Apple’s all-important iPhone market share in China is on a downwards trend, eaten away by local competition and geopolitical considerations, so Tim Cook now aims to tailor the iPhone experience better to the local customers.
Baidu has been developing its AI-powered chatbot service since 2019, and last October it announced Ernie 4.0, the large language model on which the iPhone’s Earnie Bot will be based in China.
Even before that announcement, however, Apple’s Siri virtual assistant searches defaulted to Baidu in China, rather than Google as in the rest of the globe. Apple’s iPhone sales in China, however, are down nearly 25% since the beginning of the year, and this is a rather unprecedented slump, so it is apparently trying to placate the local market any way it can.
It remains to be seen if these local AI adaptations will result in Apple or Samsung’s market share stabilizing in China, as well as how will Baidu’s Earnie Bot perform compared to its main competitor, ChatGPT.
