Tech Express | September 13, 2026: iPhone 18 Pro Sells Out in Pre-Order

1. iPhone 18 Pro Sells Out Minutes Into Pre-Order

Source: ifeng.com

Apple opened pre-orders for the iPhone 18 Pro lineup at 8 p.m. on September 12, and within minutes several popular models sold out across Apple's website and major platforms including Taobao and JD.com, with shipping dates pushed back significantly for some versions.

As first-batch stock ran out, third-party market prices began to move. According to data from Dewu App, the iPhone 18 Pro Max 256GB in Burgundy averaged 12,799 yuan, up 1,800 yuan, while the 256GB silver version averaged 13,999 yuan, up 3,000 yuan — a 27.3% jump and the highest premium seen.

Meanwhile, the previous-generation iPhone 17 Pro saw an unexpected in-store buying rush, with the lowest price dropping below 6,000 yuan after discounts. Channel merchants expect prices to stabilize around mid-to-late October as Apple ramps up production.

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2. China's AI Focus Shifts From LLMs to AI Agents

Source: Lianhe Zaobao

A new report finds that China's AI industry is gradually shifting its focus from large language models and computing power toward the large-scale deployment and monetization of AI agents. The report, released on September 12 by the China Telecom Research Institute, is titled the "2026 Research Report on AI Infrastructure Development in the Agent Era."

The report says AI is entering a new stage centered on agents, which make complex AI technology invisible and accessible, and have entered fields including office automation, e-commerce operations, industrial control and gaming.

Rao Shaoyang, head of the institute's industry and enterprise strategy research division, expects China's annual token consumption to reach 100 quadrillion in 2026 and exceed 35 quintillion by 2030, with inference demand far outpacing training and accounting for 80% of the market by 2029.

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3. Anthropic CEO Urges Slower AI Development; Musk and Altman Agree

Source: Sina Finance

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post on Saturday (September 12) that the AI industry needs to slow the pace of new model development, citing growing concern over "serious" risks. He pointed to two factors: AI's ability to self-improve, and a recent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face in which a cluster of AI agents worked together to breach a third-party website.

Amodei stressed that slowing down does not mean stopping training or progress, but ensuring companies spend enough time on adjustments and safeguards, confirmed by third-party evaluators. He pledged that Anthropic will give evaluators full access to verify safety measures and report incidents.

After the post, Elon Musk, who leads xAI, replied "Dario is right," while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also said he agreed on controlling the pace of frontier model development.

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4. Two High Schoolers Use AI to Crack a Problem That Stumped a Fields Medalist

Source: ifeng Tech

Two high school students, Aayush Bathija and Prince Rohatgi, working under the guidance of a postdoctoral researcher, used AI to solve a problem that mathematician June Huh had never cracked. Their 75-page paper, "Bounded Ratios of Lorentzian Polynomials," has been posted on arXiv, with Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol as the core tools.

The two are from Oak Park High School in California and are members of UCLA's Olga Radko Math Circle, working under UCLA mathematics postdoc Daniel Soskin. Huh won the Fields Medal at age 39 and co-developed the theory of Lorentzian polynomials in 2020; the paper's central "main structure theorem" extends previous quadratic results to arbitrary degree.

The authors note that AI assisted with computation, proof ideas and editing — with proof ideas especially important — though some suggestions were helpful and others misleading. The day before the study was announced, 25 Fields Medalists had jointly signed an open letter warning that "AI is destroying mathematics itself."

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5. Qualcomm's 2nm Chip Mass Production Reportedly Delayed to 2027

Source: MyDrivers

According to Wccftech, Qualcomm's next-generation mobile platform chip was originally planned to use Samsung's 2-nanometer process to compete with Apple's A20 series, but the mass production timeline may slip to 2027 after the two sides failed to agree on foundry pricing.

The technical issues around the 2nm collaboration have largely been resolved, and Qualcomm is reportedly satisfied with Samsung's 2nm process, but it wants lower foundry pricing, which Samsung cannot meet; the current order volume is also too small to justify a bigger price concession, leaving talks at an impasse.

Industry analysts say the core dispute is over pricing, not technology. Samsung's 2nm yield has risen above 70%; if a deal is not reached, the delayed production could affect the chip supply landscape for 2027 flagship smartphones.

