies

FILE - The new iPhone 16 is displayed during an announcement of new products at Apple headquarters Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Cupertino, Calif. (AP Photo/Juliana Yamada, File)
FILE - The new iPhone 16 is displayed during an announcement of new products at Apple headquarters Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Cupertino, Calif. (AP Photo/Juliana Yamada, File)
TT
TT

Apple Offers iPhone Discounts in China as Competition Intensifies

FILE - The new iPhone 16 is displayed during an announcement of new products at Apple headquarters Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Cupertino, Calif. (AP Photo/Juliana Yamada, File)
FILE - The new iPhone 16 is displayed during an announcement of new products at Apple headquarters Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Cupertino, Calif. (AP Photo/Juliana Yamada, File)

Apple is offering rare discounts of up to 500 yuan ($68.50) on its latest iPhone models in China, as the US tech giant moves to defend its market share against rising competition from domestic rivals like Huawei.
The four-day promotion, running from Jan. 4-7, applies to several iPhone models when purchased using specific payment methods, according to its website.
The flagship iPhone 16 Pro with a starting price of 7,999 yuan and the iPhone 16 Pro Max with a starting price of 9,999 yuan will see the highest discount of 500 yuan. The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus will receive a 400 yuan reduction.
The discounts come as consumers remain cautious with spending amid China's slowing economy and deflationary pressures, with the country's consumer inflation hitting a five-month low in November.
Apple is grappling with declining market share in China, the world's largest smartphone market, where local manufacturers have intensified competition, Reuters said.
Huawei has emerged as a particularly strong challenger since its return to the premium segment in August 2023 with locally-made chipsets. Huawei had cut the prices of a variety of high-end devices, including mobile phones, by up to 3,000 yuan over the weekend on one of China's leading e-commerce platforms.
Apple briefly fell out of China's top five smartphone vendors in the second quarter of 2024 before recovering in the third quarter. The US company's smartphone sales in China still slipped 0.3% during the third quarter from a year earlier, while Huawei's sales surged 42%, according to research firm IDC.
The Apple promotion also includes discounts of 200 to 300 yuan on older iPhone models, as well as other categories of products such as MacBook laptops and iPad tablets. Customers must use designated payment methods including WeChat Pay or Alipay to qualify for the discounts.

Most Viewed

 
 
Technology

Pinterest Deepens Amazon Partnership with $4 billion Cloud Deal

FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of Amazon logo in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of Amazon logo in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
TT
TT

Pinterest Deepens Amazon Partnership with $4 billion Cloud Deal

FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of Amazon logo in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of Amazon logo in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

Pinterest said on Thursday it would pay Amazon Web Services $4 billion for cloud services through 2031, as the social media company strengthens a long-term partnership with its largest-ever deal.

Shares of Pinterest rose nearly 6%, while those of Amazon were up 1.5%.

Amazon.com's cloud computing unit will provide Pinterest its custom chip processors, including Graviton and Trainium, to help scale its AI initiatives.

"This expanded commitment with AWS gives us the compute flexibility, hardware optionality, and infrastructure efficiency to accelerate our AI vision," Pinterest's Chief Technology Officer Matt Madrigal said in a statement.

Pinterest has been investing in AI tools by rolling out upgrades to its Performance+ ad suite, to boost growth amid intensifying competition from major players such as TikTok and Meta's Instagram and Facebook.

Pinterest said it had worked with AWS since 2010 to improve the reliability and performance of the company's core services.

The company, which last month forecast second-quarter revenue above Wall Street estimates, said it plans to diversify its accelerated compute usage with Amazon's custom silicon to improve price performance for its AI needs.

This includes leveraging AWS Trainium for large language models and vision-language models that power features like personalized visual search and AI-assisted discovery on its platform.

Technology

Meta Enters Enterprise AI Race with New Business Agent

The logo of Meta at the Meta Lab in Los Angeles, California, US, May 20, 2026. (Reuters)
The logo of Meta at the Meta Lab in Los Angeles, California, US, May 20, 2026. (Reuters)
TT
TT

Meta Enters Enterprise AI Race with New Business Agent

The logo of Meta at the Meta Lab in Los Angeles, California, US, May 20, 2026. (Reuters)
The logo of Meta at the Meta Lab in Los Angeles, California, US, May 20, 2026. (Reuters)

Meta Platforms on Wednesday unveiled an artificial intelligence agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, positioning the social media giant as a player in the enterprise AI market.

