Apple Unfolds Their New iPhone Future

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TEC360: Apple finally shipped a folding iPhone, and the surprise isn’t that it exists. It’s that Apple refused to build it like everyone else.

Every foldable on the market is essentially two candy-bar phones hinged together. Apple started from a different question — what do you actually want to look at? — and landed on an iPad shape. The iPhone Duo opens to a 7.6-inch display and closes to a 5.4-inch one that is exactly half of it, so the aspect ratio never changes as you fold. The screen is a custom polymer engineered to feel like glass instead of plastic, and there is no crease worth talking about.

Dom Bettinelli and Joanne Mercier recorded within minutes of the September 2026 event ending, and both of them want one. Joanne for reading at arm’s length as her eyesight changes. Dom for taking Apple Pencil notes on a phone that folds into a pocket.

What the foldable iPhone does that its competitors don’t is run all three display surfaces at once. Point it at someone and they watch themselves on the outer screen while you frame on the inner one — with the good rear camera, which quietly fixes selfies. Touch ID moved into the side button, the FaceTime camera hides beneath the inner display, and the interface slides its controls out of the crease when you half-fold it into a laptop shape. At $1,999 for 256GB and $2,199 for 512GB, pre-ordering October 16 and shipping October 23, this is a premium niche product — successful, but not a volume seller, and no iPad replacement at three times an iPad’s price.

The rest of the event was iteration. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max arrived without the base iPhone 18 or the Air, which now look bound for spring — a deliberate split of Apple’s inventory and its news cycle. Apple Reference Image signs photo data at the pixel level at the moment of capture, an attempt to make a real photograph provable in an age of generated ones, and the obvious question about spoofing gets asked immediately.

AirPods 5, Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 are real upgrades without being must-haves. The Watch’s new readiness score, the Health app’s forthcoming Longevity tab and its health-age number, and Siri Recap’s fifteen-second Live Rewind get a serious hearing as accessibility features rather than gimmicks — closed captioning for the world, as Dom Bettinelli puts it.

Then the absences: no AirPods Pro, no HomePod, no Apple TV, and still no Apple home hub. That last one matters, because Siri AI is about to split hard between the phone in your pocket and the speaker in your kitchen. John Ternus ran his first event as Apple CEO, “one more thing” and all, and both hosts read it as a hardware guy in his element.

Picks of the week: Facebook Marketplace, and Moonlock, MacPaw’s Mac security app.

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Disclaimer: Hosts, panelists, and guests may have a financial interest in the companies discussed through investments or other means. Their opinions and recommendations are not affected and do not present a conflict of interest. We offer this statement in the interest of full disclosure.

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