Apple unveils foldable phone as Ternus takes stage: 5 takeaways

Apple rolled out its next generation of the iPhone, AirPod and Apple Watch, with the company’s first-ever foldable smartphone taking center stage on Wednesday.

The “Surprise and Shine” event marked John Ternus’s first public appearance as Apple’s new chief executive , offering a glimpse into how the product designer is approaching the next chapter for the company.

The biggest launch of the day was the long-awaited iPhone Duo, marking the technology giant’s first foldable smartphone .

The Duo with 256-gigabyte storage will start at $1,999 — the most expensive sticker price to date for an Apple iPhone. The price for a 2-terabyte iPhone Duo will jump to $3,199.

The Duo, which will be available on Oct. 23, is a book-style foldable, similar to the size of a passport when opened. It has a bendable display and has the largest iPhone screen ever, Apple said.

The Duo is Apple’s biggest hardware change since the Vision Pro was released in 2023.

Ternus said the new phone “will redesign the experience of using a foldable phone.”

“Others have created foldables that just feel like two phones awkwardly stuck together,” Ternus said. “This results in a square screen that’s rarely suited for the way people use them.”

When open, a user can multitask on multiple screens, while dragging content from one to the other much like computer windows. According to Apple, the display is 50 percent larger than the new iPhone 18 Pro Max and 80 percent larger than the iPhone 18 Pro, both of which were unveiled earlier in the presentation.

“We brought together thoughtful design with breakthrough engineering in a way only Apple can, and the result is a series of remarkable innovations that we believe will redefine the experience of using a foldable phone,” Ternus said.

While the iPhone Duo marks the highest sticker price for an iPhone, Apple also raised base-level prices for the new iPhone 18 lineup and older generations.

The new iPhone Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max model starts at $1,299, while the iPhone 17, iPhone Air and iPhone 17e, which were released last year, were raised by $100 each.

This is a change for Apple, which usually lowers the prices of older generations once a new lineup is released.

Analysts predicted Apple would announce new price hikes this week as the AI boom fuels massive demand for memory chips, which store and process data in most electronics. The ultra-fast pace of AI development has strained supply and driven up costs.

Earlier this year, then-CEO Tim Cook warned price hikes were “unavoidable” due to the demand. The company raised MacBook and iPad products by $150 to $300 in June.

The launch event had a new host this year, with Ternus making his first public appearance as CEO of Apple on Wednesday. It comes just week one after longtime CEO Tim Cook handed over the reins to Ternus, a product designer who has worked at Apple for the last 25 years.

Cook made a cameo in the introduction video, which featured various characters debating the way to start a movie. At one point, Cook says, “Camera follows a mysterious figure before revealing our main character. … No, no, no, not me. That’s your guy. That’s your opener.”

The camera then panned to Ternus, who said, “I want to take a moment to express what an extraordinary privilege it is to represent the remarkable teams here at Apple.”

While Cook previously served as Apple’s chief operating officer, tackling sales, operations and supply chain logistics, Ternus’s 25 years at Apple were spent on hardware and product design. The new CEO played a major role in the expansion of Apple’s hardware, working on products like the iPad and AirPods.

Most recently serving as the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, Ternus is largely expected to lead with product design in mind and is under pressure to tackle the company’s lagging development of artificial intelligence.

Ternus stands behind Apple’s AI strategy

Amid scrutiny over Apple’s approach to AI, Ternus doubled down on the company’s strategy, while emphasizing the company’s hard-line stance on privacy.

In his first few minutes Wednesday, Ternus said AI “makes entirely new kinds of experiences possible, and AI can become even more useful when it brings together your life with the apps, services and products you use every day.”

The new CEO said he thinks of a product as an “intelligent hub” that is “deeply personal” and integrated across multiple devices, apps and services.

“In other words, you would arrive at something remarkably familiar, because there’s no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone,” Ternus said.

“As your personal hub, your iPhone can do so much more for you because it understands your context. This includes your calendar, your relationships, your routines, the most private details of your daily life,” he added.

It remains to be seen how updates to Apple Intelligence, the company’s personal intelligence system, will push the company forward as competitors at the frontier labs develop at a much faster pace.

As concerns mount over how AI firms collect users’ data to personalize experience, Ternus touted that Apple Intelligence runs on-device “whenever it can.”

“When greater capability is needed, private cloud compute extends that same level of privacy protection, ensuring that nobody — not even Apple — can access what’s yours. It’s personal intelligence that’s actually personal,” he said.

Apple scales up health features in wearables

Apple also announced a series of new health features available on its newest Apple Watch and AirPod models.

Health technology wearables have become widely popular in recent years, offering a range of analytics for users to keep better track of their heart health, sleep and exercise.

The new Apple Watch Series 12 features a new “Health Sensing System” that Apple claims has the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. The company also improved the watches’ heart rate variability measurements with new sensors and LED lights, providing 60 times more frequent heart rate readings than the Series 11.

The company also introduced a new readiness feature that estimates a user’s “capacity to take on the day.” This numeral score takes into account a user’s recent activity, vitals and sleep, and adjusts throughout the day.

Using Apple’s new Siri AI, the Series 12’s built-in microphone will “help you make sense of what you hear in a private and secure way.” Siri Recap will be able to summarize chats, revisit old conversations, while sound recognition can help those who are deaf or hard of hearing listen for sounds like sirens, crying babies and doorbells.

As for the AirPods 5, Apple is introducing live translation, the ability to listen on multiple AirPods and isolate your voice to reduce background noise.