Tech Express | September 3, 2026 Tim Cook Steps Down as Apple CEO

1. Tim Cook Steps Down as Apple CEO

Source: Mydrivers

Apple is undergoing a leadership transition. Tim Cook, who led the company for more than 15 years, has ended his tenure as CEO, succeeded by John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. Late on September 1, Ternus joined Weibo and posted his first message, "你好 hello," marking Apple's entry into the "Ternus era."

Unlike Cook, who built his career around supply chains, Ternus is an engineer-turned-leader. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 with a degree in mechanical engineering and joined Apple's product design team in 2001, later working on products including the iPhone 12, AirPods, and iPad.

Ternus played a key role in Apple's transition from Intel chips to its own Apple Silicon. In 2021, he became senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. Industry watchers expect the Ternus era to place greater emphasis on AI devices, robotics, and spatial computing.

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2. Google Launches Gemini 3.8 Flash

Source: ifeng Tech

Just three weeks after Gemini 3.7 Flash, Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash alongside Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a model focused on cybersecurity. The Flash line has now seen three major iterations in six weeks.

Google calls it one of its smartest reasoning and coding models, aimed at end-to-end autonomous agent workflows. In the DeepSWE v1.1 long-horizon software engineering benchmark, Gemini 3.8 Flash outperformed several larger frontier models.

After the launch, Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang joked, "Who is Gemini?" Real-world tests show 3.8 Flash is extremely fast and cheap, with input priced at $0.75 per million tokens and output at $3.75, matching 3.7 Flash.

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3. Doubao Work Adds Multi-Agent Parallelism

Source: GeekPark

Doubao Work has rolled out two new features: "multi-agent parallelism" and "computer control" on macOS, aimed at improving efficiency and coverage for complex tasks.

The multi-agent feature lets Doubao dispatch multiple sub-agents under a single task to handle different modules, greatly reducing delivery time. The macOS computer-control feature enables local GUI operation.

According to the company, the computer-control feature works without MCP, APIs, plugins, or CLI, allowing Doubao to read the interface and complete actions on its own across more long-tail scenarios.

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4. Foreign Visitors Pay $15,000 to See China's Tech Revolution

Source: ifeng Tech

Humanoid robots on factory floors, AI models challenging global rivals, and EV plants producing at astonishing scale are drawing a new wave of foreign visitors to China, Reuters reported.

Robert Wu, CEO of Shanghai data firm Baiguan Technology, has organized two tour groups, charging $15,000 (about 100,000 yuan) for a five-day trip, with roughly half the participants from Southeast Asia. Past participants include US firms Dimension, Capital Group, and Thrive Capital, as well as podcaster Lex Fridman.

China's industrial tourism generated $17.8 billion in revenue last year. Since March 2024, Xiaomi's car plant has hosted more than 250,000 visitors.

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5. TSMC Approaches 20 Fabs Under Construction

Source: CLS

TSMC is undertaking a historic expansion, building 13 fabs in Taiwan and five to six overseas, bringing its total number of fabs under construction worldwide to nearly 20 — an unprecedented scale.

Senior Vice President Hou Yongqing said Wednesday at the 2026 Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Forum that demand for chipmaking tools has nearly doubled since the end of last year, with quarterly equipment procurement estimates raised to about 1.9 times the December forecast — growth he has not seen in 30 years.

TSMC has raised its 2026 full-year capital expenditure outlook to $60–64 billion. CEO C.C. Wei said the company will work to narrow the supply-demand gap next year, as customers like Nvidia and AMD keep increasing orders.

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6. Qualcomm's Next Flagship GPU Adds AI Matrix Cores

Source: Mydrivers

Ahead of its Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm revealed details of its next-generation flagship GPU, which introduces dedicated AI matrix compute units to bring PC-class AI upscaling and frame generation to phones. The technology, called Adreno Neural Fusion, is a mobile answer to NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR.

It relies on three new Matrix Cores inside the GPU to run AI models directly in the rendering pipeline, reducing visual artifacts like flicker and ghosting while cutting power consumption by up to 40%.

The new Adreno GPU uses a three-slice architecture with clock speeds up from 1.2GHz to 1.45GHz. Both Unreal Engine and Unity natively support it, with the first games expected to ship commercially this year.

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7. Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max Debuts Xuanjie O3

Source: Mydrivers

The Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max launches on September 7. Xiaomi has revealed the device's design, featuring a 13.3-inch display and PC-class app support, positioning it as a professional productivity flagship.

The tablet will debut Xiaomi's self-developed Xuanjie O3 AI flagship processor. The O3 uses a 10-core all-big-core CPU design with a top clock of 4.35GHz, plus a 16-core G2-Ultra NX GPU.

Compared with its predecessor, GPU performance rises 85% while power consumption drops 64%, with some benchmark scores even beating Apple's A19 Pro. It also offers a matte-screen option, up to 16GB RAM and 1TB storage, a battery over 10,000mAh, and 120W fast charging.

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8. BepiColombo Begins Mercury Arrival

Source: Space

The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission is finally approaching Mercury. Its two science orbiters separated from their propulsion module at around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) on Thursday, September 3, with ESA streaming the milestone live.

The two orbiters are operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). They launched in October 2018 on a long, looping journey to the solar system's innermost planet.

The separation is just the start of the arrival phase; the orbiters won't be captured by Mercury's gravity until November 21. After that, MPO will map Mercury while Mio studies its magnetosphere, shedding light on the least-explored planet in the inner solar system.

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9. China Achieves Breakthrough in Superconducting Quantum Computer

Source: Mydrivers

Origin Quantum, together with the University of Science and Technology of China and other teams, has developed a "coherent quantum routing system" on the "Origin Wukong" superconducting quantum computer, offering a new path for scalable quantum random access memory (QRAM).

The team used auxiliary energy levels of superconducting qubits to turn complex controlled-swap operations into shallow circuits of two-qubit transition gates, reducing circuit depth and error accumulation.

Tests showed a single quantum router reached 98% information transmission efficiency, and a two-layer routing network reached 93%. In random-access tests, average fidelity was 94.8% for a single router and 82.4% for the two-layer network.

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10. Kylinsoft Posts 703 Million Yuan in First-Half Revenue

Source: Mydrivers

China Software released its 2026 interim report on August 26. While parent revenue fell 20% year over year, its core subsidiary Kylinsoft delivered a strong performance.

Kylinsoft posted first-half revenue of 703 million yuan, operating profit of 174 million yuan, and net profit of 154 million yuan. By the end of June, total assets reached 5.433 billion yuan, with a debt ratio below 8%.

The Kylin operating system has ranked first in China's Linux market share for 15 consecutive years, with cumulative deployments exceeding 20 million units. On May 29, Kylinsoft launched the Kylin 100 and Kylin Industrial OS V10, debuting its on-device agent Kylinbot.

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