iPhone sales jumped 15% year-over-year in April and May 2025, "signaling Apple's strongest two-month performance for the period since the pandemic," reports MacRumors, citing preliminary data from Counterpoint Research. From the report: The growth was driven mainly by the United States and China, Apple's two largest markets. Both regions returned to positive year-over-year growth after three years of declines during what is typically a less seasonal period. China sales were particularly notable, with Apple capturing the top spot in May. It's quite the turnaround, after Apple only recently sustained market share losses to Huawei and other local mobile vendors. [...]

The report showed Japan also indicated strong iPhone demand, with the more affordable iPhone 16e proving especially popular among consumers who favor smaller devices. The device's entry-level pricing apparently appealed to Japanese tastes, while Apple also maintained strong sales for the iPhone 16 base model and even the older iPhone 14. India continued its growth trajectory as Apple expands both manufacturing and market presence in the world's most populous country.

The NFC Forum has released NFC Release 15 (that's what it's calling it), extending the operating range of Near Field Communication connections from 0.5 centimeters to 2 centimeters -- a fourfold increase that reduces the precision required for device alignment.

The global standards body, whose board includes representatives from Apple, Google, Huawei, Infineon, NXP, Sony, and ST Microelectronics, designed the enhancement to accelerate transaction speeds and improve reliability across NFC-enabled devices. The expanded range addresses technical challenges in smaller form-factor devices like wearables and smartphones while maintaining compatibility with existing ISO/IEC 14443 standards.

The standard also incorporates support for NFC Digital Product Passport specifications, allowing single NFC tags embedded in products to store and transmit sustainability data throughout their lifecycle.

An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] the rise in China of open technology, which relies on transparency and decentralisation, is awkward for an authoritarian state. If the party's patience with open-source fades, and it decides to exert control, that could hinder both the course of innovation at home, and developers' ability to export their technology abroad.

China's open-source movement first gained traction in the mid-2010s. Richard Lin, co-founder of Kaiyuanshe, a local open-source advocacy group, recalls that most of the early adopters were developers who simply wanted free software. That changed when they realised that contributing to open-source projects could improve their job prospects. Big firms soon followed, with companies like Huawei backing open-source work to attract talent and cut costs by sharing technology.

Momentum gathered in 2019 when Huawei was, in effect, barred by America from using Android. That gave new urgency to efforts to cut reliance on Western technology. Open-source offered a faster way for Chinese tech firms to take existing code and build their own programs with help from the country's vast community of developers. In 2020 Huawei launched OpenHarmony, a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices. It also joined others, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, to establish the OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development. China quickly became not just a big contributor to open-source programs, but also an early adopter of software. JD.com, an e-commerce firm, was among the first to deploy Kubernetes.

AI has lately given China's open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek's models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot.

A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea automatically captures screenshots every five minutes and stores them in a hidden folder inaccessible to users, according to analysis by the BBC. Authorities can later review these images to monitor citizen activity on the device. The phone, obtained by Seoul-based media outlet Daily NK, resembles a Huawei or Honor device but runs state-approved software designed for surveillance and control. The device also automatically censors text, replacing "South Korea" with "puppet state" and Korean terms of endearment with "comrade."

China has achieved substantial technological advances across robotics, AI, and semiconductor manufacturing as part of a seven-year self-reliance campaign that has tripled the country's research and development spending to $500 billion annually.

Chinese robot manufacturers captured nearly half of their domestic market by 2023, up from a quarter of installations just years earlier, while AI startups now rival OpenAI and Google in capabilities. The progress extends to semiconductors, where Huawei released a high-end smartphone powered by what industry analysts believe was a locally-produced advanced processor, despite U.S. export controls targeting China's chip access.

Morgan Stanley projects China's self-sufficiency in graphics processing units will jump from 11% in 2021 to 82% by 2027. Chinese companies have been purchasing as many industrial robots as the rest of the world combined, enabling highly automated factories that can operate in darkness. In space technology, Chinese firms won five of 11 gold medals when U.S. think tanks ranked the world's best commercial satellite systems last year, compared to four for American companies.

Thursday was Rust's 10-year anniversary for its first stable release. "To say I'm surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement," writes Rust's original creator Graydon Hoare. "I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved... In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure." It's a story with many actors:

- The population of developers the language serves who express their needs and constraints through discussion, debate, testing, and bug reports arising from their experience writing libraries and applications.

