Has the garbage time for the iPhone come to an end?
John Ternus took the stage at the autumn launch event for the first time as Apple's CEO, unveiling the iPhone Duo, a foldable smartphone that marks Apple's biggest form factor change since the iPhone X.
However, this innovation came rather late. Counting from the Samsung Galaxy Fold, Apple is seven years behind the first batch of foldable smartphones. By the time it entered the market, foldable screens were no longer a novelty at all.
In the tech industry, lacking innovation is treated as an unforgivable sin. For Apple, which has long been held to high expectations, the impact is even doubled. Criticizing "Apple has no innovation" has become a fixed program that unfolds punctually every autumn, and this time is no exception — Luo Yonghao used seven consecutive "copied" to roast the newly released iPhone Duo.
But this is exactly the starting point for understanding this launch event: why Apple did not take action until the market matured and the competitive landscape was basically finalized.
The "Surprise" That Arrived 7 Years Late
At this launch event themed "Surprise and Shine", the protagonist iPhone Duo did not make its debut until the 53rd minute of the event.
Before that, Ternus first released the bar-style iPhone 18 Pro. The biggest change is the chip upgraded to A20 Pro with 2nm process, which is equipped with a 6-core CPU, a 7-core GPU and a "dual 16-core" Neural Engine. Apple claims that the GPU performance is increased by up to 40% and the unified memory bandwidth is increased by 50%; the packaging of the chip, memory and evaporation chamber has also been redesigned to further expand the heat dissipation area.
The 18 Pro Max is touted as the biggest battery life upgrade in iPhone history, with a maximum video playback time of 45 hours. However, charging 50% in 15 minutes is still not considered fast charging, and some thousand-yuan models in the mainstream Android camp can charge to more than 90% in just over ten minutes.
After that, Ternus uttered Steve Jobs' iconic "one more thing", and imitated Jobs to taunt rival brands first: some foldable devices "feel like two phones clumsily glued together", then talked about how Apple rethought the problem.
The iPhone Duo adopts a 5.4-inch outer screen and a 7.6-inch inner screen, the two screens maintain the same proportion, and the interface when unfolded is more like a natural enlargement rather than a rearranged one; it is equipped with a five-level titanium alloy body, a hinge with more than 100 precision components, a multi-layer inner screen structure and IP68 protection. At the software level, Duo can run two apps at the same time. When it is half-folded, placed horizontally or flipped, the system will rearrange the interface according to the hinge angle and sensors, actively avoiding the folding area.
Foldable screens are not new, this category has been iterated for many years, and even some manufacturers have gone through the whole process from entering the market to going bankrupt. What Apple is really good at is using software and ecosystem to smooth out as many minor flaws in the hardware form as possible. Although the crease of Duo still exists, it once rushed to the top of the hot search list.
Luo Yonghao even pointed out that Apple used a matte screen to cover up the fact that it could not solve the crease problem, but the front camera would be blurry under the matte screen, so Apple separately polished the small area around the front camera to be bright, which made the front camera that was supposed to be hidden more prominent.
Selling at Higher and Higher Prices
What is more worth asking than Duo itself is: foldable screens have been popular for so many years, why did Apple enter the market now, and why is the price set at this level.
Part of the answer is hidden in a relatively inconspicuous detail: at this launch event, the cheapest iPhone 18 did not debut together with the Pro series. Apple did not explain much, but the entire smartphone industry is experiencing the same thing — mobile phones are sold in smaller quantities, but at higher and higher prices.
The global smartphone shipment peaked at about 1.566 billion units back in 2017, and has never returned to that level since then. The figure dropped to 1.248 billion units in 2025, about one fifth less than the peak. This year, due to the rise in storage prices, Counterpoint predicts that the annual shipment may further drop to 1.08 billion units.
Although fewer mobile phones are sold, the industry earns more revenue instead. In Q2 of this year, global smartphone shipments fell by 7% year on year, but sales revenue increased by 8%, with the average selling price reaching 399 US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 16%; in the first half of the year, the sales proportion of high-end mobile phones priced above 600 US dollars rose to a record high of 29% (data from Counterpoint). Simply put, it is very difficult to drive growth by "selling hundreds of millions more units", and manufacturers are increasingly relying on another path: selling each unit in the stock market at a higher price.
Apple is exactly best at this, and this round of storage price hikes even overwhelmed its long-proud supply chain bargaining power. In the first quarter of this year, Samsung and SK Hynix raised their LPDDR quotes to Apple by more than 80% and nearly 100% quarter-on-quarter respectively. Apple also acknowledged the rise in memory costs in its financial report, so the starting price of the 18 Pro increased by 100 US dollars.
