Apple's Foldable Bet Is Ternus's First Act as CEO
John Ternus made his CEO debut with a foldable iPhone priced below Wall Street's wildest guess. The move signals Apple's willingness to reshape its own category — and the market isn't sure it's enough.
The CEO moment no one saw coming
John Ternus took the stage at Apple Park on September 9th for the first time as chief executive. The standing ovation lasted thirty seconds. What followed was less a product launch than a statement of identity.
Ternus opened by restating the iPhone’s thesis the way Steve Jobs once did — describing the ideal device from scratch before revealing it already existed in your pocket. Then he unfolded it.
The iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable phone, costs $1,999 and ships October 23rd. That price sits below JPMorgan’s floor estimate of $1,999 and well under the $2,500 many analysts were bracing for. It is also, notably, cheaper than an Apple MacBook Air. The board clearly wants volume in this category, even if the margins will be thinner than a traditional Pro iPhone.
Why $1,999 is the real story
The price is the signal. Apple could have anchored the Duo at $2,499 and let the market catch up — that’s the Cook playbook, test the ceiling, see what sticks. Instead Ternus chose to compete directly with Samsung’s Z Fold 8 at $1,900 and position Apple as the mainstream choice in a category that currently accounts for just 2.2 percent of global smartphone shipments.
Huawei dominates that sliver in China with nearly 80 percent market share. Xiaomi launched its own 18 Fold the day before Apple’s event. Both companies were clearly watching Cupertino. Apple’s entry doesn’t threaten Huawei’s domestic position, but it changes the conversation globally. A foldable at $1,999 makes the form factor accessible to iPhone owners who’ve been waiting on the sidelines.
The phone itself is modest by foldable standards. The outer display covers 90 percent of an iPhone 18 Pro’s screen area. The inner screen is 7.6 inches. Titanium case. A fingerprint sensor embedded in the side button — Apple’s first dedicated biometric besides Face ID. Craig Federighi said iOS was redesigned from the ground up for two screens, with multitasking and Apple Pencil support. The device folds to passport size.
It is not revolutionary. It is deliberately incremental, which is exactly how Apple has always entered new categories.
The chips beneath the fold
More consequential than the hinge is what powers the phone. The C2 modem, Apple’s second in-house cellular chip, lands in the Duo and further reduces dependence on Qualcomm — the supplier Apple has been quietly divorcing for years. The C2 is 50 percent faster than the first-gen modem, adds 5Gmm support in the U.S., and runs at 15 percent lower energy. Chip analyst Ben Bajarin told CNBC Apple could eliminate Qualcomm entirely by next year’s iPhone 19 line.
The A20 Pro processor in the iPhone 18 Pro is the world’s first high-volume 2nm smartphone chip, built on TSMC’s newest node. Apple is also committing to some production at its upcoming Arizona fabs, though 2nm manufacturing remains concentrated in Taiwan for now. The chip features a redesigned memory layout — core logic silicon placed side-by-side with memory chips — delivering 50 percent more bandwidth. That matters enormously given the global memory shortage driving price increases across MacBooks and iPads earlier this year.
The products around the phone
Apple’s event covered ground beyond the Duo. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max get $100 price hikes to $1,199 and $1,299 respectively, shipping September 18th. New colors — glacier and burgundy — are decorative, but the camera system gets a physical shutter with six laser-cut blades thinner than a human hair, enabling variable aperture and depth-of-field control at the sensor level. Apple also introduced “Reference Image,” a cryptographic signature baked into photos at capture to prove they weren’t AI-generated. The feature won’t ship in the EU or China, likely due to regulatory friction.
The Apple Watch Series 12 adds “Audio Intelligence,” using the watch’s microphone to record conversations and summarize them via Siri. Live rewind captures the last 15 seconds of audio. The feature is private — Apple says it doesn’t store recordings. A morning health score analyzes sleep, vitals, and activity in a single number. The Watch stays at $399; the Ultra 4 starts at $799. No price increase there.
AirPods 5 land at $129 with active noise cancellation, a feature previously reserved for the Pro line.
Siri AI, announced in June to muted reaction, finally arrives. Apple claims it works with over 300,000 apps, including third-party ones. iPhone Handoff lets a single phone number activate across any iPhone you pick up, launching with T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom.
The market’s verdict
Apple stock dipped during the event, dropping from an opening $315.49 to around $313.84 — a decline of 0.75 percent. The stock is up roughly 15 percent year-to-date, slightly outpacing the Nasdaq, but the intraday weakness was telling. KeyBanc Capital Markets had flagged the event as a potential negative catalyst, noting that large price increases would hurt volume while minimal changes would amplify margin scrutiny. The firm is one of the few tracked by FactSet with a sell rating on Apple.
The Duo is unlikely to move unit sales meaningfully — foldables remain a niche. But as JPMorgan’s Samik Chatterjee wrote beforehand, the launch is about investor confidence in Apple’s ability to ship a new premium category, not quarterly volume.
What changes after Cook
Ternus spent his keynote framing the iPhone as the ideal AI device — always with you, deeply personal, intelligent at the right moment. That framing is the bridge between Cook’s ecosystem play and whatever comes next. The in-house modem, the 2nm chip, the on-device AI, the foldable form factor — each is a bet that Apple can control its hardware stack end to end while expanding the category definition.
Cook built the services engine. Ternus is betting the hardware still matters.
The foldable iPhone won’t save Apple from the memory shortage or the China competition. But priced at $1,999, it makes a clear argument: Apple doesn’t need to invent a new category. It just needs to enter one slowly, price it aggressively, and let the rest of the market chase.
Whether that’s enough to reignite investor enthusiasm remains the question Apple’s board will be watching closely.