Announced at the company's WhatsApp-focused Conversations conference in London, the new product expands on existing business messaging services by enabling "agentic" capabilities in which the assistant can take actions like booking calendar appointments and closing sales on behalf of businesses.

The company said more than 1 million businesses were already using earlier chatbot versions of such agents on WhatsApp and Messenger. The new version will be added to Instagram as well and rolled out globally to businesses of all sizes.

The move hints at Meta's ambitions to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet's Google in the market ‌for enterprise applications ‌of its AI tools, leveraging the reach of its WhatsApp, ‌Instagram ⁠and Facebook apps.

"This ⁠is definitely an enterprise play," Naomi Gleit, Meta's head of product, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the conference.

The Business Agent can be customized to respond to queries on those apps, channeling a company's tone and handling tasks such as answering frequently asked questions, qualifying leads and escalating complex queries to human staff when needed.

Businesses will initially be able to access the tool for free, with paid subscription options planned in the coming months.

"We actually want to ⁠take actions now. We actually want it to be able to ‌complete the payment, to process the booking, to place ‌the order," going beyond "rule-based automations" for legacy bots, she said.

Alongside the new Business Agent offerings inside ‌Meta's apps, the company is also launching a broader "Business Agent Platform" aimed at giving businesses ‌the infrastructure to build custom AI agents to help them manage their operations elsewhere.

The platform is connected to hundreds of non-Meta systems like Shopify, Zendesk and Shopee, where those agents can be deployed, and provides larger businesses with enterprise-grade controls, guardrails and measurement, the company said.

Gleit is spearheading the company's efforts ‌to expand into new lines of business around AI agents, including with a new team, Enterprise Solutions, announced as part of a ⁠recent companywide restructuring around ⁠AI.

The team will send squads of forward-deployed engineers to embed with enterprise customers, a model used by AI companies such as Anthropic that is aimed at navigating internal politics around AI adoption and writing custom code to help models deliver results.

Its scope is currently focused on new business agents, but it is also working to build and sell agentic AI products that businesses can use for additional internal functions.

Gleit is also working to consolidate the different AI agents Meta has built, including internal workflow-oriented tooling, a user-facing Meta AI support bot and a separate ads-focused "business assistant" launched globally last month, she said.

"The number one thing I hear, especially from small businesses, is 'I just want to go to one place that can do all the things,'" she said.

"You want to make things modular, and you also need to be willing to evolve, because the technology is moving so quickly."

Technology

UK Allows Websites to Opt Out of Google AI Search

FILE PHOTO: The Google logo is pictured at the entrance to the Google offices in London, Britain January 18, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The Google logo is pictured at the entrance to the Google offices in London, Britain January 18, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo
TT
TT

UK Allows Websites to Opt Out of Google AI Search

FILE PHOTO: The Google logo is pictured at the entrance to the Google offices in London, Britain January 18, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The Google logo is pictured at the entrance to the Google offices in London, Britain January 18, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo

Britain's competition watchdog said Wednesday that it had ordered Google to allow UK website owners to opt out of having their content used by the US technology giant's AI search.

According to AFP, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) called the change a "world first" after it had proposed the measure in January.

Website publishers, particularly media outlets, claim that artificial intelligence models take their content without compensation.

They also argue that the AI-generated summaries discourage clicks to publishers' original pages, reducing traffic to their sites and in turn cutting their advertising revenue.

Google said Wednesday that sites opting out would not receive traffic or impressions from its generative AI features.

In response to the opt-out ruling, Google said that "Today, we're beginning to test a new control that lets website owners manage how their links and content appear in generative AI search features," its Search Ecosystem general manager, Mrinalini Loew, said in a statement.

The CMA said the ruling "will secure a fairer deal for publishers and consumers.”

It added that Google is "required to make sure that publisher content is properly attributed, using clear links, in AI-generated search results.”

The CMA last year designated Google with "strategic market status,” subjecting it to tougher regulation alongside other technology giants.

"With features like (Google's) AI Overviews rapidly reshaping online search, it is crucial that content publishers, including news organizations, have appropriate bargaining power over how their content is used," CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement.

AI Overviews currently have more than 2.5 billion monthly users, according to Google, which last month showed off plans to turn its traditional search bar into an AI assistant.