CUPERTINO, CALIF. — On the first week of his reign as the face of the world’s most valuable company, John Ternus stepped to the stage at Apple Park, introduced himself to a silent auditorium, and announced the product the entire tech industry had been waiting for: a phone you can fold in half.

Ternus, the hardware engineer who had never once given a keynote, took over as chief executive on September 1 from Tim Cook, who now serves as executive chairman and was, by all accounts, in the front row on Wednesday. The event, which Apple had billed with the confidence of a company that has sold the same rectangle for fifteen straight years, was called “Surprise and Shine.”

“I continue to be inspired every single day,” Ternus told the crowd, which, having waited a quarter-century for a foldable, was inclined to agree.

The headline device is the iPhone Duo, a phone that folds into a smaller phone and unfolds into a tablet, a category Apple has spent the entire prior decade telling everyone it was “working on” in the most legally careful language in the history of consumer technology. Alongside it came the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, which are, for reasons the company did not elaborate on, still rectangles.

Under Cook, Apple had refined the same rectangle for fifteen years, and it had, by its own numbers, been a very good fifteen years. Under Ternus, the rectangle is now two rectangles, hinged, and the company’s first week in the new era went, in the language of the event hashtag, to plan.

"For fifteen years we told you we were folding. Now you can see it. You can fold it. You can fold *yourself*."

Analysts who had predicted Ternus would “keep things the same” were, in the words of one who had written the prediction, “surprised and shining.” A different analyst, who had predicted the foldable would be “a few years off,” issued a statement that was four words long and entirely in the present tense.

THE TERNUS DEBUT, BY THE NUMBERS

  • Days as CEO before his first keynote: eight.
  • Products folded, this event: one (plus the event hashtag, which folded into a trending topic).
  • Rectangles retained, for continuity: two (the Pro and the Pro Max).
  • Tim Cook, now executive chairman: present, front row, applauding on cue.
  • Question of whether the Duo folds a second time into four screens: "not yet," per the company, "but the hinge is optimistic."

The engineering, for what it is worth, is the real story, and it is a good one. A foldable has to survive the fold. The screen has to bend without cracking, the hinge has to hold for years, and the whole thing has to feel like a phone and not like a prop. Ternus, who spent his career making the phone’s body, now has to make the phone’s body become two things, which is the kind of assignment that only lands on the person who was previously the one holding the body.

"You don't hand the hinge to the person who never touched the hinge. You hand the hinge to the person who has been, for a decade, the hinge's best friend."

At press time, Apple had not confirmed a second, smaller fold that would turn the Duo into four screens, but the company’s event hashtag was trending above the actual device, which the company described, in a statement of two words, as “good for everyone.”