The invitation said “Surprise and Shine,” and for once the surprise was not much of a secret. Apple’s annual September event, held Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern, was expected to feature the company’s first foldable iPhone, a product analysts have predicted for years and Apple has never confirmed. The show was also a debut of another kind: John Ternus’s first as chief executive, a little over a week after he took over from Tim Cook on September 1.
The foldable, according to reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Reuters, and CNET in the hours before the event, would be called the iPhone Duo and priced above $2,000, positioning it directly against Samsung’s foldables. The choice of a premium price would be characteristically Apple: rather than compete on price in a category Samsung has owned since 2019, the company would stake out the top of the market.
Apple has been late to foldables by its own standards. Samsung shipped its first Galaxy Fold in 2019 and has refined the form through generations of Fold and Flip devices, while Apple watched from the sidelines, letting others work through the durability problems that plagued early folding screens. The bet in Cupertino appears to be that the technology has matured enough to meet Apple’s standards, and that its customers will pay for the result.
The foldable market Apple is entering is small but growing. Global foldable shipments have climbed from a few million units a year to a segment measured in the tens of millions, with Samsung taking the largest share and Chinese brands such as Huawei and Honor pressing from below. The category has not matched its early predictions, but it is one of the few parts of the smartphone market still expanding, which is precisely the kind of growth Apple needs.
Ternus is a hardware man. He joined Apple more than two decades ago and rose through product engineering, with a hand in the iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, and the Vision Pro headset before his elevation to CEO. A foldable iPhone, the most significant new iPhone form factor in more than a decade, is a fitting first act for a leader whose credibility rests on hardware rather than services or finance.
The event was also expected to bring the iPhone 18 Pro series and new Apple Watch models, the annual cadence that anchors Apple’s fall and its holiday quarter. But the foldable was the story, because it answers a question the market has asked for years: whether Apple would ever enter the category, and at what price.
The stakes for Ternus are personal as well as corporate. Cook’s tenure was defined by the iPhone’s dominance and the services business built on top of it. Ternus inherits both, along with a smartphone market that no longer grows the way it once did and a set of rivals, led by Samsung, that define the most adventurous end of the category. A foldable that lands well would give his leadership a signature product; one that disappoints would raise doubts early.
The pricing question cuts both ways. Above $2,000, the iPhone Duo would be the most expensive phone Apple has ever sold, testing whether the brand can command that premium in a category where Samsung’s high-end foldables already occupy the top tier. The bet is that Apple’s software integration and ecosystem will justify the gap, the same argument the company has made for every premium product it has shipped.
The iPhone remains the engine of Apple’s business, generating a large share of the company’s roughly $400 billion in annual revenue and anchoring the services and accessories sold around it. A new form factor matters less for the units it adds in year one than for the message it sends: that the company’s flagship product line still has room to change. For Ternus, that message is the point.
Foldables have also carried a cost Apple has historically avoided: reliability risk. The hinge and crease of a folding display are the exact kind of mechanical compromises the company has resisted in other products. Shipping one at all means Apple has concluded it can hit its own durability bar, a conclusion that took the better part of a decade to reach.
Analysts will watch two numbers after the event: the price and the ship date. A foldable announced but not available for weeks would be a gesture; one shipping this fall would be a product. The difference matters for the holiday quarter and for the first impression of the Ternus era.
Whatever the details, Tuesday closed one transition and opened another. The CEO change is done; the product transition is only now being tested. Apple has spent years letting others prove foldables can work. The question the event was meant to answer is whether Apple can now prove they are worth what it will charge.
