Apple’s big fall event on Wednesday followed a familiar script: After a cinematic intro (shot on iPhone of course), freshly crowned CEO John Ternus rattled through the well-produced announcements of the iPhone 18 Pro, AirPods 5 and Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4, all of which do most of the same stuff as before, just a little bit better. There were new Apple Intelligence features of course and then there was one more thing – a beloved tradition at Apple – which Ternus announced with a satisfied smirk: the long-awaited foldable iPhone.
The presentation of the iPhone Duo also started with an Apple tradition: explaining why the competition, which has been doing foldable phones for years, has gotten it all wrong. With the iPhone Duo, Apple sets out to “redefine” the experience of using a foldable phone, for example by optimizing and unifying the aspect ratio of the outside and inside screen. And while the Duo certainly looks stunning and Apple showed off some clever ways of using the additional screen real estate, perhaps the most groundbreaking thing about it was the price.
Starting at $1,999 in the United States, the base model of the iPhone Duo is as expensive as last year’s iPhone 17 Pro Max with two terabytes of storage, which was the most expensive iPhone to date. With the same two terabytes, the Duo now tops out at $3,199, which is entirely unchartered territory for a smartphone. In today's marketplace, the price of the iPhone Duo isn’t completely detached from reality (and the competition), however. While it is (slightly) more expensive than the similarly shaped Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 and the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold, it even undercuts the price of the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra by $100 across the 256GB, 512GB and 1TB options. Perhaps it was clever by Samsung to abstain from a two terabyte version and leave it to Apple to break the $3,000 barrier.
Following Wednesday’s event, Apple also raised the prices of its existing iPhone lineup, which saw price increases between $100 (for 256GB and 512 GB models) and $300 for the 1TB iPhone Air. The new iPhone 18 Pro line will also be between $100 and $500 more expensive than the 17 Pro line, with the hefty $500 price jump reserved for the 2TB model. Former CEO Tim Cook recently said that price increases were “inevitable” in response to the global memory and storage chip shortage, which he described as a “hundred-year flood” for supply chains.
