Apple’s big goal after foldable iPhone

It says something about a significant new product announcement when the thing that Wall Street is most anticipating is not the thing itself but the price tag.

Early reactions to the first foldable iPhone, which was unveiled this week, suggest Apple can still inspire the sort of gadget fetishism that made it the doyen of consumer electronics. But for John Ternus, who has just taken over as CEO, the launch — along with decisions about how much to charge for other models of the iPhone — has presented a more basic business test.

One reason for this has been the sharp increase in memory chip prices caused by the data centre boom. Some suppliers grumble privately that Apple itself did much to create this problem, using its considerable market power to hold prices down at an earlier part of the cycle and starving chipmakers of the investment needed to boost capacity. Soaring component costs will mean 14 per cent fewer smartphones are sold this year than in 2025, according to Counterpoint Research.

As significant as the memory crunch for pricing is the pressure on Apple to maintain affordability as it tries to persuade customers to keep paying up for a product that will hit its 20th anniversary next year, an aeon in tech terms.

Apple is estimated to have sold a record 250mn or so iPhones last year, accounting for half of its sales. But that is not so different from the 231mn smartphones it sold back in 2015, after the launch of the iPhone 6. The trick is to find new ways to keep users paying up for replacement devices, while also parting with ever larger amounts to maintain Apple’s margins as the bill of materials rises.

So it is somewhat ironic that, 19 years after the launch of the iPhone and 16 years after the iPad, Apple’s hot new product is a cross between the two. A passport-sized smartphone that unfolds to create a screen only slightly smaller than an iPad mini, the Duo is a premium gadget that could nudge up the company’s average selling prices, though it will first have to prove that a hybrid can fill more than a small niche.

For Apple’s new CEO, there is something to be said for turning to the iPhone for his coming-out party. The company’s first big bets in the AI era have underwhelmed. A new and more capable Siri, the centrepiece of Apple Intelligence, is 18 months behind schedule and still in beta. That AI flub came a year after the Vision Pro, a technically impressive headset that failed to find much of a market.

By contrast, adding a new variation to the main product line feels like a low-risk starting point for the new boss. He also used it to send a message: the prevalence of the iPhone means Apple is guaranteed to have a central role in shaping many people’s first experiences of AI.

In the event, Ternus’ first big decision has been to temper the price increases. The starting price for the Duo will be just under $2,000 and iPhone prices have gone up $100 across the board to account for higher memory costs, less than many analysts had been expecting.

Risking pressure on profit margins to keep up volume makes sense. Services make up more than a quarter of Apple’s total and have accounted for the lion’s share of growth. The most important question now is not what the latest iPhones look like, but what they can do for you.

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This is where Apple’s new CEO faces his first real test. A Siri that can live up to the promise of guiding users more smoothly through everyday actions on their phone would be as significant as the advent of mobile apps was in the first place.

It will be as much about product design and user education as it is about mastering a new technology. Apple gave a glimpse of the potential at its big product event this week: a new feature for its Watch that will enable the device to listen to a wearer’s conversations and deliver brief, high-level notes of what was said, without making an actual audio recording, according to the company. The trick will be to make features like this genuinely useful without creating a new form of digital surveillance.

If Ternus’ tenure comes even close to matching the 15 years of predecessor Tim Cook, there are likely to be plenty of attempts at groundbreaking new devices to come. But the first step will be to make AI an everyday reality. Now, it is all about guiding the users of an estimated 1.5bn iPhones into the AI era.

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