At 10 a.m. local time on September 9, Apple held its most unusual iPhone event in recent years.
At the end of August, Tim Cook stepped down as CEO, ending another remarkable era for Apple.
The low-key hardware engineer John Ternus formally took over the top job. This was his first major product launch. The internal successor, who had long overseen hardware engineering and knew Apple's product system well, unveiled one of Apple's boldest iPhones in recent years.
Apple appears to be pushing itself to be more aggressive. For more than a decade, Apple had been used to launching a complete new-generation iPhone lineup all at once in the fall, using products with different sizes and storage configurations to cover consumers from the mainstream to the high end.
This year, Apple's iPhone release cadence is changing. At this fall event, Apple launched the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and a long-awaited foldable, the iPhone Duo, priced from $1,999. The standard iPhone 18 has been delayed until spring 2027.
Behind this are clearly cost considerations after memory prices soared, as well as a change in Apple's strategy. With limited ammunition, Apple wants to prioritize the highest-end market. After surpassing $400 billion in revenue and earning more than $100 billion in net profit, Apple does not need mid- and low-end products to drive sales. This time, it wants to sweep the very top of the price pyramid.
Apple Finally Enters the Foldable Era
Chinese manufacturers are somewhat nervous this time. Three days before Apple's event, Huawei launched its winged tri-fold phone, the HUAWEI Mate XT 2. On the same day, Xiaomi launched its foldable, the Xiaomi 18 Fold.
They had been watching for a long time. This Apple event was different from past ones: Apple launched its long-teased foldable.
Since the first generation of foldables made its debut in early 2019, the foldable industry has had a seven-year history. Counting from when Apple was first reported to be working on foldables, it has already been eight years. Product forms have been explored in many ways: dual-fold, triple-fold, wide-fold, mid-fold, and more.
Previously, Android makers thought about foldables by trying to keep them as thin as a bar phone, and even similar in weight. But this year that changed. Many manufacturers changed the cover-screen ratio before Apple. This time, both Huawei and Xiaomi launched tablet-like wide-fold products.
Apple is no longer entering a blank market waiting for it to define. The question it needs to answer is no longer "How should a phone fold?" What should a foldable iPhone sacrifice, and what should it keep? And by redesigning iOS, how can the two screens after folding truly create new productivity?
It is indeed a fairly balanced product.
The iPhone Duo has the largest screen in iPhone history. When unfolded, the inner display measures 7.6 inches, 50% larger than the iPhone 18 Pro Max screen. The cover display is 5.4 inches. Both the inner and outer displays are 120Hz.
To solve the foldable "crease" problem, the iPhone Duo uses a custom nano-texture display, a multi-layer lamination structure (with high-strength glass above and below the OLED panel), and a hinge made of more than 100 tiny precision parts to reduce the visibility and feel of the center crease.
Unfolded, the phone is only 5.2mm thick, equivalent to the iPhone Air's thickness, but slightly thicker than Huawei's Mate XT 2, which claims a thickness of just 3.5mm.
Apple's chief hardware officer Johny Srouji said: "The iPhone Duo is seen as the most significant experience reinvention since the birth of the iPhone."
To achieve an extremely thin body, Apple made compromises in some hardware designs. The iPhone Duo only has a dual camera setup with a 48MP main camera and an ultra-wide camera, with no periscope telephoto. The front camera is a 12MP under-display camera. It uses traditional capacitive fingerprint recognition, putting Touch ID back into the side button. It supports eSIM only, among other things.
In terms of performance, the phone is powered by an A20 Pro processor and paired with a C2 modem chip. For battery life, with hardware and software support, the phone can last up to 24 hours on a full charge when both displays are in use, provide up to 44 hours of video playback on the cover display, and charge to 50% in 20 minutes.
"Other brands have been developing foldable products for years. Relatively speaking, Apple, entering this category for the first time, faces greater competitive pressure than it does with bar phones. Apple's advantage in foldables mainly lies in its ecosystem and system," Guo Tianxiang, research manager at IDC China, told Hard Kr.
