Apple Caps iPhone Duo Preorders as Chinese Tech Leaders Debate Safety and Robots

Shoppers trying to buy more than two through Apple's website or Apple Store app are told to adjust their order before checkout. Some Reddit users said early orders on Oct. 16 could exceed two units, and Apple has not said how it will block resellers using multiple accounts or credit cards.

At Gree Technical School in Zhuhai, 72-year-old Gree Electric chair Dong Mingzhu taught the first class for incoming students and said she was unhappy when a student called her 'grandma.' She said value should be measured by spirit rather than age, citing trips across four provinces in three days and flights at 1 a.m. She also said vocational school graduates are not weaker than university graduates and that Gree needs technical and marketing talent, according to Kuai Technology.

At the 2026 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference in China on Oct. 21, Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun said safety is the precondition for the car industry. 'Without safety, everything else is zero,' he said, according to Beijing Daily, adding that intelligence, performance, design and innovation lose meaning without safety. Lei said AI is moving car intelligence from separate functions to whole-vehicle intelligence, with foundation models and agent capabilities driving upgrades and extending competition to ecosystems.

Starbucks China said it would implement a purchase-to-seat policy nationwide from Oct. 22 and place signs in stores. The company said staff would follow friendly communication principles and prioritize help for pregnant customers and people with mobility difficulties, China Business Journal reported. It also issued a 'Third Space Initiative' asking customers to use seats reasonably, keep volumes low during calls, meetings, games or videos and avoid strong-smelling outside food. Starbucks plans to invest more than 300 million yuan in the 2027 fiscal year on store service, including peak-hour staffing, digital systems and equipment and renovations at about 1,000 stores.

Unitree Technology released a new humanoid robot, the H2-X, with a video showing it lifting the front of a car, kicking a dent into a car door, landing from a four-meter height, and pulling a mannequin away from a moving car. The company said the robot can run for about eight hours. Media reports inferred the model is aimed at emergency rescue and security, according to Robot Forward.

Chen Guangyu, a 17-year-old core developer of Moonshot AI's Kimi model, has joined Discovery Loop, the AI startup founded by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, according to AI Frontline. Discovery Loop was established in August, has four top Google AI scientists and no public product, and is reportedly seeking financing at a $50 billion valuation. The hiring report has not been confirmed by Chen or the company.

Kuaishou's head of generation and ranking models in its recommendation model department, Tang Ruiming, has left, according to Programming at 10:30. Tang joined Kuaishou in July 2025 after a decade at Huawei's Noah's Ark Lab and led the OneReason generative recommendation project. Kuaishou has not issued a formal announcement.

Shengshu Technology began a half-month public livestream of the full training process for its Motubrain 2.0 embodied model, aiming to show training, testing, failures and adjustments. The company said the effort is meant to open the 'black box' of embodied model training and invite researchers and developers to discuss scaling, cross-task generalization and self-improvement.

DJI warned users not to download a third-party modified app called DJI RedFly, which vendors claimed could disable GPS, block remote identification, remove no-fly warnings and raise the 120-meter flight limit to 500 meters, Kuai Technology reported. The app is not official and is spread through second-hand platforms, social groups and overseas websites. A media test found a drone could take off in a no-fly zone with the software, but users reported motherboard damage and loss of warranty.

iQiyi has filed thousands of copyright lawsuits over unauthorized online distribution of its works against companies including Bilibili, Kuaishou, Migu and Xunlei, as well as small businesses, the 21st Century Business Herald reported. Public records show 7,204 entries for such disputes involving iQiyi, or hundreds of separate cases after merging appeals and jurisdiction filings. iQiyi itself has been a defendant in 1,883 such cases, including suits brought by Tencent and Bilibili.

At the same auto conference, Xpeng CEO He Xiaopeng said autonomous driving should skip Level 3 and move directly from Level 2 to Level 4. He argued that Level 3 shifts responsibility to the system without improving safety or experience, and said Level 4 technology would land around the second half of 2028 with full-stack hardware and software development, according to Kuai Technology.

China Telecom's AI research institute TeleAI has incubated Gamma Robotics, registered in Shanghai's Xuhui district, to focus on self-evolving humanoid robot models and applications, Robot Forward reported. The company will build a humanoid robot lab with TeleAI, with TeleAI head Li Xuelong as scientific adviser and former TeleAI embodied AI institute director Bai Chenjia as founder and CEO.

ByteDance's Beijing Zitiao Network Technology withdrew copyright registrations in September for several popular meme images, including Gugu Gaga, Knife Shield Dog and Banana Cat, according to a China Copyright Protection Center notice. The registrations had drawn controversy when they became public.