The Real Reason Why Chinese Phones Aren’t as Good as iPhones

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Huawei is trying its best to outdo Apple’s iPhone. Last year, ahead of the launch of the iPhone 15, Huawei ‘rivaled’ it with the Mate 60 Pro which caused a stir in the smartphone industry.

For the first time after years of US sanctions, Huawei was able to develop a premium phone with 5G connectivity. As a result, sales of the iPhone 15 fell short of expectations due to the Chinese market’s overwhelming enthusiasm for Huawei’s new phone.

In China, Apple’s position has been pushed out of the ranks of the ‘Top 5’ smartphone manufacturers. Globally, iPhone sales have also plummeted, considering that China is an important market for Apple.

A similar phenomenon occurred this year. Along with the launch of the iPhone 16, Huawei launched the Mate XT tri-fold phone at a price of IDR 40 million.

Although the phone has regained popularity in China thanks to its innovation and sophistication, experts say that Huawei phones cannot yet compete with the iPhone in the performance sector.

Senior Emerging Technologies analyst at Oppenheimer & Co said Huawei’s chips are still 2-3 years behind the advanced chips on the market today.

“Huawei still doesn’t have access to chips with fabrication below 7nm,” Yang said, quoted from CNBC International, Thursday (12/9/2024).

In chip manufacturing, nanometers determine the size of a processor’s transistors. The smaller the transistor size, the more can fit into the chip, so the higher the performance.

Last year, Huawei introduced the Mate 60 using a 7nm chip independently developed in China.

Its benchmark testing exceeded analysts’ predictions. This is because many doubted that Huawei could rise again when access to advanced US technology was tightly closed by the Biden government.

Thanks to its success, Huawei was able to retake Apple’s market share in China. However, this does not mean that Huawei’s chips are more advanced than Apple’s.

Currently, Apple has introduced a chip with 3nm fabrication on the iPhone 16 which is 10% to 15% more powerful than the previous generation.

For that reason, Huawei did not really promote the chip embedded in the Mate XT. The Chinese manufacturer focused more on ‘selling’ the latest three-fold screen innovation.

This trick worked, at least according to Huawei’s official website, initial orders for the phone had reached more than 3.5 million units as of Tuesday this week.

It should be noted that the Mate 60 RS released by Huawei last year also had high pre-order numbers, but failed to materialize into final sales, according to Yang.

“I don’t think the phone shipments will reach [3 million],” he said.

SOURCE : CNBC INDONESIA