Smartphone Shipments Fall 22% in Q3; Tesla, Apple and Nvidia Detail Plans

Samsung and Apple remained the top two vendors by global share, but shipments fell across leading brands. Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo held third to fifth places, while their shares declined from a year earlier and shipments dropped by about 30%. In China, Huawei ranked first and was the only top vendor to post double-digit year-on-year growth, helped by varied product forms and restrained price increases, IDC said. Apple took 17.8% in China, followed by OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and Honor.

Tesla's Oct. 15 Roadster event left key questions unresolved, The Wall Street Journal reported. Tesla's website says the top Rocket version has a full flight system, is a single-seat model and is available only by invitation; the car has not been approved for public roads. The two-seat Performance version has no thrusters and is described as road-legal, while the Thrust version is described as track-only. The cold-gas thrusters release gas to push the car, a technology said to come from SpaceX, and fans under the body draw air to create downforce. Tesla claims a top speed above 230 mph and a sub-one-second 0-60 mph time for the thrust version, with legal use unclear. Musk told buyers last week that production would definitely begin in 2028; Tesla first said production would start in 2020 and has repeatedly delayed, while some depositors have paid up to $250,000 and waited nearly a decade.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple is developing a high-end smart-home screen with a robotic arm, code-named J595, for launch in 2027 or 2028. The device is expected to have a roughly 9-inch screen, rotate 360 degrees, identify who is speaking and turn toward that person; it would sit above the current HomeView. Separately, the secondary-market premium for the black 512GB iPhone Duo on Dewu fell to 3,150 yuan on Oct. 17 from 6,469 yuan the previous night, a drop of more than 50%, according to Jiemian and Beijing News Shell Finance. The phone goes on sale Oct. 23, and Gurman said Apple stores had not been uniformly told to turn away customers without reservations as some outlets were still checking stock and orders.

The Seoul Economic Daily reported on Oct. 18, citing industry sources, that Nvidia is designing custom high-bandwidth memory, NVHBM, with Samsung and TSMC, using TSMC's 3nm process for the base logic die. The design moves the memory controller from the GPU to the base die to free space for computation, targeting up to 30% more bandwidth and 15% lower power than standard HBM4E. Samsung's existing base-die lines cannot meet all custom demand and TSMC can add supply, the report said, while Samsung is also validating a 2nm base-die process. At a Taipei event on Oct. 16, Nvidia personal-computing chief Jeff Fisher denied that the GeForce RTX 5090 would be discontinued and said supply remained constrained across the industry.

NIO co-founder and president Qin Lihong said on Oct. 17 that the company sold 111,638 vehicles in China in the third quarter, citing Wilson terminal sales data, exceeding each of Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi for the first time on a company basis. BMW, including MINI, sold 107,210; Mercedes-Benz, including Maybach and smart, 99,592; and Audi 94,597. NIO's total exceeded all three in 8 provincial-level regions and 40 cities, and at least one of them in 12 regions and 94 cities, Qin said.

DeepSeek upgraded its V4.1 Flash model to Flash-1017 on Oct. 17 across web, app and API without changing usage or pricing. The company said the model improved building games and 3D scenes from scratch, with official demos including a 3D model of the Forbidden City, a web racing game and a Godot-based remake of Portal 2. The weights are open-sourced under the MIT license. DeepSeek also opened search and web-scraping APIs at 5 yuan per 1,000 successful requests; server-side tool calls through Harness, Claude Code or Codex are free until Nov. 1.

China State Railway Group said on Oct. 16 that it will implement a new national train-numbering system in two batches in late November and late December. The number of prefixes for EMU passenger trains will rise from four to seven and total train-number capacity by nearly 40%. K will denote EMUs with top speeds of 200-250 km/h and T those at 300 km/h; G will mean 350 km/h; a new X prefix will cover Fuxing trains above 350 km/h and reserve numbers for higher-speed models such as CR450. Conventional passenger trains will use Z, N and V for 160, 140 and 120 km/h, while freight trains will use B and a new DH prefix for EMU express freight.