- The language designers and implementers who work to satisfy those needs and constraints while wrestling with the unexpected consequences of each decision.

- The authors, educators, speakers, translators, illustrators, and others who work to expand the set of people able to use the infrastructure and work on the infrastructure.

- The institutions investing in the project who provide the long-term funding and support necessary to sustain all this work over decades.

All these actors have a common interest in infrastructure.
Rather than just "systems programming", Hoare sees Rust as a tool for building infrastructure itself, "the robust and reliable necessities that enable us to get our work done" — a wide range that includes everything from embedded and IoT systems to multi-core systems. So the story of "Rust's initial implementation, its sustained investment, and its remarkable resonance and uptake all happened because the world needs robust and reliable infrastructure, and the infrastructure we had was not up to the task." Put simply: it failed too often, in spectacular and expensive ways. Crashes and downtime in the best cases, and security vulnerabilities in the worst. Efficient "infrastructure-building" languages existed but they were very hard to use, and nearly impossible to use safely, especially when writing concurrent code. This produced an infrastructure deficit many people felt, if not everyone could name, and it was growing worse by the year as we placed ever-greater demands on computers to work in ever more challenging environments...

We were stuck with the tools we had because building better tools like Rust was going to require an extraordinary investment of time, effort, and money. The bootstrap Rust compiler I initially wrote was just a few tens of thousands of lines of code; that was nearing the limits of what an unfunded solo hobby project can typically accomplish. Mozilla's decision to invest in Rust in 2009 immediately quadrupled the size of the team — it created a team in the first place — and then doubled it again, and again in subsequent years. Mozilla sustained this very unusual, very improbable investment in Rust from 2009-2020, as well as funding an entire browser engine written in Rust — Servo — from 2012 onwards, which served as a crucial testbed for Rust language features.
Rust and Servo had multiple contributors at Samsung, Hoare acknowledges, and Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and others "hired key developers and contributed hardware and management resources to its ongoing development." Rust itself "sits atop LLVM" (developed by researchers at UIUC and later funded by Apple, Qualcomm, Google, ARM, Huawei, and many other organizations), while Rust's safe memory model "derives directly from decades of research in academia, as well as academic-industrial projects like Cyclone, built by AT&T Bell Labs and Cornell."

And there were contributions from "interns, researchers, and professors at top academic research programming-language departments, including CMU, NEU, IU, MPI-SWS, and many others." JetBrains and the Rust-Analyzer OpenCollective essentially paid for two additional interactive-incremental reimplementations of the Rust frontend to provide language services to IDEs — critical tools for productive, day-to-day programming. Hundreds of companies and other institutions contributed time and money to evaluate Rust for production, write Rust programs, test them, file bugs related to them, and pay their staff to fix or improve any shortcomings they found. Last but very much not least: Rust has had thousands and thousands of volunteers donating years of their labor to the project. While it might seem tempting to think this is all "free", it's being paid for! Just less visibly than if it were part of a corporate budget.

All this investment, despite the long time horizon, paid off. We're all better for it.
He looks ahead with hope for a future with new contributors, "steady and diversified streams of support," and continued reliability and compatability (including "investment in ever-greater reliability technology, including the many emerging formal methods projects built on Rust.")

And he closes by saying Rust's "sustained, controlled, and frankly astonishing throughput of work" has "set a new standard for what good tools, good processes, and reliable infrastructure software should be like.

"Everyone involved should be proud of what they've built."

Apple's smartphone shipments in China plunged nearly 50% year-over-year in March 2025, as domestic brands like Huawei and Vivo surged ahead -- now controlling 92% of the market. MacRumors reports: The steep decline saw shipments fall to just 1.89 million units, down from 3.75 million during the same period last year. That shrinks Apple's share of the Chinese market to approximately 8%, while domestic brands now control 92% of smartphone shipments. For the entire first quarter, non-Chinese brand shipments declined over 25%, while total smartphone shipments in China actually increased by 3.3%.

Apple's struggles come as domestic competitors have gained ground. Counterpoint Research reports Huawei now leads with a 19.4% share, followed by Vivo (17%), Xiaomi (16.6%), and Oppo (14.6%). Apple has slipped to fifth place with 14.1%. Several factors are driving Apple's declining fortunes. The company faces competition from rejuvenated local brands like Huawei, which has rebounded with proprietary chips and its HarmonyOS Next software. Chinese government policies appear to be playing a role too. Under government subsidies, consumers of electronics get a 15% refund of products that are priced under 6,000 yuan ($820). Apple's standard iPhone 16 starts at 5,999 yuan.

