For a company that once taught the technology industry how to think differently, Apple has spent much of the post-Steve Jobs era doing something rather different: watching.
The launch of the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable iPhone, is impressive. It is also an admission.
The $1,999 device, unveiled this week under new CEO John Ternus, opens into a 7.6-inch display, brings iPhone and iPad-like experiences together and uses Apple’s custom silicon, hinge and software integration to make the foldable form factor feel distinctly Apple.
But let’s call it what it is: Apple has arrived late to a party Samsung has been hosting since 2019.
That does not make Duo a bad product. Quite the opposite. Apple has historically been exceptionally good at taking technologies that already exist, refining the hardware, simplifying the experience and turning them into mass-market products.
The problem is that this was once the company’s second act, not its main act.
Steve Jobs died in 2011. Since then, Apple has become enormously more profitable and operationally sophisticated under Tim Cook. The company has sold billions of iPhones, built an extraordinary services business and expanded into wearables, custom silicon and spatial computing. Cook deserves enormous credit for transforming Apple into a financial and operational machine.
But innovation is not the same thing as commercial excellence.
Jobs-era Apple introduced the iPhone, iPad and major new computing paradigms. Post-Jobs Apple has largely refined existing categories: better cameras, faster processors, thinner devices, improved watches and increasingly sophisticated ecosystems.
The Apple Watch was genuinely important. Apple silicon has been transformational. AirPods helped redefine consumer audio. The Vision Pro demonstrated Apple’s willingness to attempt something radically expensive and ambitious.
Yet in smartphones, artificial intelligence and foldables, Apple has increasingly looked like the follower.
Samsung embraced foldables years ago. Google pushed aggressively into generative AI. Microsoft and OpenAI transformed expectations around AI-powered computing. Even smaller companies have been willing to experiment with new interfaces and form factors.
Apple’s biggest strategic weakness has arguably been AI.
While competitors raced to make AI the centre of their products, Apple’s Siri remained frustratingly limited. The company’s new Siri AI, now rolling out in beta with iOS 27, finally promises contextual understanding, onscreen awareness and the ability to act across apps and personal information. Apple is also emphasising on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute.
That privacy-first approach deserves credit.
Apple understands something many AI companies sometimes forget: intelligence without trust can become surveillance.
Its advantage is also enormous. Apple controls the processor, operating system, hardware, developer ecosystem and billions of devices. The company can put AI directly into the hardware rather than simply presenting users with another chatbot.
The question is whether Apple can move quickly enough.
Duo suggests it may be rediscovering its appetite for risk.
The foldable’s design is thoughtful, the A20 Pro chip brings serious performance, and Apple’s custom approach to the hinge and display demonstrates that it has not forgotten how to engineer beautiful hardware. But Samsung can legitimately ask: where were you?
That question matters because the next computing revolution may not be another iPhone.
It could be AI agents, spatial computing, wearable intelligence, robotics or something that has not yet been named.
And this is where Ternus inherits an extraordinary opportunity.
He takes over after Cook at precisely the moment Apple needs to transition from being the world’s best consumer technology company to once again being one of its most disruptive.
Duo can therefore be interpreted in two ways.
It can be Apple’s admission that the market moved without it.
Or it can be the beginning of Apple’s return to the front.
The difference will not be determined by how good the Duo is.
It will be determined by what Apple does next.
If Apple merely perfects technologies invented elsewhere, it will remain extraordinarily successful — but increasingly predictable.
If Ternus uses Apple’s unmatched ecosystem, silicon expertise and financial muscle to invent the next computing platform rather than simply polish the current one, the company may finally begin answering the question that has followed it since 2011:
Can Apple innovate without Steve Jobs?
The next decade will provide the answer.
