CUPERTINO, California: Apple on Wednesday (Sep 9) unveiled a foldable phone called Duo, introducing the biggest change in years in the company’s flagship product.
The Duo is sized and shaped like a passport, with rounded edges. It opens into a horizontal, wide screen that can also be viewed vertically. There is a smaller single screen on the front, when the phone is folded. When open, it is Apple’s thinnest phone, the company said.
The folding phone event, the first with new CEO John Ternus at the helm, is the most noticeable overhaul of Apple’s flagship product since it removed the physical home button from the iPhone X in 2017. The iPhone brought in US$209.6 billion, or just over half of Apple’s sales, in its most recent fiscal year.
Former CEO Tim Cook handed over the leadership baton to Ternus with a video about how to start the presentation that ended with a close-up of Cook, who said, “not me. That’s your guy”, pointing back toward Ternus.
Ternus touted the iPhone as a personal AI hub that focused on privacy, saying that others wanted to collect and store personal data. “Honestly, trust only goes so far when your data is no longer yours to control,” he said. “That’s why Apple Intelligence runs on device whenever it can.”
Apple’s Lilian Rincon, who oversees AI products for the iPhone maker and was recruited from Google earlier this year, described an updated Siri assistant that will work with 300,000 apps at release.
Executives also showed off the iPhone 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max handsets that are the latest versions of Apple’s well-known line, which do not fold. Pricing for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max starts at US$1,199 and US$1,299, up US$100 from the starting prices of the 17 Pro and Pro Max.
In Singapore, the iPhone Duo starts at S$3,099 for the base 256GB model. The 2TB configuration is priced at S$4,899.
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