($) Apple vs Huawei: Boomer vs Startup
A defiant Huawei tries to upstage Apple with a trifold phone. Will it work?
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I watched the back-to-back product release events of Apple and Huawei in full. If you have three hours to kill and are fluently bilingual, you can too! (Apple event LINK; Huawei event LINK).
While I am not a consumer electronics expert and usually don’t focus on it (my investment circle of competence is in enterprise and infrastructure technology), I spent time absorbing these two dueling events in their original, unfiltered form, because they are emblematic of a different stage of the US-China technology competition, which affects all forms of technology in one way or another.
In short (and in crude generational terms), Apple’s announcement felt like a boomer – incremental, conservative, but polished. Huawei’s felt more like a startup – defiant, flashy, but rough around the edges. (Lest you feel insulted by the “boomer” designation, I didn’t come up with it. Ben Thompson did! Though as the perma-Apple-bull, he meant it in a more charitable way.)
The contrast between the two events have already sparked a lot of snarks and memes. Bloomberg’s flagship Big Take podcast thought this iPhone 16 launch sounded “a lot like the last iPhone launch…and the one before that…and the one before that…” Veteran tech reporter from Barron’s, Tae Kim, said every Apple product launch should just be a press release, not an hour-plus long event. I did my fair share of snarking and meming with this:
The debate and rhetoric of who is better are fierce and emotional, but this is not a pro-Apple or pro-Huawei piece. I have no idea whether Huawei’s Mate XT trifold phone will do better or worse than the new iPhone 16 model that will be awash with “Apple Intelligence.” Personally, I’m very much locked in to the iOS ecosystem with my daily electronic use and have no plans to switch.
On a broader level, however, these two events, even down to their logistics and timing, have solidified Apple’s image as a boomer incumbent, while Huawei is trying its hardest to behave like a startup to survive and thrive. This difference is all the more interesting, because both companies are quite old by tech company standards – Apple is 48 years old and Huawei is 37.