Track Hyper | Xiaomi 15 Ultra: From Imaging Peak to Ecological Breakthrough

Author: Zhou Yuan / Wall Street News

On February 27th, Xiaomi became the market focus for the first quarter with a "Double Ultra" launch event.

As a tribute to Xiaomi's 15th anniversary, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra debuted with a starting price of 6,499 yuan, featuring Leica imaging, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, and a powerful 6000mAh battery, aiming at the high-end market.

This product, referred to by Xiaomi Group founder, chairman, and CEO Lei Jun as a "five-year high-end exploration answer sheet," not only represents a concentrated explosion of Xiaomi's technological strength but also reflects the profound changes in the competitive landscape of the smartphone industry.

Breaking the Imaging Ceiling Again

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra is equipped with a Leica professional quad-camera system, featuring a Sony 1-inch LYT900 main camera, a 200-megapixel Samsung HP9 periscope telephoto lens (supporting 28x lossless zoom), and dual 50-megapixel ultra-wide and mid-focus lenses, forming a "pocket-sized triple lens" with seamless focal lengths.

Xiaomi Group President Lu Weibing maintained his usual "Lu Duidu" style, boldly declaring at the launch event that the goal of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is "to make competitors' Ultra no longer worthy of the name Ultra."

Lu Weibing's confidence stems from the multiple technological innovations possessed by the Xiaomi 15 Ultra.

For example, dynamic AI portrait wallpapers; relying on the second-generation portrait large model, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra can achieve real-time rendering of light and shadow and expressions, breaking the boundaries of traditional static wallpapers.

It must be said that Lei Jun is a top marketing master in today's Chinese consumer electronics industry, and the summarized marketing terms exude a sense of high-end quality.

For instance, ACES LOG cinematic-level video, which Xiaomi has achieved in collaboration with the film industry standard-setting body, marks the first time professional-level color management has been implemented on a mobile phone, lowering the post-production threshold for dynamic videos.

This time, Lei Jun also introduced a "Night God" mode: through a super-large aperture and algorithm collaboration, the night scene performance across all focal lengths reaches a "god-level" standard, and slogans like "Android imaging ceiling" will not be absent, with fierce wording used throughout.

In terms of performance and battery life, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra attempts to redefine the flagship experience baseline.

This flagship model is equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, LPDDR5X, and UFS 4.0 high-end combination, along with Xiaomi's self-developed annular cooling pump heat dissipation system, ensuring extreme smoothness in gaming and multitasking scenarios; the inclusion of a 6000mAh Jinsha River battery (with 10% silicon content, supporting ≥90% capacity after 1000 cycles), paired with 90W wired/80W wireless fast charging, further eliminates the "battery anxiety" of Android flagships.

This flagship phone's charging configuration clearly targets the battery shortcomings of the iPhone. In this regard, Apple phones are no longer competitors to domestic Android flagships.

In addition, the screen, which domestic smart flagship phone manufacturers have always placed great importance on, also maintains a consistently high standard in the Xiaomi 15 Ultra.

This phone is equipped with a 6.73-inch 2K full-depth micro-curved screen (with energy consumption comparable to a 1.5K screen), featuring an LTPO 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate and a peak brightness of 3200 nits, marking that domestic screen manufacturers have the strength to compete with Samsung in the high-end panel field At the same time, upgrades in details such as ultrasonic under-display fingerprint recognition, IP68/69 dual certification, and multi-device local area network transmission further solidify the user experience moat.

High-End Path Paradigm Upgrade

While the performance and imaging capabilities of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra are impressive, what is even more valuable is that Xiaomi has leveraged this flagship model to achieve a breakthrough from hardware benchmarking to cross-platform integration.

This time, the most notable strategic shift of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is that it marks Xiaomi's first deep compatibility with the Apple ecosystem—this approach has also become a standard practice in the industry today.

For example, the newly added "cross-account local area network transmission" feature allows users to seamlessly transfer files directly with iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices, breaking down the ecological barriers between Android and iOS.

This initiative is not unique to Xiaomi; OPPO had already achieved this earlier.

However, Xiaomi smartphones are not merely consumer electronics; Xiaomi's overall strategy now is "people-vehicle-home," with smartphones being a core component of the Xiaomi ecosystem.

Xiaomi's aim in breaking the boundaries with the Apple ecosystem is very clear: to compete with Apple for the high-end user market, targeting the pain points of iPhone users when switching devices, and reducing the switching costs with "painless migration."

What sets Xiaomi apart from its competitors is that Xiaomi smartphones serve as an entry point into the "people-vehicle-home" ecosystem.

When Apple smartphone users switch to Xiaomi, they are entering the Xiaomi ecosystem through the Xiaomi smartphone from the Apple ecosystem; meanwhile, Apple currently does not have a "vehicle" category, and due to well-known reasons, the application end of the Apple ecosystem has flaws in the Chinese market.

As for Xiaomi's competitors, they achieved compatibility with the Apple ecosystem earlier than Xiaomi, but it was limited to a few products, and in terms of ecosystem, they fall far short.

Xiaomi's actions also carry two additional meanings: first, to build open ecological discourse power; by penetrating through compatibility protocols, paving the way for Xiaomi's automotive (SU7 Ultra) and smart home ecosystem products; second, to reshape the logic of industry competition and cooperation; no longer limited to domestic manufacturers' internal competition, but directly competing with Apple for the position of "ecological definers."

Xiaomi's initiative stands on the foundation of ecology, thus requiring observation from a higher industrial level: the paradigm of Xiaomi's high-end path has been upgraded.

The launch of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra reflects the leap of the Chinese mobile phone industry from "parameter competition" to "experience reconstruction"—although this is not a new phenomenon, the core differentiation lies in Xiaomi having a complete ecological system as its foundation.

Like all companies that have gained access to the high-end market in today's smartphone industry, Xiaomi has also begun to see quantifiable results in its self-research in technology, which is the technical and brand foundation for smartphone companies (businesses or segments) like Apple, Samsung, and Huawei to maintain their positions in the high-end market.

The Surge OS equipped in the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, the material innovation of the Jinsha River battery, and the algorithm iteration of the portrait large model all reflect Xiaomi's significant reinvestment in core technology.

This "soft and hard integrated" self-research system is becoming the key for domestic flagships to compete with international brands On February 28th, the supplier of carbon fiber materials for Xiaomi's SU7 Ultra opened with a limit-up, demonstrating the influence of Xiaomi's ecosystem on the supply chain and the recognition in the secondary market.

In terms of pricing, it reflects Xiaomi's enhanced control over the domestic supply chain and implicitly tests the payment boundaries of high-end target market consumers.

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra uses a domestically produced 2K screen and a jointly customized sensor, reflecting the increased control of domestic manufacturers over the upstream supply chain, reducing the costs of high-end models, and supporting price reductions to the range of 5,000 to 7,000 yuan; behind the starting price of 6,499 yuan (approximately a 15% increase from the previous generation) is Xiaomi's precise exploration of high-end users' willingness to pay.

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra released not only represents Xiaomi's renewed charge into the high-end market but also marks a qualitative change in the Chinese smartphone industry from "cost-performance breakthrough" to "technology leadership."

The "high-end triangle" constructed through peak imaging, ecological openness, and experiential innovation is rewriting the global smartphone competition rules.

As Lei Jun said, "Ultra is the pursuit of the ultimate, and it is also the beginning of a new era."

The outcome of this battle will determine the power dynamics of the high-end market for the next five years