30: Chapter 30: Without doing anything, the fruit was handed over.

Cupertino, California, United States.

6:00 AM.

The massive ring-shaped building resembled a spaceship docked in the dark night, with only a few windows still glowing with light.

Tim Cook's personal phone rang abruptly.

It vibrated frantically on the nightstand.

There were no more than five people on the entire planet who could call him at this hour. Cook grabbed his phone and glanced at the screen; the caller ID read 'Jony'.

Jonathan Ive, Apple Inc.'s Chief Design Officer.

'The sky better be falling,' Cook said as he pressed the answer button, his voice thick with sleep.

'It's worse than the sky falling, Tim.'

The voice from the receiver was extremely fast, accompanied by the background sound of rapid keyboard clacking. 'Open your email, or any social media app, and look at the link I sent you. Right now.'

Cook sat up in bed.

He knew Jonathan Ive too well; this elegant British knight had never lost his composure like this, not even when the iPhone 4 prototype was leaked.

His iPad screen lit up.

The blinding white light made Cook squint. He swiped his finger and tapped the link from across the ocean.

The page loaded.

A poster with a black background filled the screen.

Cook rubbed the bridge of his nose, almost wanting to laugh at first glance.

Was it another clout-chasing marketing stunt by some obscure little Chinese manufacturer? He had seen too many of these tricks in recent years—hiring a talented graphic designer to trim the bezels down to the atomic level, only for the actual phone to have bezels wide enough to race horses on.

'Guanghui Technology?'

He muttered the unfamiliar name, his finger hovering over the close button.

'Don't close it. Zoom in on the earpiece area,' Jonathan Ive shouted from the other end of the line.

Cook pinched to zoom as instructed.

The next second,

any lingering sleepiness was instantly washed away as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over his head, and his spine snapped straight.

There was no earpiece.

There was no forehead bezel.

There was no damn 'notch'!

This was impossible.

Cook stared intently at the image, his breathing quickening. Apple Inc.'s tenth-anniversary commemorative model, internally codenamed 'X', had been sitting in their high-security lab for half a month. It was the weapon they had prepared to stun the world, and its biggest selling point was the Full-screen display.

But due to the physical limitations of the Face ID components and the front-facing camera, they had to compromise, cutting out a portion of the screen and leaving behind that ugly but necessary 'notch'.

Yet, the phone on this poster was a single, pure sheet of glass.

The sole front-facing camera hung like a waterdrop at the very top of the screen.

'This is fake, a concept render,' Cook said, stepping barefoot onto the carpet and pacing back and forth in his spacious bedroom, trying to convince himself with logic.

'Current COP packaging technology simply cannot achieve this level. We've seen Samsung's latest panels, and the bottom bezel has to be at least 4.5 millimeters.'

'If it were fake, I wouldn't have called you,'

Jonathan Ive's voice sounded dry. 'Our image analysis team just ran the data. The lighting and reflection logic in this image completely conform to the laws of physics. It's clearly a photo of a real device—they didn't even bother rendering a CGI image!'

'And Guanghui Technology's CEO said this poster is completely real and welcomes anyone to debunk it. They are extremely confident.'

Welcomes debunking?

These words struck Cook's heart like a heavy hammer.

The other party definitely wouldn't make baseless claims.

'Gather everyone.'

Cook hung up, tore off his pajamas, and changed into his signature dark T-shirt. 'In half an hour, I want to see all the VPs of hardware engineering in Conference Room One.'

...

4:10 AM.

Even for the company with the highest market value in the world, when facing an existential crisis, the level of chaos was not much better than a wet market.

Conference Room One was brightly lit.

On the massive projection screen, the poster of the guanghui 7 ultra was magnified to its maximum size. Next to it was the design blueprint of their unreleased iPhone X.

Side by side,

it looked like a perfect work of art placed next to an obviously flawed semi-finished product.

This comparison was not just cruel; it was an outright humiliation.

'Can anyone tell me where the sensors, the ambient light sensor, and the proximity sensor are?'

Cook leaned his hands on the conference table. His eyes, which usually held a gentle smile, were now as sharp as a falcon's as he swept his gaze across everyone present.

These top engineers, who earned tens of millions of dollars a year, kept their heads bowed like misbehaving elementary school students.

'Maybe they're in the slit of the earpiece...' a hardware director muttered, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. 'The lab has been trying to crack this technology, but we just haven't been able to solve the problem...'

'We can't solve it, but a small Chinese factory did?'

Cook grabbed a water bottle from the table, his knuckles turning white from the strain. 'And they actually got rid of the chin too! Even Samsung's best phone, the S8, still has a chin. How did they manage that?'

No one dared to answer.

Technological dominance.

These words appearing in Apple Inc.'s conference room was a ridiculous joke in itself. But now, that joke had become reality.

'There is only one explanation.'

Schiller, VP of Marketing, broke the silence. 'Our Full-screen display concept was leaked. Not only did they get our idea, but they also improved upon it. They want to launch ahead of us and steal the ownership of the Full-screen display concept.'

As soon as these words were spoken, the air in the conference room grew even colder.

If Guanghui Technology held their launch event first and showed a real device,

then the iPhone X, scheduled to launch a month later, would become a clumsy 'notched copycat'.

Apple Inc. would even be labeled as 'technologically backward'.

This would be a catastrophic disaster.

'We can't wait until September.'

Cook made a prompt decision, his business instincts still terrifyingly sharp.

'We must counterattack immediately. We need to tell the world that we are the ones who define this era. Even if our design has flaws, it's due to technical limitations, not because we couldn't think of it.'

'But the device isn't in mass production yet...'

'Release a teaser poster!'

Cook cut off the technician's nonsense, slamming his palm heavily on the table.

'Now, immediately, right now! Use our official Twitter, use all our social media accounts in China!

Post the silhouette of the iPhone X. The caption must be both vague and suggestive. We need to muddy the waters and make everyone think that Guanghui Technology is copying us, just with an exaggerated copy!'

This was a form of narrative hegemony.

As long as Apple spoke first, the public's subconscious would believe Apple was the original.

Besides, Guanghui Mobile hadn't officially debuted yet; perhaps they really were just using exaggerated marketing.

...

China.

7:00 AM.

The all-night flame war caused Weibo's servers to lag several times.

The comment section of Guanghui Technology's pinned Weibo post had already surpassed one hundred thousand comments, filled with nothing but mockery and abuse.

Zhang Yuqing's long article debunking the technology had been reposted tens of thousands of times.

Just when everyone thought Su Qingxue wouldn't dare to show her face today,

a push notification shattered the quiet morning.

It wasn't from Guanghui Technology.

It was Apple.

Apple Inc.'s official Weibo account for Greater China updated with an image out of nowhere.

Against a pitch-black background, there was only the glowing silhouette of a phone.

That iconic rounded rectangle, the extremely high screen-to-body ratio, and... the notch at the top of the screen, which was still discernibly present despite being obscured by shadows.

The caption had only a short sentence in English:

Say hello to the future.

The moment this Weibo post was published,

the entire Chinese tech community seemed to have its pause button pressed.