On the software side, Apple has prepared an iPad-like interface for the iPhone Duo. Along with a reimagined iOS 27, the iPhone Duo has a redesigned system UI. To free up more vertical space for content, Apple uses a vertical Dock for the first time, fixed on the right side of the screen.
With the larger screen, the iPhone Duo supports running two apps side by side in split screen, swapping their positions, and grouping two apps together by tapping the divider.
For switching between different displays, Apple has specially tuned iOS. Sensors in both sides of the body can adjust based on the device's angle. For example, it supports watching video in folded-standing mode; when folded inward, content slides away from the fold area that is hard to reach; and in standby, widgets such as music and weather can be displayed.
Notably, Apple said that later this year Apple Pencil will be able to work with the iPhone Duo. It is not hard to see that Apple's first foldable will become a new productivity tool for Apple.
Apple has never been afraid of being a step behind. It has long been a leader in setting the rules of the market. Even if it is several years behind Chinese phone makers in foldables, that is enough to put them on edge.
"Android tablet apps and foldable apps are largely similar. Android's tablet app ecosystem has not been built very well, and for a long time, most of the tablet market share was eaten up by Apple, so developers are more willing to build app ecosystems on iOS," said Lucas, an analyst at Omdia.
For many years, foldable phones never truly entered the smartphone mainstream. Counterpoint data shows that in 2025, global foldable phone shipments accounted for only about 1.6% of total smartphone shipments.
This time, Apple's entry will be a key turning point. Supply chain sources say Apple is preparing 3.5 million units in the fourth quarter of this year and 5 million units in the first quarter of 2027.
According to Counterpoint's forecast, Apple's foldable will take 28% market share in 2026, approaching the lead held by Samsung and Huawei. IDC forecasts that first-year shipments of Apple's first foldable could reach 10 million units.
It is foreseeable that Apple's entry into the foldable battlefield will significantly reshape the global competitive landscape. After Apple's event, its stock price jumped. The whole market is confident that Apple will be the player that arrives last but eats the most.
A Compromise in the Memory Price Surge
Compared with the splash made by the foldable, the iPhone 18 series looks somewhat subdued.
The iPhone 18 series marks the seventh year of the flat-edge design that began with the iPhone 12, and this year it only received minor adjustments.
In terms of design, the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max largely continue the previous generation's design language, offering four colors: deep black, silver, glacier blue, and burgundy. The camera module, battery life, and processor received routine generational upgrades.
The iPhone 18 Pro series' camera system has been upgraded to a Pro-level Fusion camera made up of three 48MP lenses, covering the main, ultra-wide, and telephoto cameras. It supports 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x optical zoom options, as well as 4K 120fps Dolby Vision video. In addition, to address the difficulty of telling real from fake in AI-era photo synthesis, the new phones will support the SynthID standard to identify whether images are generated or edited by AI.
In terms of battery life, the iPhone 18 Pro can last 24 hours on a single charge; the iPhone 18 Pro Max can last 30 hours on a single charge.
In terms of performance, the iPhone 18 Pro series fully adopts the 2nm A20 Pro processor, providing a stronger computing foundation for on-device AI operations, and pairs it with a new-generation VC vapor chamber cooling design to improve power consumption and boost performance. Apple says that compared with the iPhone 17 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro's overall performance has improved by 70%.
The A20 Pro chip has a 6-core CPU made up of 2 super cores and 4 efficiency cores, with the two performance cores 20% faster than the previous generation. The new GPU has a 7-core design, with performance up to 40% higher. For AI tasks, the A20 Pro's neural engine has been upgraded to 32 cores. Apple has also added a new-generation neural accelerator, doubling 8-bit floating-point computing speed. Chip memory bandwidth has also increased by 50% to support on-device models and more complex inference tasks.