President Donald Trump's administration has taken a tougher stance on Chinese technology advances, warning companies around the world that using AI chips made by Huawei could trigger criminal penalties for violating US export controls. From a report: The commerce department issued guidance to clarify that Huawei's Ascend processors were subject to export controls because they almost certainly contained, or were made with, US technology.

Its Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees export controls, said on Tuesday it was taking a more stringent approach to foreign AI chips, including "issuing guidance that using Huawei Ascend chips anywhere in the world violates US export controls." But people familiar with the matter stressed that the bureau had not issued a new rule, but was making it clear to companies that Huawei chips are likely to have violated a measure that requires hard-to-get licences to export US technology to the Chinese company.

The Department of Commerce officially rescinded the Biden administration's Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule on Tuesday, just days before its May 15 implementation date. The rule would have imposed first-ever export restrictions on U.S.-made AI chips to dozens of countries while tightening existing controls on China and Russia.

Instead of implementing blanket restrictions, the DOC signaled a shift toward direct country-by-country negotiations. The department released interim guidance reminding companies that using Huawei's Ascend AI chips anywhere violates U.S. export rules and warned about consequences of allowing U.S. chips to train AI models in China. Commerce Secretary for Industry and Security Jeffery Kessler criticized the previous administration's approach, calling it "ill-conceived and counterproductive."

An anonymous reader shared this repost from the Washington Post: It's becoming standard practice at a growing number of U.S. airports: When you reach the front of the security line, an agent asks you to step up to a machine that scans your face to check whether it matches the face on your identification card. Travelers have the right to opt out of the face scan and have the agent do a visual check instead — but many don't realize that's an option.

Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) and John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) think it should be the other way around. They plan to introduce a bipartisan bill that would make human ID checks the default, among other restrictions on how the Transportation Security Administration can use facial recognition technology. The Traveler Privacy Protection Act, shared with the Tech Brief on Wednesday ahead of its introduction, is a narrower version of a 2023 bill by the same name that would have banned the TSA's use of facial recognition altogether. This one would allow the agency to continue scanning travelers' faces, but only if they opt in, and would bar the technology's use for any purpose other than verifying people's identities. It would also require the agency to immediately delete the scans of general boarding passengers once the check is complete.

"Facial recognition is incredibly powerful, and it is being used as an instrument of oppression around the world to track dissidents whose opinion governments don't like," Merkley said in a phone interview Wednesday, citing China's use of the technology on the country's Uyghur minority. "It really creates a surveillance state," he went on. "That is a massive threat to freedom and privacy here in America, and I don't think we should trust any government with that power...."

[The TSA] began testing face scans as an option for people enrolled in "trusted traveler" programs, such as TSA PreCheck, in 2021. By 2022, the program quietly began rolling out to general boarding passengers. It is now active in at least 84 airports, according to the TSA's website, with plans to bring it to more than 400 airports in the coming years. The agency says the technology has proved more efficient and accurate than human identity checks. It assures the public that travelers' face scans are not stored or saved once a match has been made, except in limited tests to evaluate the technology's effectiveness.
The bill would also bar the TSA from providing worse treatment to passengers who refuse not to participate, according to FedScoop, and would also forbid the agency from using face-scanning technology to target people or conduct mass surveillance: "Folks don't want a national surveillance state, but that's exactly what the TSA's unchecked expansion of facial recognition technology is leading us to," Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., a co-sponsor of the bill and a longtime critic of the government's facial recognition program, said in a statement...

Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general initiated an audit of TSA's facial recognition program. Merkley had previously led a letter from a bipartisan group of senators calling for the watchdog to open an investigation into TSA's facial recognition plans, noting that the technology is not foolproof and effective alternatives were already in use.

Huawei has launched its first laptop running HarmonyOS instead of Windows, complete with AI features and support for over 2,000 mostly China-focused apps. The product is largely a result of U.S. sanctions that prevented U.S.-based companies like Google and Microsoft from doing business with Huawei, forcing the company to develop its own in-house solution. Liliputing reports: Early version of HarmonyOS were basically skinned version of Android, but over time Huawei has moved the two operating systems further apart and it now includes Huawei's own kernel, user interface, and other features. The version designed for laptops features a desktop-style operating system with a taskbar and dock on the bottom of the screen and support for multitasking by running multiple applications in movable, resizable windows.

