Apple order report disputed as Xiaomi and Huawei raise phone prices; AI firms rehearse crisis response

Bloomberg reported that Apple's new CEO John Ternus is pressing another personnel change. Steve Smith will replace Adrian Perica as M&A chief and report to CFO Kevan Parekh; the M&A team will return to the finance department after seven years. Perica will keep iCloud, Fitness+ and News and report to services chief Eddy Cue. Cue's remit will expand to the App Store and health and fitness teams, while Carson Oliver is promoted to App Store vice president for day-to-day platform management. Apple has not formally announced the changes, the report said.

Xiaomi's website showed on Oct. 9 that the Xiaomi 17 Ultra standard 12GB+512GB version rose to 7,999 yuan from 6,999 yuan at launch, with standard and Leica versions up 1,000 yuan across capacities, Jiemian News reported. Xiaomi customer service attributed the change mainly to higher procurement costs for core components and said its backend could not show the exact date. Huawei's nova 16 and nova 16 Pro recommended retail prices rose 400 yuan, and the nova 16 SE rose 200 yuan, according to Cailian Press and Kechuangban Daily. Separately, The Paper reported that users can initiate water, electricity and gas payments in the Doubao app by voice or text. A person close to Doubao said the company is gradually building travel services and utility payments, after adding flight booking, train tickets, ride-hailing and navigation.

Axios reported on Oct. 9 that executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out how to handle public backlash and regulation after a major real-world AI incident. The scenarios center on large-scale cyberattacks that could disrupt financial services, internet connectivity, power or water supplies, including rogue agents during testing and malicious use of released models. The exercises include worst-case red-teaming and explaining technology and risk to U.S. lawmakers to try to shape post-crisis policy. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the company runs emergency-preparedness exercises to discuss multiple potential scenarios and said it does not treat them as inevitable. Anthropic declined to comment. Axios said some industry figures worry about a major incident in the next six to twelve months.

Bloomberg reported that Tian Keyu, who was dismissed by ByteDance for violating rules, has raised nearly $30 million for a world-model lab at a post-money valuation of about $200 million. 5Y Capital and IDG confirmed the investment. The roughly 10-person team has no formal name or product. Tian said it has built a visual dictionary of 200,000 symbols, aiming to process video with AI-generated symbols and feed about 100 million hours of video to learn the real world, with a full model planned for 2027. He was a first author of the VAR visual autoregressive model paper, one of NeurIPS 2024's best papers, and a ruling seen by Bloomberg said he must pay 500,000 yuan for breaching his ByteDance contract. He acknowledged shutting down another intern's program to free compute and said he would act more wisely if he could redo it. He said the company is prioritizing technology over consumer products or a business model. TypeSafe AI, developer of the Jev model, raised about $870 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg reported. The round came weeks after Jev's release. Co-founder Diogo Almeida said interest from executives, developers and investors surged after a product launch video went viral. TypeSafe said Jev surpassed 1 million users within days and that about one-third of Fortune 500 companies use the model; it did not disclose their names.

IDC's preliminary data showed global traditional PC shipments fell 20.1 percent year on year to 62.7 million units in the third quarter of 2026, down 9.1 percent from the previous quarter. It was the second consecutive quarterly contraction and a steeper decline than the 3.8 percent drop in the second quarter. IDC attributed the fall to continued supply constraints and demand pulled forward earlier in the year as vendors and channel partners stocked up before price increases. Channels mostly drew down inventory, and the usual third-quarter seasonal rebound did not appear. Lenovo, HP and Dell declined more than the overall market, and their combined share fell 4.2 percentage points. Jitesh Ubrani, IDC's research director for consumer devices, said high inventory and high prices are suppressing demand; short-term promotions are possible, but prices are unlikely to return to year-ago levels. The figures cover desktops, notebooks and workstations, excluding tablets and x86 servers, and shipments are not equal to retail sales.

Porsche said at its Oct. 7 capital markets day that it aims to raise average prices of top models by about 20 percent in the medium term, through a higher-value product mix and repositioning rather than immediate across-the-board increases. It plans to cut derivative variants by about 20 percent and raise sales per version by about 30 percent. It also plans a new mid-engine sports car positioned above the 911 and at least one brand-defining product a year through 2030, under a direction it calls Sportwagenschmiede 3.5.

Deadline reported on Oct. 9 that Royal Mail confirmed its 2025 Christmas advertisement used an AI voice. The daughter of late BBC announcer Paul Vaughan, who voiced Paddington, said the voice closely resembled her father's and questioned whether it was cloned without family permission. Producer Fameplay said the voice was generated through ElevenLabs but denied intentionally cloning Vaughan. Voice experts told Deadline the voices have similarities, though listening alone cannot prove direct cloning; ElevenLabs did not answer questions about training materials. ElevenLabs later added Vaughan to a list barring direct cloning. The ad's use of AI voice is confirmed, while whether Vaughan's voice material was used remains disputed.

Nikon stripped the original first-place entry in this year's Small World in Motion microscopy video contest after finding it violated rules on generative AI, updating the winner to Nguyen Nam Nhat. The Verge reported on Oct. 9 that the original winner, Dr. Ning Xu, said the video showed cilia movement in the airway of a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia. After online questions about authenticity, Nikon began a review last week. Xu acknowledged using AI in LinkedIn comments but described it as post-processing: an unsupervised neural network used for feature differentiation and visualization on grayscale images reconstructed by super-resolution optical imaging. Nikon concluded the entry broke contest rules; the video has been removed. Nikon said it will review future contest rules and judging and that the disqualification should not be read as a judgment on the entrant's professional reputation, research contribution or intent.

The Human Mathematics Association's communications working group said in an Oct. 7 statement that it criticized OpenAI's release of mathematics manuscripts a day earlier and called on mathematicians to stop collaborating with OpenAI. Terence Tao reposted the guest statement on his blog. The statement focused on research norms and understanding and questioned how model answers become academic results. AHM wrote that credibility, research ethics and public interest are conditions for evaluating mathematics research, rejected OpenAI's claim that the release advanced mathematics, and advised mathematicians and the public to view the publication model cautiously. It cited a recommendation from the Mathematics and AI Advisory Group that frontier AI companies should not test advanced mathematics with internal models without authorization; AHM said OpenAI ignored that premise while borrowing the group's legitimacy, harming academic norms. AHM called the release of more than 700 documents a display of force rather than an academic contribution by scale alone, and said the direction should return to science centered on human understanding. AHM said this was its organizational position; Tao identified the author when reposting and did not present it as his own signed statement.

In other company and product news, the State Intellectual Property Office published an embodied intelligent robot design patent on Oct. 9, with BYD as patentee, for service, education and industrial scenarios. TRAE merged TraeWork and TraeCode to support Agent and IDE dual modes. JetBrains released Mellum 2.1, focusing on enhanced agentic coding. OnePlus and BOE released the fourth-generation Oriental Screen, supporting global 165Hz and 185Hz in games. Li Auto disclosed six upgrades for the new i6, which will launch Oct. 28. Sam's Club plans to restrict family-card rebinding to a maximum of two main-card members per year. Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello will leave after a decade. The creator of WandaVision will develop a new Stargate series for Amazon. AI series Space Nation and Kira will screen full pilot episodes at Mipcom. Icelandic crime series Elma will launch Oct. 15.

Editor's Summary

Apple suppliers disputed a reported cut in iPhone 18 Pro component orders, while Xiaomi and Huawei raised phone prices. AI companies discussed crisis responses and several AI and consumer hardware developments advanced. IDC reported a sharp PC shipment decline and Porsche outlined a higher-price, lower-complexity strategy.