APPLE UNVEILS THE IPHONE DUO, ITS FIRST FOLDABLE PHONE

Apple showed the world its first folding phone today. The iPhone Duo opens book style to a 7.6 inch inner display, the biggest screen ever built into an iPhone, with a 5.4 inch display on the outside for using it closed. It is the device Apple has spent a decade being asked about, and the company picked an unusual moment to finally answer: the first product keynote of its new chief executive.

Titanium, Touch ID, No Crease Apple Wants You to Notice

The frame is aerospace grade titanium built around what Apple calls a custom variable torque hinge, with ceramic shield on both the front and back glass and an IP68 rating for water and dust. Face ID is gone. In its place, Touch ID moves into the side button, a trade every foldable maker has made for the same reason: there is no room in a folding frame this thin for the sensor array Face ID needs. The under display FaceTime camera sits behind the inner screen instead of cut into it. Apple Pencil works on both sides.

Software carries as much of the pitch as the hardware. iOS 26 runs its new Liquid Glass interface across both screens, with the outside acting as a real home screen with its own dock rather than a lock screen bolted onto a phone, and an adaptive layout that reflows apps into split screen mode the moment the phone opens. Samsung has sold a version of this idea in the Galaxy Z Fold for seven years. Apple's bet is that its version will feel like one phone instead of a phone taped to a small tablet, and Ternus said as much on stage.

Ternus's First Product Keynote

Today was John Ternus's debut running an Apple keynote as chief executive. He took over from Tim Cook on September 1, after 25 years at the company and five running hardware engineering, and Cook moved up to executive chairman. Cook opened the show and handed it to him, and the crowd inside the Steve Jobs Theater gave Ternus a standing ovation that ran for roughly half a minute before he said a word.

He used the moment to take a direct shot at every foldable that came before his. "Others have created foldables that just feel like two phones stuck together," he told the audience, before walking through the Duo's single continuous hinge as the answer. It is the kind of line a company says about its own product on the day it launches, but it also doubles as Ternus stating what kind of CEO he intends to be: hardware first, and comfortable saying a competitor's version of an idea was done wrong.

The Price Is the Real Headline

Reporting from today puts the iPhone Duo starting near 2,000 dollars for 256 gigabytes of storage, climbing to roughly 3,000 dollars at the top of the range. That is a genuinely new price ceiling for an iPhone, more than double where the 18 Pro Max starts. Apple is reportedly eating some of the cost itself after a memory shortage pushed component prices higher than planned, rather than pricing the entry model even further out of reach. Sales begin as early as October, after the rest of the new lineup, and supply is expected to stay tight for months, the same script Apple has run on every genuinely new form factor since the first Apple Watch.

Everything Else Apple Announced Today

The Duo was the centerpiece, but it shared the stage with a full refresh. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max run a new A20 Pro chip, the first high volume phone processor built on a 2 nanometer process, with a 48 megapixel main camera that now varies its own aperture and a battery Apple says lasts up to 45 hours on the Pro Max, the longest of any iPhone. They come in two new colors, Glacier and Burgundy, start at 1,199 dollars, and go on sale September 18. Apple Watch Series 12 checks heart rate every five seconds instead of every five minutes and adds a Health Age score to go with it, priced at 399 dollars, with the Ultra 4 at 799. AirPods 5 add live translation and start at 129 dollars.

Prediction: the Duo sells out its first run within a day of preorders, Apple spends the next two quarters explaining why supply is short, and by next September the crease free hinge is the one spec every other phone maker is racing to copy.