The Microsoft-reminiscent iPhone Duo: How much customer holding-and-folding is necessary to keep Apple from folding on the experiment?

New smart phones, earbuds and watches, this year with an added dash of memory price increases. It’s September in Cupertino again.

September 1 was Tim Cook’s last day as Apple’s CEO, after a 15-year tenure with that title. Hereafter he’ll be Executive Chairman of the board of directors, succeeded as CEO by John Ternus, former senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. And reflective of the changing of the guard, Cook was nowhere to be seen in this morning’s prerecorded launch event video, albeit in a brief cameo at the beginning.

Not because, I suspect, Cook’s got anything against product launches, although after having fronted so many of them by now, he’d certainly be entitled to a bit of burnout. Instead, I’m guessing he just wanted to make the passing of the baton as clean and obvious as possible.

Just like last year…and the year before it…and…Apple launched new and updated wearable and broader mobile products in September 2026 (which, I’ll note, has just started, so we might not be done with the month yet, far from the rest of the year). The biggest surprise this time around was that today’s unveilings weren’t the first in this year’s late-summer sequence, having been preceded by the release of new M-series SoCs and systems containing them late last month.

And speaking of M-series SoCs, there’s as-usual no shortage of commonality between those earlier latest-generation application processors for computers and high-end tablets and the one(s?) that rolled out today for high-end iPhones. Speaking of which…

The iPhone 18 Pro series

What do you do if rising DRAM and flash memory costs are clobbering your products’ bill-of-materials budgets? You focus your new-product energy on the stuff that’s most profitable already. And you do something else…which I’ll share in a minute. New stuff first. There’s no mainstream iPhone 18 yet, for the first time ever. But the high-end iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are here. And they’re priced $100 higher than were their forebears of similar memory capacities, along with adding an even higher-end (and higher-priced) 2 Tbyte storage tier.

That new SoC? It’s the A20 Pro. First-time 2 nm-fabricated by foundry partner TSMC. 50% higher memory bandwidth than the A19 Pro. Faster CPU (6 cores total, 2 “super” and 4 “efficiency) and GPU (seven cores total) subsystems than those in the A19 Pro. And a dual 16-core Neural Engine inference subsystem. Lessee…where have we heard this same messaging…two weeks ago, to be exact? Yessiree, it seems that once again there’s no shortage of shared DNA between the late-August M6 and today’s A20 Pro SoCs, albeit with varying dollops of various on-die resources, befitting varying platform cost, feature and performance requirements.

What I’m admittedly most excited about as an unabashed photography geek is the camera subsystem’s variable aperture support for the rear main unit.

Yes, it enables more meaningful user control of exposure, particularly in low light environments (adjusting for bright-light settings can always alternatively be done via integrated or external neutral density filters, of course). But it also first-time affords user adjustment of depth of field, allowing for both shallow-depth “bokeh” effects and sharpness across a wider depth range than possible before.

Oh, and by the way…even though Apple delayed releasing the mainstream iPhone 18 (which, in saying so, I’m obviously assuming is still coming eventually), the company still found another way to use our credit cards and bank accounts as counterbalance to the higher semiconductor-content costs it was incurring. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are no more, of course. But the company’s still selling the baseline iPhone 17 and 16, the boutique iPhone Air, and the “cost-effective” (relatively speaking, at least) iPhone 17e. That said, post-Apple Store resurrection mid-day today, they all now cost $100 more than they did yesterday. Yay…???

The AirPods 5

Two years ago this same month, Apple released the 4th-generation AirPods in two flavors, $129 with only passive noise reduction (PNR, and not great, at that, given their imperfect ear-shape seal for many users), and $50 more for an active noise control (ANC)-supportive model. I’d love to see the comparative sales stat results between the two variants, but clearly the world has moved en masse to ANC since then.

To wit, Apple’s fifth-generation AirPods successors have dropped the PNR option, but the company’s marketeers can’t seem to quit the price-differentiation shtick completely. Want a conventional wired-charging case? That’ll cost you $129. How about a wireless charging-capable case option? $20 more, please. Maybe two years from now, Apple Marketing will realize that the world’s already moved en masse to Qi…oh, sorry, this is Apple…MagSafe…too. Wonder how they’ll try to extract more money out of our wallets next time? Reader prognostications are as-always welcomed in the comments!

