Apple expected to unveil folding iPhone as new CEO takes center stage

The passport-size iPhone Duo serves as the first big test for John Ternus, who took over for Tim Cook last week

Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo, the company’s first foldable phone and the most significant change to the iPhone since the smartphone’s introduction in 2007.

The nearly $2,000 device takes inspiration from iPads’ wide screens and combines them with the portability and camera features of iPhones. When opened, it is the company’s largest phone display and thinnest phone. The Duo opens and closes like a passport to double its screen size.

“iPhone Duo brings an entirely new design while preserving everything you love from an iPhone,” said John Ternus , the company’s new chief executive. “It feels effortless to use and it makes new experiences possible.”

The phone will start at $1,999 and be available on 23 October.

The product release event, titled “Surprise and Shine”, began at 10am Pacific Standard Time on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California , south of San Francisco.

“I started the day with an intelligent personal hub and why there’s no product in the world that is better to be that hub than iPhone,” Ternus said. “We think the best way to achieve that is with a foldable design. Others have created foldables that just feel like two phones stuck together … scrolling through vertical content feels compromised.”

While competitors have released foldable smartphones since the late 2010s, the new model is a first for the iPhone maker, and its rollout serves as the first big test for Ternus, who assumed the role on 1 September. He claimed the Duo “will redefine the experience of using a foldable phone”.

Apple reportedly began testing prototypes of its folding iPhone display in early 2021 – though at the time there were no plans for its launch, according to a Bloomberg report .

The company started the event with its more routine announcements, including the new iPhone 18 Pro, which starts at $1,199, and 18 Pro Max models, which start at $1,299. Apple emphasized the AI-enabled features that will be integrated throughout the phone. Called Siri AI, the company said it will be able to tap into third-party apps and already works with over 300,000 apps.

Among the many AI-related features available on the new iPhones will be a novel mechanism that fingerprints an image and identifies as captured by an iPhone’s camera – not generated by AI. The feature, called Apple Reference Image, will act as a “digital negative”, as one Apple executive described it, and serve as proof that the the original image was not AI-generated.

Both new iPhones also represent a “massive leap” in battery life, executives said – the iPhone 18 Pro Max will have 45 hours of battery life and the iPhone 18 pro will have 36 hours of battery life.

Though the foldable iPhone took center stage on Wednesday in California, overall demand for foldable phones makes up only a small sliver of overall mobile device sales. Customers’ interest in standard iPhones, by contrast, remains high, as evidenced in Apple’s most recent robust earnings .

The company also unveiled new iterations of some of its other product offerings at its events and over the next few months, including updates to its Apple Watch and AirPods lines.

The company announced the fifth generation of its AirPods headphones, describing them as 50% more noise cancelling than AirPods 4 and sporting five hours of battery life. The latest iteration starts at $129.

The company also introduced its latest watches, Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, pitching them as some of the most advanced and accurate wearable devices to support health and fitness goals.

The updated watch will include several new AI features, including “Health Age”, which analyzes heart health, sleep, mental wellbeing, movement health, metabolic health, hearing and nutrition and measures how users stack up to their chronological age.

The watch will also include “audio intelligence”, meant to enable your watch to record ambient conversations throughout the day and take notes, producing a transcript of what someone said 15 seconds earlier in case you missed it. At the end of the day, a watch user can review a summary of their day, called a “Siri Recap”. The company said these recordings are stored on the device and anything that is collected is end-to-end encrypted.

Ternus took the stage as CEO for the first time, marking the beginning of his tenure as the head of Apple, replacing the outgoing CEO , Tim Cook . In a note to employees on his first day, Ternus said that he was excited about “the incredible products already in the works and the ones we haven’t even imagined”.

“I’m honored to be stepping into this role at what is truly the greatest company in the world, and I am so excited about everything we have in store,” Ternus wrote in his letter. “We have a huge launch next week that’s going to be phenomenal. Thanks for everything you’ve all done to make it possible.”