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6. Loongson's 9A1000 Graphics Card to Launch in First Half of Next Year

Source: MyDrivers

Loongson chairman Hu Weiwu recently revealed that the company's self-developed 9A1000 graphics card is expected to officially go on sale in the first half of next year, with final pricing depending largely on the market price of the paired LPDDR4 memory.

The 9A1000 is a two-in-one product: a conventional consumer discrete GPU (benchmarked against the RX 550 in the open consumer market) and a full AI accelerator card, whose compute power can meet most embodied-AI application needs. Several industry customers are already developing agent products based on its hardware.

Hu also revealed that Loongson's sixth-generation high-performance CPU core has officially entered development and will be used in the next-generation Loongson 7000-series CPU line. The company posted first-half revenue of 272 million yuan, up 11.64% year over year.

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7. U.S. iPhone 18 Pro Max Uses a Qualcomm Modem, Not Apple's C2

Source: MacRumors

Apple has updated its tech specs pages for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max to clarify which models carry its new C2 cellular modem. According to the new wording, the iPhone 18 Pro has the C2 worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the C2 in every country except the U.S.

Based on analysis of iOS 27 code, the U.S. iPhone 18 Pro Max is equipped with a Qualcomm modem instead of the C2 chip, most likely the Snapdragon X85. Apple has not explained the difference; observers suggest it may relate to Qualcomm's 2023 announcement that it would supply Apple with smartphone modems through 2026.

Apple's C2 modem supports ultra-fast mmWave 5G and delivers "meaningfully faster uploads" than the previous C1X while using 15% less energy; Apple's foldable iPhone Duo uses the C2 worldwide.

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8. China's Tianwen-3 Plans to Bring Mars Samples Home in 2031

Source: Jalopnik

In an interview with state media, Chinese scientist Hou Zengqian confirmed that the Tianwen-3 mission is on pace to launch to Mars in 2028 and return rock and soil samples to Earth in 2031. As the mission's chief scientist, Hou appears bullish on the plan.

That stands in sharp contrast to America's Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, the one project Congress did not save from President Donald Trump's proposed cuts to NASA funding. Even though the Perseverance rover has collected samples over the past five years, it is unclear whether retrieval will ever happen, with MSR's latest cost estimates ranging from $7 billion to as high as $11 billion.

Tianwen-3's simpler design uses a stationary lander that drills about seven feet down, collects roughly 18 ounces of material, and launches it straight back into orbit — no roving required, with a total post-landing mission time of about two months. The plan calls for two Long March 5 rockets to launch in 2028, one carrying the lander and the other an orbiter.

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9. Beijing Bans Drone Flight, Storage and Transport Across the Entire City

Source: Lianhe Zaobao

Beijing has again revised its drone regulations, banning the flight, storage and transport of drones across the entire city. According to Beijing Daily, the city's standing committee passed the revised "Beijing Regulations on Unmanned Aircraft Management," which will take effect on November 15.

The regulations designate the entire Beijing administrative area as controlled airspace, prohibiting drone flight, the holding and storage of drones and their core components, and the transport or carrying of drones and core components into the area.

The revision establishes a "citywide storage ban" principle. To help residents dispose of existing drones, Beijing offers on-site buyback, scrapping and recycling, and out-of-city shipping channels, with subsidy policies applied by category.

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10. Only 7 Provinces Top 75% Utilization; "Effective Compute" Becomes the Focus

Source: CLS.cn

On the sidelines of the 2026 China Computing Power Conference, CLS.cn reporters learned that China's intelligent computing scale reached 2,185 EFLOPS (FP16) as of June this year, up 177% year over year, as the country shifts from "building more" to "using well and coordinating well."

"Effective compute" became a buzzword at the conference. He Baohong, chief engineer of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said computing supply is concentrating in leading provinces and national hubs, with utilization diverging across regions — only seven provinces have utilization rates above 75%.

Multiple industry figures stressed that simply expanding supply does not improve quality. Power conditions, green-electricity share, per-rack power density and liquid-cooling capacity have replaced rack count and floor area as the core metrics for data center value.

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