Apple Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4

Three key takeaways distinguish this year’s mainstream and high-end smartwatches from their prior years’ versions:

An upgraded S11 processor, whose specifics were as-usual not revealed but likely include a sprinkle (or few) of deep learning inference acceleration, reflected in…
AI as a first-time notable element in Apple’s smartwatch pitch this time, particularly focusing on ambient audio processing capabilities (including conversations, although Apple predictably maintains its “privacy by design” reassurance mantra) and thanks in no small part to a recently unveiled partnership with Google that has seemingly finally gotten Siri on track for something other than corporate embarrassment, and…
The other notable AI-analyzed data set, an enhanced health sensor suite enabling, among other things, continues heart rate monitoring every five seconds, all day.

This year’s models are identically priced to their generational predecessors, surprisingly, although around 24 hours ago, I’d wondered if Apple was going to deal with its burgeoning semiconductor memory bill-of-materials burden in a different way. Beginning some time yesterday and continuing for quite a while, although subsequently corrected, the company’s entry-level Apple Watch SE 3 models all became “unavailable” for purchase.

Apple typically takes its online store down a few hours ahead of launch events to make the necessary tweaks in preparation and out of the public eye, but this was unprecedented. I’d wondered if Apple was planning on dropping the whole line, either because it wasn’t AI-capable and/or because memory cost increases had rendered it insufficiently profitable, and if someone had “pulled the plug” prematurely and highly visibly. But given that the Watch Series 3 had just been unveiled a year ago, the “yank” seemed premature. As, it turned out, it was. Maybe. Then again, maybe someone just decided to do a last-minute course-change. We’ll likely never know.

Back to the future

I guess John Ternus thought that instead of charting his own course, he’d use his first launch event to “channel” a predecessor’s past glory. Yes, he pulled out the memory closet a Steve Jobs “chestnut”, the “one more thing”. And of course, it was one of the worst kept secrets of recent Apple corporate strategy: the foldable iPhone. Although at least one thing was surprising about it: industry scuttlebutt had long branded it the “iPhone Ultra”, but instead it’s the “iPhone Duo”. Begging the question of what, if anything, the “iPhone Ultra” will be…but I digress.

It’s $1999 (and up, capacity-dependent). It won’t be available until next month (October). And like its iPhone 19 Pro siblings, it’s based on the A20 Pro Soc. But I don’t want to spend my precious few remaining paragraphs in this section talking about that. Instead, I want to talk about aspect ratios. Let’s start with my long beloved, in spite of chronic software bugs, Microsoft Surface Duo, an example of which still inhabits my storage closet in the hopes that someone will someday release a stable, robust-featured, reasonably current Android build for it or…dare I dream…Windows 11 for Arm with Wi-Fi and cellular data support? Be still my heart.

Yes, it was foldable. But no, unlike the iPhone Fold it wasn’t comprised of a single piece of bendable OLED internal “glass”. Instead, there was that jarring hinge in-between the two internal displays. And there was no external screen, either, so you had to unfold it to use it at all, even for basic smartphone tasks. But again, I digress. Look at its aspect ratio. Unfold it and, without rotating it 90°, you had a 7.36” wide by 5.72” tall screen (yes, I know, with a gap in the middle) perfect for reading eBooks in a style akin to that of actual books, watching movies, and the like.

Next, let’s look at the first-generation (2023) Google Pixel Fold, an example of which my wife bought me for my birthday earlier this year.

Same fundamental aspect ratio, this time with an added bonus: no midway gap. And this time, there was a third outer display, too.

But given overall system form factor dimensions, it was atypical in both size (5.8” diagonal) and (especially) aspect ratio in comparison to the ones in conventional smartphones. Atypical equals low volume. Low volume equals costly and supplier-option deficiency. All of which explains why second and subsequent-generation Pixel Folds have switched to “bifolds”, taller than before, albeit losing the unfolded “book” (or, if you prefer, movie screen) form factor in the process.

Now look at the iPhone Fold again. The “book” form factor is back (in black, aka “night sky”, as well as “star white”)!

Apple perhaps obviously has supplier leverage that Google doesn’t (or at least didn’t) have, so assuming customers buy into the design decision, I suspect it’ll play out better this time around. Agree or disagree, readers? Let me know your thoughts on this or anything else I’ve discussed here, in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the associate editor, as well as a contributing editor, at EDN.

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