Apple's Foldable iPhone Duo Marks John Ternus Era With New Product Lineup

John Ternus walked onto the stage at Apple's 'Surprise and Shine' keynote with a simple directive: make products that are simple and intuitive. As the company's new chief executive, Ternus was steering Apple through a transition that would define his tenure—and he began by taking the company into a market it had long avoided. The iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone, arrived at $1,999, positioning itself as the most expensive iPhone the company has ever made.

Ternus inherited a company at historic scale. Tim Cook, his predecessor, had overseen Apple's market capitalization climb to roughly $4.65 trillion over fifteen years, a period during which the stock gained approximately 2,300 percent in value. When Cook took the helm in August 2011, Apple was valued at around $347 billion. The bar for Ternus was set impossibly high, and his first major move was to enter a category where competitors had already spent years iterating. Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold8 launched at $1,900, while Xiaomi's 18 Fold occupied similar territory. Apple's late arrival, however, came with advantages. The company had waited long enough to benefit from more mature foldable technology—a magnetic hinge system, screens with less pronounced creases, and components that had proven themselves in the market.

The iPhone Duo's design philosophy departed from the book-style foldables that had dominated the category. Instead, Apple chose passport-like proportions: shorter and wider than its competitors. This geometry enabled something the book-style phones struggled with—genuine app multitasking, closer to what users experienced on an iPad. The device also supports the Apple Pencil, a feature that signaled Apple's ambition to blur the line between phone and tablet. A 5.4-inch cover display with 120Hz refresh rate sits outside; when unfolded, a 7.6-inch flexible OLED screen with the same refresh rate dominates the interior. The camera system includes dual 48-megapixel wide and ultra-wide lenses, though notably absent is a telephoto camera. A 12-megapixel front-facing camera handles video calls. Storage ranges from 256GB to 2TB. The device runs on eSIM only, worldwide—a clean break from the physical SIM cards that still dominate much of the global market.

Powering the Duo, and also the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, is Apple's A20 Pro chip, built on a 2-nanometer process. The silicon prioritizes on-device artificial intelligence compute and power efficiency through a redesigned thermal management system. Apple paired it with its own C2 modem, maintaining vertical integration across the stack. The Pro models themselves represent a more measured evolution. Screen sizes and overall aesthetics remain largely unchanged, but battery capacity increased, display technology was refined to reduce power draw, and the Dynamic Island cutout shrank while gaining the ability to display three live activities instead of two. The standout feature is a mechanical variable aperture on the main camera—a physical iris that adjusts to control light reaching the sensor, improving optical depth-of-field control and dynamic range across different lighting conditions. In India, the iPhone 18 Pro starts at ₹1,64,900, while the Pro Max begins at ₹1,79,900.

The broader product refresh extended beyond phones. Apple Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4 arrived with new hardware finishes, including Light Gold and a return to ceramic builds. A new Readiness app evolved from the existing Vitals software, tracking heart rate and blood oxygen levels as part of Apple's expanding health-tracking ambitions. The fifth-generation AirPods received updated audio hardware, refined processing algorithms, and improved noise cancellation, available in cases with or without wireless charging.

Software moved in parallel. iOS 27, now in its final release candidate phase, introduces Apple Intelligence, the company's suite of on-device and server-based AI features. The system relies on two on-device Apple Foundation models and three server-based ones. The core on-device model contains 20 billion parameters but uses sparse architecture to activate only 1 to 4 billion depending on the task at hand. iOS 27 also adds a new Handoff feature allowing users to set up a second iPhone as a companion device using the same phone number, though this launches only with select carriers in some countries—India is not yet included. New Child Safety features and a redesigned Mail app round out the software updates.

Ternus's keynote signaled a multi-year product expansion strategy. The standard iPhone 18 models, conspicuously absent from this announcement, are expected in early 2027 alongside an iPhone 18e, a new entry-level variant. This separation of consumer-focused iPhones from premium Pro models reflects a deliberate segmentation strategy. Beyond phones, Apple plans a prolific period of announcements stretching into next year, spanning Mac, iPad, and Home product lines. The foldable market, which has struggled to gain mainstream traction despite years of Samsung and Chinese manufacturer efforts, now faces a test: whether Apple's late entry and design philosophy can inject the momentum the category has lacked.