Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
On Wednesday, Apple held its annual September product launch at its Steve Jobs Theater. The event will be remembered for two debuts. One was the long-awaited announcement of the company’s first folding phone, the iPhone Duo. The other was the first public appearance of its new CEO, John Ternus, who appeared briefly in person and at length in the prerecorded keynote presentation.
I came to Cupertino looking forward to the time I’d get with the folding iPhone in Apple’s post-keynote demo area. Though hardly enough to render a firm verdict on the device, that hands-on experience left me impressed with the thinking that Apple has put into the device. But I also left mulling over Ternus’s unexpectedly intriguing framing of the role that iPhones—folding or otherwise—play in the AI era.
First, let’s talk about the Duo. By any measure, Apple is an exceptionally late arrival to the folding-screen party. Unlike the 2007 iPhone, the Duo is not a ground-up reimagining of a product category. Instead, it sits squarely in the same class as existing folding phones from Samsung and other makers of Android phones. Even its distinctive, passport-like form factor, with a squat outer screen and an inner one optimized for full-screen video, had some of its thunder purloined when Samsung announced the similar Galaxy Z Fold8 six weeks earlier.
Yet the Duo, which is entering the market more than seven years after Samsung’s first Galaxy folding phone, is fully baked in ways other companies’ early folding phones were not. While other companies were putting their models through iteration after iteration, Apple was waiting until it had good answers to the myriad questions presented by the form factor.
Such as: What size and aspect ratio should the inner and outer screens be? Which things about iOS’s user interface do and don’t need to change to accommodate those two displays? How do you minimize the crease at the folding point so users don’t obsess over it every time they open their phone?
Overall, Apple’s design decisions appear to strike a maximally happy balance between the Duo’s two screen sizes, something other folding phones long struggled with. In a daring change to a basic aspect of iOS, Apple repositioned the dock and other toolbars to the screens’ right edge. That helps prevent apps from merely stretching out to fill more space, an issue that can leave Android-based folding phones (and tablets) feeling like they don’t deliver on the promise of their extra display acreage.
When it came to facilitating the use of multiple apps on the inner screen, Apple didn’t invent a whole new mode of interaction. Instead, it pretty much revived the split-view multitasking that the iPad had until last year, when the company ditched it for a more Mac-like interface. I find the iPad’s new system an overcomplication rather than an improvement—which seems to be a minority view—and welcome the return of the old approach’s streamlined simplicity on the Duo.
As for that pesky crease, Apple’s solution involves giving the inner screen a “nano-texture” matte finish that cuts glare, reducing the telltale reflections the fold would otherwise have. It’s a clever work-around that adds to the Duo’s generally posh vibe.
Speaking of posh, there’s the unavoidable subject of the phone’s price. At $1,999 for the 256 GB version, it’s less than many analysts expected. But there’s no getting around the fact that it makes the Duo either unaffordable or a serious splurge for most people. Girding yourself to buy one may be easiest if you’d otherwise purchase both a new iPhone ($699 and way, way up) and an iPad Mini (at least $599).
The Duo’s price might also make more sense if you embrace its transformer-style nature. You can prop it up like a tent for movie watching or open it into a laptop-esque clamshell for hands-free video calls. Or you can unfold it all the way and use the larger screen while the smaller one on the other side lets photo subjects see themselves, brings a nearby friend into FaceTime sessions, or shows Snoopy animations to focus the attention of a kid whose picture you’re taking. Apple has been clever with these scenarios, and it’s fun to think of additional ones it could add over time.
Judged strictly on what it does and how it does it, the Duo appears to validate Apple’s why-rush-things attitude toward foldability. Its potential is constrained by its price more than its appeal, but it won’t be surprising if it meaningfully boosts the sales of folding phones all by itself. (They currently account for just 2% of the market.)
The iPhone as iHub
Now, on to Ternus’s remarks during the keynote. Nobody was expecting him to articulate a vision for Apple that boldly departed from that of his predecessor, Tim Cook. He didn’t. Still, I detected signs of his background as a product guy.
Cook’s keynote comments on what Apple was trying to do usually didn’t go much beyond saying that it wanted to make great products that people love. Ternus, by contrast, immediately began explaining the iPhone’s role in people’s lives—a task that wouldn’t have been necessary until AI upended the entire tech industry.
