WAIC Weekend News Roundup

APPSO · wechat · 2026-07-18

Top Highlights from This Weekend's News

Doubao Phone 2nd Gen appears at WAIC: Nubia NaviX Ultra debuted as the "Doubao Phone 2.0" featuring the Doubao phone assistant. The new generation shifts away from "screen reading + simulated clicks" to integrating applications' native MCP services; inventory has also increased from 30,000 to hundreds of thousands of units.
Zhipu ARR reportedly hits $1 billion: According to independent sources, Zhipu's Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) reached $1 billion in July 2026, marking a roughly 15x growth from January to July. Reports attribute this surge to enhanced Coding/Reasoning capabilities, API price hikes, and increased call volumes.
Apple raises Apple Music prices: Prices have increased simultaneously in the US and China across individual, family, and student plans, which Apple attributes to rising music licensing costs.
First-instance verdict in Xiaomi SU7 fake crash test case: The court ruled that the blogger fabricated and spread false facts, damaging the product's reputation, sentencing them to 1 year and 8 months in prison plus a fine.
Shopify CEO continues to champion AI coding: Tobi Lütke believes anti-AI coding advocates overestimate human code quality, a view publicly endorsed by Elon Musk. The debate's focus has now shifted to "who reviews and controls the codebase."
Insta360 × Honor partnership: Insta360 flagship products will enter Honor stores, with plans to expand to 300 stores by year-end.
Fudan University's room-temperature single-electron non-volatile memory: Published a "quantum flash memory" study in Science, claiming to have achieved room-temperature single-electron storage, with plans to integrate with AI clients within 1–3 years.
Proposed increase in NEV reliability standards: The reliability test mileage for pure electric, hybrid, and fuel cell vehicles is planned to be unified and raised to 30,000 kilometers.
Netflix's Q2 growth slows: Revenue grew 13.4% year-over-year, the lowest in 3 years, with shares dropping as much as 8% intraday; the company also disclosed that generative AI is now involved in the production process of about 300 titles.
Kimi temporarily steps back from video generation: Moonshot AI stated that its current focus is on raising the model's intelligence ceiling, rather than joining the video generation race.
Dense showcase of agents and terminals at WAIC: StepFun, Qwen, Ant, Lenovo, and others showcased agent phones, AI earphones/glasses, payment and transaction ecosystems, enterprise agents, and embodied AI solutions.

Overall, the main narrative of this issue isn't a single model release, but rather how AI is transitioning from pure model capabilities to terminals, payments, enterprise workflows, and the physical world.

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WAIC Weekend News Roundup

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