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Sep 29, 09:38
Apple's foldable iPhone Duo faces low yields ahead of October launch
Apple's first foldable handset, the iPhone Duo, is nearing launch in October, but reports from China said production remains constrained by low yields in final assembly, panels, and hinges. Jiemian News reported that, as of September 17, Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn, had an assembly yield just above 60%, more than a month before sales were set to begin.

Apple's first foldable iPhone has become a test of how far India has come as a manufacturing base, and the answer is sobering. As India-assembled iPhones reach record export levels, Apple kept development and assembly of its most complex phone, the iPhone Duo, in China. The decision points to a gap that Pune Times Mirror summed up this way: India has become indispensable to Apple's assembly operations, but not yet to its engineering.

Europe's enterprise networking market is emerging from a two-year inventory correction as Wi-Fi 7 adoption accelerates and pulls spending into campus switching, broadening what began as a wireless upgrade into a wider infrastructure refresh.

Vivo unveiled its new X500 series imaging flagship phones in Shanghai on September 21, 2026, aiming to build a stronger moat in mobile imaging and break through more aggressively in the premium smartphone market. As rising memory prices force handset makers to lift retail prices, IDC expects worldwide smartphone shipments to fall 16.7% in 2026 to just over 1 billion units.

Millimeter-wave communications technology and solutions provider TMY Technology (Tmytek) officially listed on Taiwan's Innovation Board on September 22 at an offering price of NT$60 (approx. US$1.90) per share. The company said its products, which span millimeter-wave R&D and validation instruments, Lego-like phased-array antennas and subsystem modules, have moved from development and verification into commercial delivery and mass production.

Industry sources say Valve is expected to launch a new Steam Deck in 2027, setting up a tougher contest for Taiwanese original design manufacturer (ODM) Quanta as China's Huaqin moves to win the manufacturing order. The winner has not yet been confirmed.

Apple's latest flagship iPhone 18 Pro series is now shipping, and the choice of modem chip has drawn close market attention. A newly released teardown report has revealed an unexpected exception: the US iPhone 18 Pro Max still uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 rather than Apple's newly announced in-house C2 chip.

Apple has changed its iPhone launch cadence this year, splitting its high-end releases into two waves. The iPhone 18 Pro series went on sale on September 18, with Apple's first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, set to follow on October 23.

DIGITIMES analyst Luke Lin said on his podcast that the foldable's pricing is more consumer-friendly than expected, but Apple's across-the-board price hikes on older models will weigh on iPhone shipments in the second half of the year. He added that the packaging changes for the A20 Pro are the signal that supply chain players should watch most closely.

Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) announced on September 18 that the nearly 300km-long Taiwan-Matsu submarine cable has been completed, landed, tested, and has officially been added to the Taiwan-Matsu external communications network. The project strengthens communications resilience for the outlying Matsu Islands by adding a third route with redundant backup and improving service stability for residents and public services.

Compal Electronics is buying out the shares of its listed networking arm, Compal Broadband Networks (CBN), in a cash deal that will end CBN's public listing and give Compal full control of a router and gateway business it wants to pair with its edge AI hardware.
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro series will go on sale on September 18, and Taiwan's major e-commerce platforms and telecom carriers have released preorder results ahead of launch. Data show that demand for premium iPhone models remains strong, with most channels selling out quickly and reservation volumes rising one to two times from the same period in 2025.