Since this is 2025, of course Huawei's demos also heavily emphasize AI features: the company showed how Celia, its AI assistant, can summarize documents, help prepare presentation slides, and more. While the operating system won't support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that's developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.

Huawei is gearing up to test its newest and most powerful AI processor, which the company hopes could replace some higher-end products of U.S. chip giant Nvidia. From a WSJ report: Huawei has approached some Chinese tech companies about testing the technical feasibility of the new chip, called the Ascend 910D, people familiar with the matter said. The company is slated to receive the first batch of samples of the processor as soon as late May, some of the people said.

The development is still at an early stage, and a series of tests will be needed to assess the chip's performance and get it ready for customers, the people said. Huawei hopes that the latest iteration of its Ascend AI processors will be more powerful than Nvidia's H100, a popular chip used for AI training that was released in 2022, said one of the people. Previous versions are called 910B and 910C.

The Trump administration is "taking measures to restrict the sale of AI chips by Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel," especially in China, reports the New York Times. But that's triggered a series of dominoes. "In the two days after the limits became public, shares of Nvidia, the world's leading AI chipmaker, fell 8.4%. AMD's shares dropped 7.4%, and Intel's were down 6.8%." (AMD expects up to $800 million in charges after the move, according to CNBC, while NVIDIA said it would take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion.)

The Times notes hopeful remarks Thursday from Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a meeting with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. "We're going to continue to make significant effort to optimize our products that are compliant within the regulations and continue to serve China's market." But America's chipmakers also have a greater fear, according to the article: "that their retreat could turn the Chinese tech giant Huawei into a global chip-making powerhouse." "For the U.S. semiconductor industry, China is gone," said Handel Jones, a semiconductor consultant at International Business Strategies, which advises electronics companies. He projects that Chinese companies will have a majority share of chips in every major category in China by 2030... Huang's message spoke to one of his biggest fears. For years, he has worried that Huawei, China's telecommunications giant, will become a major competitor in AI. He has warned U.S. officials that blocking U.S. companies from competing in China would accelerate Huawei's rise, said three people familiar with those meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

If Huawei gains ground, Huang and others at Nvidia have painted a dark picture of a future in which China will use the company's chips to build AI data centers across the world for the Belt and Road Initiative, a strategic effort to increase Beijing's influence by paying for infrastructure projects around the world, a person familiar with the company's thinking said...

Nvidia's previous generation of chips perform about 40% better than Huawei's best product, said Gregory C. Allen, who has written about Huawei in his role as director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But that gap could dwindle if Huawei scoops up the business of its American rivals, Allen said. Nvidia was expected to make more than $16 billion in sales this year from the H20 in China before the restriction. Huawei could use that money to hire more experienced engineers and make higher-quality chips. Allen said the U.S. government's restrictions also could help Huawei bring on customers like DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI startup. Working with those companies could help Huawei improve the software it develops to control its chips. Those kinds of tools have been one of Nvidia's strengths over the years.
TechRepublic identifies this key quote from an earlier article: "This kills NVIDIA's access to a key market, and they will lose traction in the country," Patrick Moorhead, a tech analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, told The New York Times. He added that Chinese companies will buy from local rival Huawei instead.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jack Ma-backed Ant Group used Chinese-made semiconductors to develop techniques for training AI models that would cut costs by 20%, according to people familiar with the matter. Ant used domestic chips, including from affiliate Alibaba and Huawei, to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machine learning approach, the people said. It got results similar to those from Nvidia chips like the H800, they said, asking not to be named as the information isn't public. Hangzhou-based Ant is still using Nvidia for AI development but is now relying mostly on alternatives including from Advanced Micro Devices and Chinese chips for its latest models, one of the people said.

The models mark Ant's entry into a race between Chinese and US companies that's accelerated since DeepSeek demonstrated how capable models can be trained for far less than the billions invested by OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. It underscores how Chinese companies are trying to use local alternatives to the most advanced Nvidia semiconductors. While not the most advanced, the H800 is a relatively powerful processor and currently barred by the US from China. The company published a research paper this month that claimed its models at times outperformed Meta Platforms Inc. in certain benchmarks, which Bloomberg News hasn't independently verified. But if they work as advertised, Ant's platforms could mark another step forward for Chinese artificial intelligence development by slashing the cost of inferencing or supporting AI services.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Belgian prosecutor's office said on Tuesday that it has charged five people in connection with a bribery investigation in the European Parliament allegedly linked to China's Huawei. The five were detained last week. Four have now been arrested and charged with active corruption and involvement in a criminal organization, while a fifth faces money laundering charges and has been released conditionally. The prosecutor's officer did not disclose the names of those involved or give information that could identify them.

