Apple's New CEO Just Launched a Foldable iPhone and an AI Plan

Apple has a new CEO. John Ternus replaced Tim Cook less than two weeks before the company's annual iPhone event, and his very first act as boss was launching the iPhone Duo — Apple's first phone with a folding screen. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the timing wasn't a coincidence. Apple wanted its new leader's debut to be tied to something genuinely new, because a foldable phone is the kind of visible, tangible change that gets people talking.

So what does that mean for you? A folding iPhone is a real change in how you'd use a phone — a bigger screen in your pocket for reading, watching, and working, without carrying a tablet. And Ternus opened the event not with hardware specs but with a pitch about an "intelligent personal hub," which is Apple's way of saying it wants Siri and its devices to do more thinking for you. That matters because Apple has been widely seen as behind in AI, and a new CEO gets one chance to reset that story.

The catch is that almost nothing else felt new. Gurman, who has covered Apple for years, said the event could have been hosted by Tim Cook without anyone noticing. Behind the scenes, though, a lot has changed: a wholesale reshuffling of Apple's leadership ranks over the past year, which Gurman says could shift the company's culture over time.

The bigger question is whether Ternus can find Apple's "next big thing." The iPhone made Apple the most valuable company in the world, but phones are a mature business. Moving from the iPhone era into the AI era means convincing people that Apple — not Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI — should be the assistant living in their pocket. That's the bet, and it's just getting started.