If you log onto Chinese social media these days, you may encounter many young people expressing the “involution” or neijuan mentality. It’s become a buzzword for a generation of college students and recent graduates beaten down by society’s relentless competition, and roughly translates to rolling inwards.
You also might stumble upon new selfies of Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, who was back in China this week for his first visit of the year. The US business leader and de-facto diplomat between the geopolitical nemeses had a packed itinerary: Meeting officials in Beijing, stopping by a local Apple store and visiting students in Hangzhou, among other events. As usual, he chronicled much of his journey via bilingual Weibo posts.
So far, there’s been no official updates on the rollout of Apple Intelligence in the country. But his trip comes as competition in China’s AI sector has become ferocious, revitalized by the success of DeepSeek and fresh top-down government support. Domestic smartphone rivals, meanwhile, have been much quicker to incorporate the buzzy technology into devices. iPhone sales have seen a precipitous drop, falling more than 18% in the December quarter. On a recent earnings call, Cook called China “the most competitive market in the world.”
Bringing the AI iPhone features to China at a time of hyper-competition is fraught, and it will be hard for Apple to not feel the pains of involution. But there are reasons to believe that the tech giant has a unique opportunity to get this right in a way that it has noticeably not done elsewhere.
In being forced by regulators to work with local partners — it’s chosen Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. — the company will have to loosen the reins it famously likes to hold tight. But with its in-house AI efforts sputtering, this could end up being a blessing. For Apple to overcome involution in China, it must find a way to invigorate local tech talent — who have been flooding the market with AI products — to build these services for the iPhone.
It’s been an unusually rocky few weeks for Apple outside of China, when even the most long-standing Apple supporters seemed to realize the company was much further behind on AI than initially thought. It indefinitely delayed some of its most exciting updates that were advertised to sell its iPhone 16. The AI features that have arrived have been imperfect, to put it mildly. The company is also undergoing a rare leadership shakeup to address some of these issues.
