Apple Launches Foldable iPhone Duo

Apple unveiled a much anticipated foldable iPhone at its first product launch featuring brand-new Chief Executive John Ternus.

The iPhone Duo is Apple’s first foldable smartphone—a product category that competitors have been selling for years, but has remained mostly a smaller, niche part of the broader market. While folded, the Duo is around the size of a passport and can fit easily in one hand, with an exterior screen. It unfolds to a length of a 7.6-inch display, closer to the size of an iPad.

A video showed how users could use two apps at once while unfolded—texting in iMessage while watching a video, for example. Developers could adapt their apps to fit the new format, such as Netflix letting users browse videos clips on the outer display while closed and then opening up the Duo for the full-video experience.

The Duo starts at $1,999 for a version with 256 gigabytes of storage and climbs to a whopping $3,199 for one with 2 terabytes.

Apple also unveiled the iPhone 18 Pro, starting at $1,199, and 18 Pro Max, starting at $1,299. That’s $100 more than the prior generation’s Pro models, a price hike the company forecasted publicly a few few months ago that it would need to compensate for surging costs for memory and storage chips.

At the beginning of the pre-recorded video, Ternus repeatedly talked about the “intelligent personal hub,” a new term Apple is invoking to describe how AI is used to understand users’ personal context. “There’s no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone,” Ternus said, touting Apple’s on-device AI and privacy features.

He also added: “Others see that data as something to collect and store. They move it to their servers and ask you to trust them. But honestly, trust only goes so far when your data is no longer yours to control. ”

Apple has long emphasized its privacy practices but it is especially focused these days on OpenAI, which aims to launch a family of new AI devices, starting with a portable speaker and later phone sometime in the future. Apple sued OpenAI in July, alleging theft of trade secrets alongside its aggressive poaching of Apple employees with backgrounds in hardware engineering and operations. OpenAI has denied the claims.