A week slipped by, and Apple announced the date for this year's global keynote. On September 6, late at night China time, Tim Cook would take the stage to unveil three products. Supply-chain chatter from Foxconn hinted that it would not be only phones this time, but there would be a watch as well.
Anticipation spiked. Apple still holds a significant share worldwide, and its A-series chips paired with iOS have long given the iPhone a performance edge over most Android phones. In recent years, Android hardware has surged, and the pace of "black-tech" features has quickened, so Cook had reasons to worry.
He is not Jobs, people liked to say. Jobs forged Apple's golden run with restless invention and ruthless polish. Cook, the operator, can outrun him on logistics and marketing, but not on technology. The memes about Apple "squeezing toothpaste," dribbling out minor, incremental tweaks, have only grown louder.
The remedy is simple in theory and brutal in practice: ship something so good it silences the noise. Cook's best chance, according to rumor, would be on this stage.
When the keynote opened, Cook kept the iPhone for last. First, he pulled back the curtain on Apple Watch, the piece most tightly wired into the Apple ecosystem.
The watch had been on shelves the previous year, but it had not been given center stage. Sales in China, in particular, had underwhelmed without the spotlight. This time, Apple meant to fix that.
Cook's pitch was crisp, the kind of lines built to echo. This is the coolest watch of the year. It receives messages, measures heart rate, and runs apps. It is the most useful partner for your iPhone. The spec sheet filled out the promise.
The watch handled texts and calls, stacked in multiple sensors for health metrics, paired over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and supported wallet payments. In effect, it was a miniature, wrist-worn extension of the phone. You would not take photos with it or run heavy tasks, but for the everyday loop of glancing, replying, tapping to pay, and tracking activity, it felt complete.
The price was never going to be gentle. Internationally, it started at $369, and in China, Apple listed it at ¥2,699 (≈ $386). In a market where plenty of domestic flagships sit below that price, the number would make people blink.
Then again, buyers already knew iPhones routinely sell for ¥7,000–¥8,000 in China, so a premium watch that anchors the same ecosystem could wear a premium tag without breaking character.
In Piao City, Heifeng Lu watched the stream with Huaxing's senior team in the conference room. The price did not surprise him. Apple Watch is not a side gadget in Apple's world; it is a keystone. More important, there was a lot here worth studying.
Apple's ecosystem is the industry's cleanest expression of division of labor among devices. Each product knows its job, and they hand work back and forth without seams. That is why so many people stay with Apple even when the raw hardware race swings back toward Android.
Domestic makers have their own strengths. Xiaomi has spent years building a broad everyday-life ecosystem, a whole city of connected gadgets. Apple's system tilts toward work and study, productivity first: different scaffolds, different souls.
Heifeng watched the watch demo and felt a separate kind of friction. Huaxing Technology's own ecosystem work lagged behind its ambitions. Some delays were structural, some the result of dependencies on foreign high tech that had become contentious in recent years.
Either way, the conclusion was the same. Huaxing could not think of itself as "a phone company" anymore. The next competition will not be phone against phone; it will be ecosystem against ecosystem.
He sketched the frame he had been turning over for months, then set it as Huaxing's near-term plan, 1 + 3 + N.
The "1" is the phone, the core that everything else orbits.
The "3" is a trio of secondary cores that should share the phone's language, tablets, smart speakers, and watches or bands. Each overlaps the phone's function in places, and each can stand in for it at key moments. Done right, these three become extensions of the handset, not accessories.
The "N" is the long tail, the many categories of consumer electronics and smart-home devices that round out daily life and fill the house. They will not all ship at once, and they do not need to. What matters is that when they do, they understand the "1" and the "3," they pair instantly, and they behave.
Heifeng underlined the last point for the team. The goal is not to scatter products in every direction. The goal is to make sure that when a buyer brings a second or third Huaxing device home, it snaps into their life without thought.
Phones, tablets, speakers, watches, and the rest should find each other, share notifications and calls, move tasks across screens, and make the buyer feel they got more than the sum of the parts. If Huaxing cannot match Apple's coherence, it should not bother launching the category.
He closed the stream and stood, the plan clear. The phone remains the anchor; the three flanking pillars must be great, not good, and the "N" must be disciplined.
If they can execute that, then when someone looks at a Huaxing watch and a Huaxing phone on the table, the question will not be "why would I use them together," it will be "how did I ever stand them apart."