Apple to Launch Smart Home Hub on Oct. 13 as Google Releases Gemini 4 Argon

The hub is reported to have an approximately 6-inch square screen and can sit on a countertop; a wall-mounted version is codenamed J491. It uses voice or facial recognition to identify family members and show their contacts, messages, calendar and app layout, with a guest mode that hides personal information. Facial recognition is less reliable than iPhone Face ID, and users can require secondary iPhone authentication or use the phone when recognition fails. It controls connected thermostats, locks and other devices, supports FaceTime, room intercom, music and iCloud photo display, has no battery and needs continuous USB-C power. The tabletop screen can tilt manually, and its base includes microphones and speakers. The HomePod mini and Apple TV will keep their current designs but move to faster processors for Siri AI, and the HomePod mini is reported to add green and pink colors. Apple is also developing a larger-screen hub with a robotic arm, but it is not part of the first batch.

Counterpoint Research said in China weekly tracking data released on Sept. 30 that the iPhone 18 Pro series went on sale on Sept. 18 and sold 12% more in its first three days than the iPhone 17 Pro series did in its first week. The two periods differ in length, so the figures cannot be read as a like-for-like full first-week comparison. Apple topped China’s weekly smartphone sales in the week of Sept. 14–20 with a 33% share. Senior analyst Ivan Lam said the delayed launch of the standard iPhone 18 may have pushed some consumers to the Pro models, while price increases by some Chinese flagship brands narrowed their price gap with iPhone Pro models. China’s weekly phone sales had fallen by double digits year over year since July, and the research firm expects the market may recover sequentially as September launches arrive.

Counterpoint also gave its first forecast for Apple’s foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, saying about 6 million units could be sold in 2026. The phone is expected to launch in October, leaving only one quarter for sales this year, and analyst Ivan Lam said actual volume depends on how quickly Apple can raise production. IDC expects global foldable shipments of 22.9 million units this year, up about 13% year over year, and said the market might have declined without the iPhone Duo. The two estimates cover different scopes and cannot be used directly to calculate the same market share.

Google released its next flagship model, Gemini 4 Argon, on Sept. 30, first opening it through the Fairwind program to trusted cyber defenders before expanding to developers, enterprises and consumers. Paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers will have priority. Argon targets professional tasks in software engineering, law and finance, as well as cybersecurity defense, and Google raised its output limit from 64,000 tokens to 1 million tokens. Google said internal engineers have used it to debug code, migrate large codebases and design algorithms, and that it scored 77.9% on the real-world long-task software engineering test DeepSWE v1.1. Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Argon performs well on benchmarks but often struggles with real business code, especially front-end design. Some employees said Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s Astra are advancing faster, while others said the new version had caught up with leading labs; a Google spokesperson said the claim that Gemini 4 performs poorly in programming and other areas is inaccurate. Initial API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input 95% cheaper than regular input; after the promotional period, input and output prices are $4 and $20.

DeepSeek announced on Sept. 30 that it had open-sourced infrastructure components for Huawei’s Ascend computing platform, including the TileLang high-level language compiler, a compute library and a distributed communication library. The components correspond to tools DeepSeek previously used on Nvidia platforms and are intended for developers writing operators, performing matrix calculations and handling cross-device communication on Ascend. DeepSeek said the Ascend version of TileLang encapsulates Ascend C low-level instructions, and that TileLang operators used in its training already have corresponding implementations on Ascend. The release also includes DeepGEMM, DeepEP, TileKernels, FlashMLA and DeepSelect, covering matrix operations, cross-device communication, general vector and memory access, sparse attention and data selection. DeepSeek disclosed that Huawei’s team took part in compute and communication optimization on Ascend, and the two sides are advancing a 128-card supernode plan based on Ascend 950.

Anthropic’s IPO filing shows that about 47% of its 2025 revenue came from Amazon and Google cloud marketplace channels, Reuters reported on Sept. 29. The two companies are also Anthropic investors, compute suppliers and competitors with their own AI products. Anthropic’s 2025 revenue was nearly $4.6 billion, with operating losses of more than $8 billion. For contracts sold through those channels, Anthropic recognizes revenue on a gross basis and records distribution fees paid to partners in sales, marketing and partner expenses; those fees were about $351 million. Anthropic said it is the principal in the relevant transactions and that the treatment follows established accounting principles. The cloud marketplace share of revenue rose from 11% in 2023 to 32% in 2024 and 47% in 2025. The filing warned that partners know its pricing and customer information and that changes in the relationship could affect its business; Reuters said two unnamed customers each contributed 12% of revenue in 2025, and many large customers have no long-term contracts.

TrendForce said in a Sept. 30 memory market study that conventional DRAM contract prices are expected to rise 10%–15% quarter over quarter in the fourth quarter, while NAND Flash contract prices are expected to rise 15%–20%. Memory makers continue to shift advanced processes and capacity to server applications, while consumer electronics demand remains weak. Mobile DRAM quotas remain tight as phone brands use up low-price inventory, and some PC brands are reducing SSD capacity in mainstream models to lower total costs. Enterprise SSDs are the only category expected to see a wider fourth-quarter increase, as cloud providers expand AI inference infrastructure and agent-driven real-time retrieval and caching demand drives high-capacity QLC SSD purchases. The increases are TrendForce forecasts for the component contract market, not uniform retail price increases.

Kuaishou announced on Sept. 30 the creation of a cross-business-unit virtual organization called Enterprise AI Productivity to build general agents, an enterprise context system and internal information systems. The organization comprises the intelligent office platform department and the AI productivity center, led by Wang Xu. Daily Economic News reported that it will handle basic office systems and coordinate AI infrastructure; Kuaishou previously launched tools including MyFlicker and Data Agent, and as of June more than 92% of employees used self-developed AI agents, with AI contributing 60% of code written by research and development staff, according to company disclosures. On the same day, Kuaishou said founder and CEO Cheng Yixiao will also lead the community science line, while former head Yu Yue became director and CEO of Kling AI. JAC Motors said in an evening announcement on Sept. 30 that it confirmed talks with Huawei and Stellantis about cooperation intentions, but no content, form or binding agreement has been determined; the disclosure followed a more than 20% cumulative closing price deviation over three trading days from Sept. 28 to 30. Reuters reported on Sept. 30, citing a senior FTC official, that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over consumer risks from uncontrolled intelligent agents.

Editor's Summary

Apple is preparing to enter the smart-home market with a hub launch on Oct. 13, while early iPhone 18 Pro sales in China beat the prior Pro series’ first week. Google released Gemini 4 Argon amid internal and external debate over its real-world coding performance, and DeepSeek opened infrastructure tools for Huawei Ascend. Anthropic’s IPO filing showed heavy reliance on Amazon and Google cloud channels, as memory prices and corporate AI reorganizations pointed to continued pressure and investment across the technology sector.