Apple’s Huawei comparison trends on Chinese social media

Other online commenters criticize the iPhone 11 Pro’s camera design

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The iPhone 11 comes in six colors. (Picture: Screenshot from Apple’s September 2019 keynote)

Published: 9:28am, 12 Sep 2019Updated: 9:28am, 12 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Sales of iPhones might be declining in China, but Apple’s September launch event still enjoys nationwide attention.

Apple’s new products dominated discussions on Chinese social media Wednesday morning, hours after Apple’s latest keynote event. Eight of the top 20 hot searches on Weibo were about the new products, as were four of the top five trending questions on Q&A site Zhihu.

Zhihu, where people in China go to ask questions and get answers

Eventually, questions about the iPhone 11 Pro and the latest iPad were overtaken by other topics, but discussions about the iPhone 11 remained at the top spot on Zhihu at the time of writing.

Based on social media discussions, one of the biggest surprises from the event for Chinese audiences was Apple’s comparison of the CPU and GPU in its A13 Bionic chipset to other flagship chipsets. China’s homegrown, embattled hero Huawei and its Kirin 980 chipset appeared on the comparison chart, resulting in the trending Weibo hashtag “Apple comparing itself to Huawei for the first time.”

Apple says the A13 Bionic used in the iPhone 11 series has the fastest CPU and GPU in any smartphone. (Picture: Screenshot from Apple’s September 2019 keynote)

Comparing device specs against those of competitors is a common launch event tactic used by Chinese smartphone vendors as competition in the industry gets more intense. Huawei and Xiaomi, for instance, constantly reference each other’s devices when launching a new smartphone in an attempt to show that they have more creative features and better specs.