However, the rising cost did not make Apple the most affected company. In the second quarter, iPhones only accounted for about 21% of global smartphone shipments, but took away 49% of the industry's sales revenue, hitting the highest level in the second quarter of all years. For every 100 US dollars global consumers spend on mobile phones, about 49 US dollars goes to Apple, 16 US dollars goes to Samsung, and the remaining 35 US dollars are shared by other manufacturers. What is more abnormal is that when the sales volume of the entire market declined, Apple still grew: iPhone shipments in the second quarter increased by 13% year on year, revenue increased by 22%, and the unit price increased by 8%; for the whole year of 2025, Apple became the top player with about 20% global market share.
This makes the iPhone occupy a more important position within Apple. In the first nine months of fiscal year 2026, iPhone revenue reached 196.515 billion US dollars, accounting for 53.9% of Apple's total revenue, with a growth rate of 22%, higher than the company's overall 16%; in the same period, Apple's product gross margin reached 39.9%, the highest level since 2018 when Apple began to list this data separately, and it rose to 40.1% in the third quarter. In contrast, the gross margin of the global smartphone industry in the same period dropped from 26.7% to 26%. It is getting harder for the industry to make money, but Apple is earning more and more.
This set of industry data explains Apple's consistent profit logic in recent years, and it is also the confidence for Apple to set the price of Duo at 15999 yuan. As for why the foldable smartphone was not launched until now, the more direct factor may lie in the supply chain: the yield and cost of key components such as foldable screen hinges, ultra-thin glass covers and flexible screens only met Apple's mass production threshold for the first time this year.
Having Missed Foldable Screens, Apple Cannot Afford to Miss AI
Although the iPhone Duo cannot be compared with Apple products from the Steve Jobs era, it is not a bad phone. The foldable screen solves the problem of allowing users to put a larger screen in their pocket, and some of the interaction methods redesigned by Apple have also won the favor of many Apple fans.
Compared with the delayed launch of foldable screen products, what may really cause Apple to miss an era is its slowness in the R&D of AI smartphones.
When Siri was launched in 2011, Apple's vision for smart assistants was quite advanced: understanding context, calling user-authorized personal information, and then making calls, sending messages, setting reminders, checking routes via voice; more importantly, Apple was the first to deliver the "smart assistant" as part of the operating system to mass users. But this first-mover advantage did not eventually turn into a long-term advantage. Apple Intelligence released in 2024 promised to let AI understand user information, understand screen content and operate across apps while protecting privacy, but until this year's iOS 27, this more complete set of capabilities is still in the Beta stage. Similar cross-app operations were first implemented by the Doubao phone last year, and the two important markets of China and Europe still cannot use the full set of features (see "Apple's AI Past" for details).
Making up for the AI lesson has become the top priority that Ternus cannot avoid after taking over Apple. So at the beginning of the launch event, he did not rush to talk about products, but first explained Apple's future product logic, with the keyword "intelligent personal hub": a truly valuable personal AI needs to understand your context, accompany you every day, be equipped with screens, cameras and microphones, have strong enough on-device computing power, and can also connect to cloud models. And this device actually already exists, which is the iPhone.
In this vision, AI will not kill the iPhone. On the contrary, Apple hopes to use AI to make the 2.5 billion active devices distributed around the world once again become the center of personal digital life. But there is still a clear gap between vision and implementation: so far, Apple has not announced any specific details about the personalized model training method, cross-device memory mechanism or the in-depth access schedule for third-party apps at this launch event. The term "intelligent personal hub" itself is more like a direction statement rather than a verifiable roadmap, which is the real problem Ternus needs to answer.
What Cook left him is not a company waiting to be saved, but a commercial machine with extremely strong hematopoietic capacity: when Cook took over in fiscal year 2011, Apple's annual revenue was about 108 billion US dollars, and by fiscal year 2025, it exceeded 416 billion US dollars, with its market value growing from about 350 billion US dollars to around 4.6 trillion US dollars. The smartphone industry is already highly mature, and Apple is even better at making money than in the past. However, there is no standard answer in the AI era yet, and no one knows what the AI terminal that everyone will carry in the next generation looks like — whether it is a mobile phone, glasses, or some kind of device that does not exist today.
Duo still solves the problem of the previous era. If Apple really wants to step into the next era, what it needs is not another "one more thing" style surprise, but to turn the phrase "intelligent personal hub" into a real product.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Yunjian Insight", Author: Liu Yimo, Editor: Wang Hailu, published with authorization from 36Kr.