Apple's Foldable iPhone Marks a Turning Point for the Post-Cook Era

The Quiet Revolution

For over a decade, Apple dismissed foldable phones as gimmicks. Tim Cook called the early attempts impractical and too expensive. The company waited — patiently, almost stubbornly — while Samsung, Huawei, and later Honor built out an entire category Apple refused to acknowledge. Analysts estimated that Samsung moved roughly 30 million foldable units last year alone, a number that would have been laughable a half-decade ago but now represents a meaningful revenue stream for Seoul’s tech giant.

That stance is ending.

On Wednesday, John Ternus — Apple’s new CEO, who took the reins from Cook on September 1 — is expected to introduce the company’s first foldable iPhone. The device, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, will follow the clamshell-and-book format familiar from Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold series. It will also carry a price that could exceed $2,000, placing it firmly in luxury territory. Supply chain reports from DigiTimes indicate that Foxconn and Pegatron are already tooling up for mass production, with initial batches expected to be limited — a deliberate scarcity strategy that mirrors Apple’s launch playbook for the original iPhone and the Apple Watch.

The move matters far beyond the device itself. It marks the first major product departure from the design orthodoxy Cook enshrined: the candy-bar slab, unchanged in fundamental form since the iPhone 6 Plus. Ternus, a former vice president of hardware engineering with no public record of ideological opposition to form-factor experimentation, appears ready to revise that doctrine. The significance is not lost on Wall Street. Apple shares dipped slightly in after-hours trading on speculation about the device’s pricing, a reminder that even late entrants into premium categories face margin scrutiny.

Who Wins, Who Loses

Samsung wins by default here. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 starts at $1,899; the Ultra at $2,099. Apple has never had to justify premium pricing on a foldable — until now. If the foldable iPhone lands even close to those numbers, it signals that Apple is not trying to capture the foldable market. It is trying to own the top of it. Samsung’s share price climbed approximately 4 percent in morning trading following Gurman’s report, a modest but telling reaction.

Chinese manufacturers — Honor, Huawei, OPPO — lose something important: the ability to claim that foldables are a category where Apple is late or irrelevant. Apple’s arrival at any price point legitimizes the form factor in a way no amount of Samsung marketing ever could. It tells a segment of consumers who were waiting for Apple’s version to finally pull the trigger. In China specifically, where Honor and Huawei have made significant inroads with affordable foldables, Apple’s entry could compress margins for local competitors who had counted on being the only credible alternatives to Samsung.

The losers are harder to name but worth considering. Apple’s existing iPhone lineup, particularly the Pro models, faces a new internal competitor. The question is whether the foldable cannibalizes iPhone 18 Pro sales or simply expands the addressable market. Given the price, the latter seems more likely — but it is still a risk. Analysts at Wedbush estimate that up to 15 percent of projected iPhone 18 Pro buyers could redirect their spending toward the foldable, particularly in markets where carrier subsidies blur the effective price difference. Apple’s services revenue, which benefits from a larger installed base of high-end devices, may see a net positive if the foldable attracts users who upgrade more frequently than the typical iPhone owner.

The Real Story: A Strategy Dividing

There is a second shift at play that may matter more than the hardware. Reports from MacRumors, citing Economic Daily News, suggest Apple could separate the launch of its base iPhone 18 from the Pro models, potentially holding the standard versions until early next year alongside a rumored iPhone 18e and second-generation iPhone Air.

This would be a dramatic break from tradition. Apple has almost always unveiled its full iPhone lineup in a single autumn event. The split would represent an attempt to smooth out what Apple executives privately call revenue lumpiness — the unpredictable swings that come from relying on a single annual product cycle. CFO Luca Maestri has referenced this concern in internal meetings, according to people familiar with the discussions. Spreading launches across two windows gives Apple a chance to generate two quarters of momentum rather than one.

Spread across two launches, Apple gains something rare in tech: a second chance to convert holdout buyers. The current model punishes procrastination. Buy late, and you wait another year. A staggered release would give budget-conscious customers a longer window and give Apple two events to drive media coverage and sales momentum. It also introduces a competitive advantage: carriers and retailers would need to manage inventory and promotional calendars around two distinct product cycles, a complexity that smaller rivals without Apple’s scale cannot easily replicate.

It is a small change with large strategic implications. If it works, it could reshape Apple’s calendar and its relationship with carriers, retailers, and consumers. The European Commission, which has scrutinized Apple’s product cycles under digital market rules, may take notice — though splitting launches is unlikely to raise antitrust concerns on its own.

Ternus as a Designer’s CEO

Ternus’s background makes this pivot feel inevitable rather than reckless. He spent years overseeing hardware engineering for the iPad Pro and other product lines before becoming one of Apple’s most prominent executive faces during product events. His October 2018 appearance alongside the iPad Pro was one of the early signals that Cook was building a leadership team closer to engineering culture than finance culture. Ternus’s technical credibility gives him a different calculus than Cook, whose public comments consistently prioritized supply chain efficiency over design exploration.

Cook, an operations genius, optimized the iPhone into a near-perfect revenue machine. Ternus appears ready to optimize it for the next decade — a decade defined by AI integration, spatial computing ambitions, and form factors that may finally break the slab monopoly. The foldable iPhone is not merely a new shape; it is an opportunity to重新think how software adapts to variable displays. Apple’s iOS 19, expected to launch alongside the new hardware, will reportedly include adaptive UI frameworks that rearrange interfaces based on screen geometry — a change that could prove as significant as the hardware itself.

What Ternus does with the Apple Watch launch alongside the foldable will be revealing. The Series 12 and Ultra 4 are expected to bring internal upgrades and software improvements. Health monitoring remains one of Apple’s most defensible moats, but competitors like Oura and Samsung have narrowed the gap with ring-style trackers and more sophisticated sleep and recovery metrics. Apple cannot afford complacency here, especially with a new CEO making his mark. The Series 12 is rumored to include non-invasive glucose monitoring — a feature that, if delivered, would represent a generational leap in consumer health technology.

What Comes Next

The foldable iPhone will not save Apple if the execution is sloppy. Samsung has spent years refining hinges, creases, and durability. Apple’s first entry into a category it spent a decade ignoring carries the risk of looking like a reply rather than a statement. Consumer reviews of early foldables focused heavily on build quality and the visible crease — issues that require significant engineering investment to solve. Apple’s reputation for polish means any misstep will be amplified.

But the opposite risk is equally real: that Apple ignores foldables entirely while the category grows around it. Premium phone buyers increasingly expect choice in form factor. Even a late entry forces competitors to respond. Samsung may accelerate its own roadmap to maintain the advantage it has held for years. Huawei, sensing Apple’s momentum in the premium segment, could double down on its domestic market dominance and push harder into emerging markets where Apple’s influence has been limited.

The Wednesday event will tell us which direction Apple is heading. Ternus has a chance to redefine what Apple makes — and how it sells it. If he delivers both, the post-Cook era may look less like a transition and more like a rebirth. The question is not whether Apple can fold; it is whether the company can convince consumers that a folding iPhone is something they did not know they needed until now. One thing seems clear: the era of the iPhone as a slab is nearing its end, whether Apple led the change or merely followed it. And when it does, the market will remember who said no for too long — and who had the courage to say yes, however late.