The keynote ended Wednesday evening, and by Thursday the research notes were moving. Apple had shown the iPhone Duo, its first foldable, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, and at least seven Wall Street firms had something to say about what the new hardware does to the numbers.
Most of them were buyers. Melius kept its buy rating and a $370 price target. Evercore held its outperform call at $365. Bank of America stayed at buy but trimmed its target to $370 from $380, and cut its fiscal 2027 earnings estimate to $9.98 a share from $10.32. JPMorgan repeated its positive stance with a confirmed target of $340. Oppenheimer stayed at market perform.
The outlier was Jefferies, which kept its underperform rating and a $263.66 target. The firm’s case, like Bank of America’s, is built on price more than product.
The common ground is volume. Analysts broadly agree that the foldable and the premium tier will lift unit sales and average selling prices. Melius estimates Apple could sell about 15 million Duo units in fiscal 2027 if supply allows, enough to drive roughly 20 percent iPhone revenue growth over the following two years. Oppenheimer is less convinced, pegging this year’s supply at 8 million to 10 million units.
The disagreement is over margin. Apple priced the Duo at $1,999, a restrained number for a category that has long carried a premium. Bank of America and Jefferies both argue that disciplined pricing helps demand but may compress gross margin just as memory and component costs are climbing.
That cost pressure is real. DRAM and NAND prices have risen sharply through 2026 as memory makers shifted capacity toward AI orders, and Apple, one of the largest memory buyers in the world, must absorb the increase or pass it along. A phone with more storage and a higher sticker price does not automatically mean a fatter margin when the bill of materials is moving against you.
The Duo is Apple’s answer to a category Samsung has owned since the first Galaxy Fold shipped in 2019. Apple’s habit is to let rivals prove a form factor, then enter once the supply chain can support volume and the software is ready. Analysts said the foldable screen and the hinge remain the two parts that have broken every other maker’s economics, and Apple’s ceiling in year one will be set by how fast it can scale both.
The launch is also part of a scheduling change. For the first time in years Apple split its lineup, holding the standard iPhone 18 back until spring. That leaves the December quarter stocked with only the high-priced models, which lifts average selling price but makes the year-over-year comparisons in 2027 harder to read.
The reason the notes arrived so fast is that the iPhone still drives roughly half of Apple’s revenue. A change in unit estimates or gross margin flows straight through the model, and seven firms weighing in within a day is a sign of how closely the street is watching.
For the bulls, the Duo is the first genuinely new form factor in the iPhone’s life, and the 20 percent revenue estimate rests on it pulling existing users to upgrade rather than merely taking share from Samsung’s foldables. For the bears, the phone is a premium niche arriving at a moment when memory costs are squeezing the rest of the line.
Foldables remain a small corner of the market, roughly 2 percent of global phone sales by most estimates, but they command outsized prices and margins when they do sell. Apple’s entry is expected to grow the category rather than simply rearrange it, the way a new entrant often legitimizes a form factor that has struggled for mainstream acceptance.
The foldable also fits a larger bet Apple is making on the upgrade cycle. The company has pushed its AI features hard this year, framing the new phones as the hardware those features were built for, and the Duo is the most visible statement of that pitch. A user who has held an iPhone for three or four years is the target, and the foldable is the reason to finally move.
Underneath the hardware debate sits the installed base. Apple’s services business, now a growing share of revenue, compounds with every new device sold, and a successful foldable cycle would feed that engine for years. That is part of why the margin worry matters less to the bulls than the volume opportunity.
Analysts cautioned that the first quarter of foldable sales will say more about supply than demand. The 15 million unit estimate assumes Apple solves panel and hinge scaling faster than its rivals did, and the 8 million low end assumes it does not.
The competition is already reacting. Samsung’s mobile arm spent Wednesday mocking the launch on social media, pointing to its own Galaxy foldables and inviting iPhone users to switch, while the language app Duolingo joined in to note that its own product is free. The taunting is a measure of how closely rivals were watching.
What the seven notes share is a conviction that the product is real and the pricing is deliberate. What they do not share is any agreement on what the combination is worth, which is why the targets run from $263 to $370 on the same afternoon.
