Apple has taken its biggest gamble yet on the future of the iPhone, unveiling a $1,999 foldable model that is drawing questions over whether the costly device offers enough innovation to persuade existing iPhone users to switch.
The book-style iPhone Duo, unveiled on Wednesday at Apple’s annual product launch event, starts at $1,999 in the United States and can cost as much as $3,200. UK prices start at £1,999.
The device is the biggest redesign of the iPhone since its debut in 2007, but its arrival comes nearly a decade after Samsung Electronics and other smartphone makers introduced foldable phones, raising questions about whether Apple is innovating or simply entering an established market at a higher price.
Apple Chief Executive John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook, said the Duo was “inspired by the iPad” and described its folding mechanism as “fluid and completely intuitive.”
When unfolded, the Duo resembles a small tablet, while folded it becomes a wider version of a conventional iPhone.
Ternus said Apple deliberately avoided designs used by rivals that “feel like two phones stuck together… making a larger screen feel much smaller.”
The Duo, he said, is the “result of a series of remarkable innovations that we think will redefine the experience of using a foldable phone.”
But the central question for Apple may be whether consumers see the device as a meaningful advance or an expensive reinterpretation of technology they have already seen.
Critics have long argued that Apple has struggled to deliver a transformative new product since the original iPhone. The company has steadily refined the iPhone’s cameras, processors, displays and software, but the basic smartphone design has changed little.
“The foldable risks becoming a premium-priced ornament in the portfolio, imparting badge value but not meaningful growth,” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, an analyst at Forrester.
The price puts the Duo well above Apple’s other new iPhones. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max starts at $1,299.
For an iPhone owner accustomed to paying roughly $800 to $1,300 for Apple’s flagship phones, spending at least another $700 for a device whose primary proposition is a larger, foldable display could prove a difficult sell.
Chatterjee said the Duo could follow the path of Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which debuted at $3,699 and has struggled to attract mass-market buyers. Alternatively, he said, it could become more like the Apple Watch, which is less popular than the iPhone but still sells millions of units.
That distinction may be crucial for Apple. A foldable iPhone does not necessarily need to replace the conventional iPhone to be successful, but it must sell at sufficient scale to justify the engineering, manufacturing and marketing investment while avoiding becoming a niche luxury product.
Ben Wood, chief analyst at technology research firm FDM CCS Insight, said Ternus’s promotion was likely timed specifically “to coincide with what will be arguably one of the biggest iPhone launches for many years”.
“Nothing happens by accident at Apple,” Wood added.
Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies who attended the launch, said the emphasis on Ternus made it feel “almost like he was a product himself.”
The broader market may offer Apple less room for error than its dominance of the smartphone industry suggests.
Foldable smartphones currently account for about 2% of smartphone sales, Wood said. Even with Apple’s entry expected to boost consumer interest, FDM CCM Insight expects foldables to reach only about 4% of the overall smartphone market over the next decade.
That raises a fundamental question: can Apple make the foldable iPhone sufficiently mainstream to generate meaningful growth, or will its enormous installed base simply treat it as another premium option?
“The foldables are interesting devices”, Milanesi noted. “A lot of people are intrigued by it, but the software and the learning curve that you have from moving from a traditional phone to a foldable is real.”
For existing iPhone users, the challenge may be less about convincing them that a foldable phone is technically impressive than convincing them that it solves a problem they actually have.
The Duo offers a larger screen in a smaller folded footprint, but users must also adapt to a new form factor, a different way of interacting with apps and potentially compromises around thickness, weight and durability.
Apple’s brand gives it an advantage that Samsung and other early entrants did not have: millions of consumers already use its ecosystem of phones, watches, computers, services and applications. But that ecosystem also makes switching to a fundamentally different iPhone design more complicated if the benefits are not immediately obvious.
The iPhone remains Apple’s biggest product, accounting for more than half of its annual sales. The company has also said recent iPhone launches have generated strong demand.
That makes the foldable a potentially important test of whether Apple can create a new premium category without weakening the economics of its core iPhone business.
The company also provided details of a revamped Siri, now called Siri AI, which will debut with the iPhone 18. The assistant will be able to search information across a user’s messages and emails, answer questions and take actions on the user’s behalf.
Ternus described the new AI capabilities as an “intelligent personal hub”, while acknowledging that Apple would be using “the most private details of your daily life.”
He said the information would remain private, with many AI functions running “on device” rather than through third-party companies. Where cloud processing is required, he said, the information would remain private on Apple’s servers.
“Others see that data as something to collect and store”, Ternus said. “Here, not even Apple can access what’s yours.”
For Apple, however, the immediate test is whether millions of iPhone users will look at the Duo and decide that folding technology is finally worth paying nearly $3,200 for, or whether they will simply keep the iPhone they already own.
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