Apple brings Alibaba's Qwen AI to Macs in China
What's the story
Apple has published a guide explaining how eligible Mac users in mainland China can connect with Alibaba's Qwen artificial intelligence (AI) service. The integration works with Apple's Siri digital assistant and Writing Tools feature, giving them enhanced capabilities. The move is seen as a strategic response to the growing competition from domestic players like Lenovo and Huawei in China's AI PC market.
Tech details
What is Qwen?
Qwen is a suite of generative-AI models developed by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
These advanced systems can generate text and images, as well as analyze documents, photos, and other content based on user prompts.
The latest update to Apple's Chinese-language guide explains how users can take advantage of this technology through Siri for more in-depth responses to certain requests.
Feature expansion
How to use Qwen on Mac
Along with providing detailed responses, the integration also lets users ask Siri to analyze photos and documents using Qwen.
Apple's Writing Tools can use this service as well, enabling users to generate text and images from descriptions.
The feature is available for Macs running macOS 26.6 or later, but comes with China-specific conditions.
Users have to enable the extension and log in to a Qwen account after activation.
Market impact
Apple's PC market share in China
Apple's Mac shipments in mainland China fell 9% YoY in Q1 to some 800,000 units.
This leaves it with a mere 9% of the PC market, compared to Lenovo's 31% and fast-growing Huawei's 16%.
The integration with Qwen gives Apple a way to offer more advanced document, image, and content-creation capabilities while keeping control over the Mac interface.
Expansion plans
Alibaba's plans for Qwen integration
The integration with Apple's built-in software could extend the reach of Qwen beyond its own apps and cloud services.
Alibaba has already announced plans to integrate Qwen into Apple Intelligence across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro software in China.
However, Apple's newly published guide only covers Macs for now.
This week, Alibaba launched Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model touted as its most capable yet.