Nothing quickens the pulse of an Apple fan more than these three words: one more thing. Steve Jobs used the catchphrase to introduce the original iPhone in 2007. In his 15 years running the company, Tim Cook deployed it only a handful of times, including before his 2014 announcement of the Apple Watch. Today, nine days into his tenure as Apple’s CEO, John Ternus said the magic words. Apple’s next big invention, the company revealed at a launch event in Cupertino, is a $2,000 iPhone that sports—get ready—a “remarkable hinge.”
This is the iPhone Duo, a foldable gadget that opens like a book to reveal a capacious 7.6-inch screen. Billed as the most versatile iPhone, it can be used in folded or unfolded form, and in split-screen or full-screen modes. The screen appears seamless when open, which is a clever engineering feat. Yet an iPhone that blossoms into an iPad Mini seems unlikely to change many lives—especially at the price of a MacBook Pro. And foldable smartphones have been on the market since Samsung popularized the category, in 2019. In the pantheon of “one more things,” the Duo feels like a dud.
Apple also announced several other devices today, all pitched in superlative terms by executives to obligatory applause. The most interesting might be new versions of the Apple Watch that will listen for sounds such as sirens and doorbells, take notes on your conversations, or play back the past 15 seconds of what someone just said to you. (Exactly how all of that will work, and how well, is not yet clear.) There are also new AirPods with improved noise cancellation. The new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max—the ones that don’t fold—offer “the longest battery life in iPhone history and the most advanced pro-camera system ever,” the company said. They also come in “a sophisticated and unique new color,” which is burgundy.
Apple may have once captured people’s imagination. Now it also captures a lot more of their money. On top of its hardware sales, the tech giant is raking in subscription fees to Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV, iCloud, and more. Earlier this summer, the company announced price hikes on many of its products and a leasing program in partnership with Klarna for anyone who blinks at the sticker prices. One thing it didn’t announce today was the base iPhone 18, or any of its other less expensive models, which now seem likely to be released after the holiday buying season. Apple has begun to feel like a late-stage tech giant, squeezing residual value from markets it has long since saturated.
Ternus, an engineer who led Apple’s hardware division, arrives with the promise of reviving the company’s penchant for creativity. In his first company-wide memo as CEO, he told employees he couldn’t wait to “build the future” with them. The companies that are actually building the future these days, for better and worse, are the ones pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. Apple is not among them. If there is to be a real threat to Apple’s core business, it is likely to come from AI. For now, the iPhone is the entry point to users’ digital lives: messages, emails, websites, and apps. As chatbot users deepen their relationships with ChatGPT and Claude, those personal assistants could become the primary gateway to online tasks and information. At least, that’s what many in the AI industry believe. They are racing to build AI-first devices—pendants, glasses, speakers, and so on. Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer, is working with OpenAI on what is rumored to be a smart speaker the size of hockey puck. Apple was irked enough that it sued OpenAI earlier this year, alleging that it had poached employees and pilfered trade secrets; OpenAI has denied wrongdoing.
Another candidate to build the first proper AI device is, of course, Apple itself. There were signs today that Ternus grasps the assignment: He led the event with a vision of the iPhone as an “intelligent personal hub” through which Siri and Apple Intelligence become the AI-powered command centers for all of the information stored on and sensed by a customer’s Apple devices—their calendar, contacts, messages, movements, and everything their iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods can see and hear. Those are, he acknowledged, “the most private details of your daily life.” That could work to Apple’s advantage; the company has cultivated a reputation for safeguarding users’ privacy. One problem: Despite years of promises of coming improvements, Siri is still not very good. Earlier this year, Apple agreed to pay $250 million to some iPhone 15 and 16 customers over claims that it had falsely advertised the AI capabilities of those devices. In January, Apple was reduced to contracting with archrival Google to supply the underlying AI for a revamped version of Siri. Even so, it is reportedly having some trouble getting app developers to buy in. (An Apple spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Being the boring tech giant right now has some upsides. Unlike the industry’s other titans, Apple is not lighting money on fire in a frantic race to build data centers and superintelligent AI. It also appears to be the tech giant whose products are the least likely to bring about the extinction of the human race anytime soon, for whatever that’s worth. Its emphasis on user privacy, with AI tools that keep people’s data on their device instead of sending them to the cloud, remains an important differentiator for those who care about such things. Maybe Apple can go on a while longer as the unchallenged king of fancy consumer-tech hardware while everyone else fights to the death over AI software and infrastructure. Maybe rebuilding Siri around Google’s AI will buy Apple time to eventually develop its own powerful models, the way it leaned on Intel for chips for years before creating its own. But if Ternus really wants to build the future, he will eventually have to do something that once came naturally to Apple when it was an underdog: take a risk.
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