It said new searches had taken place on Monday, this time at European Parliament offices. Huawei said last week it took the allegations seriously. "Huawei has a zero tolerance policy towards corruption or other wrongdoing, and we are committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations at all times," it said. The prosecutors have said the alleged corruption took place "very discreetly" since 2021 under the guise of commercial lobbying and involved payments for taking certain political stances or excessive gifts such as food and travel expenses or regular invitations to football matches.

Huawei will no longer be able to produce or sell Windows-based PCs as Microsoft's supply license to the Chinese tech company expires this month, according to Chinese tech site MyDrivers. The restriction comes as Huawei remains on the U.S. Department of Commerce's Entity List, requiring American companies to obtain special export licenses to conduct business with the firm.

Richard Yu, executive director of Huawei's consumer business unit, said the company is preparing to pivot to alternative operating systems. Huawei had previously announced plans to abandon Windows for future PC generations. The Chinese tech giant will introduce a new "AI PC" laptop in April running its own Kunpeng CPU and HarmonyOS, alongside a MateBook D16 Linux Edition, its first Linux-based laptop.

In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said next-gen AI will need 100 times more compute than older models as a result of new reasoning approaches that think "about how best to answer" questions step by step. From a report: "The amount of computation necessary to do that reasoning process is 100 times more than what we used to do," Huang told CNBC's Jon Fortt in an interview on Wednesday following the chipmaker's fourth-quarter earnings report. He cited models including DeepSeek's R1, OpenAI's GPT-4 and xAI's Grok 3 as models that use a reasoning process.

Huang pushed back on that idea in the interview on Wednesday, saying DeepSeek popularized reasoning models that will need more chips. "DeepSeek was fantastic," Huang said. "It was fantastic because it open sourced a reasoning model that's absolutely world class." Huang said that company's percentage of revenue in China has fallen by about half due to the export restrictions, adding that there are other competitive pressures in the country, including from Huawei.

Developers will likely search for ways around export controls through software, whether it be for a supercomputer, a personal computer, a phone or a game console, Huang said. "Ultimately, software finds a way," he said. "You ultimately make that software work on whatever system that you're targeting, and you create great software." Huang said that Nvidia's GB200, which is sold in the United States, can generate AI content 60 times faster than the versions of the company's chips that it sells to China under export controls.

China will expand consumption subsidies to cover smartphones and other electronics, in a step to promote domestic spending as external headwinds pick up. From a report: A national trade-in program that currently applies to home appliances and cars will broaden this year to include personal devices like phones, tablets and smartwatches, officials from the nation's top economic planning agency said in a briefing Friday.

Chinese consumers in the post-Covid era have begun holding onto their smartphones longer, given a lack of exciting new features and general belt-tightening. As with cars and washing machines, investors hope incentives will revive the world's largest smartphone market and drive sales for not just brands such as Huawei and Xiaomi, but also galvanize business on platforms popular with device fans like Alibaba Group and JD.com.

Apple is offering rare discounts of up to 500 yuan ($68.50) on its latest iPhone models in China, as the U.S. tech giant moves to defend its market share against rising competition from domestic rivals like Huawei. From a report: The four-day promotion, running from Jan. 4-7, applies to several iPhone models when purchased using specific payment methods, according to its website.

The flagship iPhone 16 Pro with a starting price of 7,999 yuan and the iPhone 16 Pro Max with a starting price of 9,999 yuan will see the highest discount of 500 yuan. The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus will receive a 400 yuan reduction. The discounts come as consumers remain cautious with spending amid China's slowing economy and deflationary pressures, with the country's consumer inflation hitting a five-month low in November.

Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85% to attract more enterprise users and strengthen its position in China's competitive AI market. CNBC reports: The Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm's cloud computing division, Alibaba Cloud, said in a WeChat post that it's offering the price cuts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images. [...] Major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance have all launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the hype around the technology.

It's not the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to incentivize businesses to use its AI products. In February, the company announced price reductions of as much as 55% on a wide range of core cloud products. More recently, in May, the company reduced prices on its Qwen AI model by as much as 97% in a bid to boost demand. [...] In Alibaba's case, the company is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise segment rather than launching a consumer AI chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT. In May, the company said its Qwen models have been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise users.