The iPhone 18 Pro series has also seen a clear price increase. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199, and the iPhone 18 Pro Max starts at $1,299, both $100 higher than the previous generation, with the largest increase reaching 19%.
For a product with such incremental innovation, the price surge is unavoidable.
Since the second half of last year, memory prices have continued to rise and further intensified this year. Sharp increases in DRAM and NAND prices are directly pushing up smartphone material costs. According to supply chain sources, "Phone storage used to cost only $10, but now it has risen to nearly $100."
TrendForce says that, taking the Pro 256GB model as an example, memory costs in the third quarter of 2026 increased nearly 400% year over year. Although Apple actively negotiated prices for other components, it is still difficult to effectively ease overall BOM (bill of materials) cost pressure.
Apple has not really gained revenue from AI yet, but it has already begun bearing the costs AI brings.
AI Is Still Reheated Leftovers, but That Does Not Matter
Judging from the two products announced today, Apple is trying to use AI to establish a price anchor for the iPhone that did not exist before.
In the past, the iPhone Pro brought flagship phones into the $1,000-plus price range, the Pro Max pushed further upmarket, and the foldable pushes the iPhone's price ceiling even higher.
But hardware iteration alone cannot sustain a product premium for long.
Over the past few years, the smartphone industry has entered a typical cycle of incremental innovation: a slightly faster chip, a few more camera megapixels, a slightly bigger battery. For Apple, these upgrades are enough to maintain product competitiveness, but they are unlikely to create another true upgrade wave.
What Apple faces now is no longer just "how to sell phones for more." Foldables can move sales, but their marginal effect is limited.
Clearly, AI is a bigger technological revolution. In the phone market, Apple no longer faces traditional Android phone makers, but a group of competitors that can keep investing in AI, such as Doubao Phone.
Apple's AI progress is relatively conservative. Over the past year, Apple has clearly lagged major tech giants in generative AI and foundation models. Although Apple Intelligence has made its way into the iPhone, it has not yet produced a killer experience capable of driving mass consumer upgrades.
Apple seems to be trying hard to catch up with the pace of AI. At the start of the event, John Ternus introduced the concept of an "intelligent personal hub." The phrase continues Apple's past product thinking under Steve Jobs around the "digital hub," but shifts the focus from coordination of content and services across devices to AI-driven integration of personal information, apps, and multi-device experiences. The iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max are all gateways to the intelligent personal hub.
On the software side, Apple launched a new Siri AI, which is planned to support 16 languages, including English and Simplified Chinese. However, the features supported at Siri AI's launch are fairly basic, including spelling correction, taking a photo at any time to ask Siri AI, and AI photo erasure features that Android makers have long used.
AI may be the next opportunity Apple faces, and a bigger test. In the long run, Apple must prove another possibility:
AI does not necessarily have to belong only to data centers; it can also belong to the phone in everyone's hand. AI's value does not necessarily have to be shown only in model parameters and computing scale; it can ultimately become a product consumers are willing to pay for.
The foldable proves the iPhone can still grow new forms; but for Apple, the real deep water is whether AI can further enter on-device hardware.
But Apple's AI features this time look like reheated leftovers again. Strip away the so-called intelligent personal hub concept, and Apple's AI upgrades are still just the voice assistant and cross-device connectivity. Even a company as powerful as Apple still cannot fully open up the underlying system.
But for now, these things do not seem to matter. This year, Apple's stock has outperformed the Nasdaq 100 by 23%, and its market cap briefly surpassed Nvidia's. After sustained AI spending, Apple's conservatism has instead become an advantage in investors' eyes. Today, Apple remains the world's second most valuable company, ahead of Google and Microsoft, both known for their strength in AI.
Over the past 20 years, Steve Jobs made Apple the greatest product innovator, while Cook forged it into the most profitable super machine among hardware companies. The question left for the new CEO is this: How does Apple find its growth logic for the next decade? John Ternus faces a more divided and turbulent world. Whether he succeeds or fails, he is destined to leave a different mark.