AI, he argued, “can become even more useful when it brings together your life with the apps, services, and products you use every day. And this means the product at the center of your experiences becomes even more essential. What I like to think of as an intelligent personal hub. It’s the intersection of your personal context that makes this idea so powerful.”
Then Ternus listed the features you’d want in such a hub: a powerful processor, pervasive networking, a beautiful display, cameras, microphones, long battery life, and the ability to work seamlessly with other devices, apps, and services. “In other words, you would arrive at something remarkably familiar. Because there’s no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone.”
Not everyone attempting to invent the next generation of AI gadgetry would agree. Many of them are predicated on the assumption that the smartphone era has left people weary of all the screens in their lives. OpenAI, for example, is reportedly readying a screenless, puck-sized speaker.
And then there’s the iPhone Duo. It’s . . . a smartphone! With two screens! Apple is betting that a critical mass of people are not tired of smartphones. Instead, they crave one that’s even more capable, because it’s capable of displaying more information. (The Duo’s inner screen is 50% larger than that of the iPhone 18 Max.)
But wait. Along with the iPhone Duo, Apple’s Wednesday event featured the announcement of the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4. Among their features is an AI-powered mode that can listen to conversations, summarize them, and even let you see a text recap of the last 15 seconds. The Apple Watch does have a screen, of course, but this new capability offers a minimalist, ambient form of AI that wouldn’t work if it involved taking a phone out of your pocket.
A product Apple didn’t announce on Wednesday is also relevant here: AirPods Pro with built-in cameras. Now expected next year, they appear to offer a visual counterpart to the new Apple Watch’s audio AI. Rather than letting you capture snapshots or video, they’ll feed imagery to Apple Intelligence for analysis.
The new Apple Watch audio features have been greeted with skepticism over the propriety of a smartwatch capturing the speech of people who might not be aware that it’s listening. Some folks are already in a tizzy over the privacy implications of AirPods that can see. If Apple convinces people that these new features can’t be used for untoward purposes, the seamless, multi-device AI Ternus talked about could start to look very real. It would be tough for other companies to match.
As Ternus introduced the concept of the iPhone as intelligent personal hub, he didn’t mention the iPhone Duo or new Apple Watches—they weren’t unveiled until later in the keynote—let alone the still-unannounced AirPods Pro. But his use of the term reminded me of another moment of truth, more than 25 years ago, when Steve Jobs pointed Apple toward the future by calling its most popular product a hub.
In January 2001, Jobs was a fairly new CEO himself—it had been only a year since he’d stripped the “interim” from that title after returning to the company he’d cofounded. Apple was still bouncing back from the late-1990s turmoil that had threatened its very existence. The bulbous, all-in-one iMac was already a hit. But computers of all kinds were feeling somewhat outdated, at least in comparison to newer devices such as MP3 players, digital cameras, DV camcorders, and PDAs.
That’s when Jobs used a Macworld Expo keynote to position the Mac as something new: a digital hub that would help you get more out of all those new gizmos in your life. The company already had a tool for editing video, iMovie. It began to roll out more media apps, such as iTunes and iDVD. Eventually, it released a whole suite of them called iLife.
Apple didn’t have to make the case for the Mac being a digital hub for long. Mostly, it just made sure it was a great one. The strategy was central to the Mac’s rebound and led to the company releasing its own MP3 player, the iPod.
Without the iPod, there might not have been an iPhone. Without the iPhone, who knows what Apple would look like today? Ternus’s intelligent personal hub might have a similar trajectory: something that begins as a new way of looking at Apple’s products and then redefines them so successfully that it no longer has to be acknowledged.
Back when Jobs pitched the idea of the Mac as a digital hub, he wasn’t just talking about the iMac. Apple made many Macs, from PowerBooks and iBook laptops to the budget-priced Mac Mini to hulking Power Mac desktops to the memorable failure known as the G4 Cube.
If the iPhone is going to be an intelligent personal hub, different people will want different expressions of the idea. And the iPhone Duo—the most different iPhone that Apple has made since the original—may be a clue to Ternus’s larger vision for the company’s future.
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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