INNOVATING TOGETHER
Apple's "Surprise and Shine" event is September 9, 2026
Apple is expected to unveil its first foldable iPhone — reportedly the iPhone Ultra.
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Khanlar Alizada
9/1/2026
And the succession wasn't sprung on anyone: Apple's board appointed him on April 17 and announced it publicly on April 20. He has had four and a half months of public runway, and years of private ones.
So the interesting question isn't whether a new CEO can survive a keynote days into the job. It's what Apple was saying when it picked him.
Everything in the right column is journalism, not announcement. Worth holding loosely until the 9th.
Now look at what's on the September 9 stage: a genuinely new form factor, a 2nm process node, and Apple's own cellular modem replacing Qualcomm's. Three hardware engineering problems, all landing in the first week of a hardware engineer's tenure.
That is not a coincidence of scheduling. It's a board saying the next decade of Apple is won or lost on physical products again — after fifteen years in which it mostly wasn't.
The missing iPhone 18 is the actual news
Everyone is looking at the fold. Look at the gap instead.
There is no standard iPhone 18 this autumn. The mainstream models move to spring 2027, leaving the autumn lineup as two Pros and an Ultra.
That's not a delayed phone. It's a restructured product calendar — and it has a direct financial consequence.
Apple's autumn quarter is its biggest of the year. By removing the cheapest iPhone from it, Apple mechanically raises the average selling price of the quarter that matters most, while pushing volume into a historically quieter spring. Same units across the year, different mix distribution.
If it works, it's one of the smartest packaging decisions Apple has made in a decade. If it doesn't — if buyers who wanted an entry iPhone simply wait, or leave — Apple has surrendered the mass-market slot in its own biggest window.
That's the number I'd watch in the December quarter, not the foldable's unit sales.
The modem is the underrated item
The C2 is Apple's third-generation in-house baseband, following the C1 in the iPhone 16e and the C1X in the iPhone Air. Putting it in the flagship Pro line is the endpoint of a decade-long, famously painful project to stop paying Qualcomm.
Modems carry the kind of supplier margin that makes vertical integration worth years of pain — the same logic driving Meta's custom silicon and every hyperscaler's ASIC programme. Commodity components with fat supplier margins get pulled in-house first. The pattern is now so consistent it's almost a law.
The fold will get the headlines. The modem will get the gross margin.
Where I'd push back
Foldables aren't new, and they haven't worked. Samsung shipped the first Galaxy Fold in 2019. Seven years on, foldables remain a low-single-digit share of smartphone shipments. Apple's habit is to arrive late and define a category — iPod, iPhone, Watch, AirPods. But the honest question is whether the category has stayed small because nobody executed it well, or because most people simply don't want a phone that folds.
Apple is about to run that experiment at the only scale that can answer it.
And Touch ID instead of Face ID, if the reporting holds, is a real regression on a device positioned as the most expensive iPhone ever made. Apple will have a good engineering reason. Customers rarely accept engineering reasons.
My read
The framing that matters isn't "new CEO, high stakes." It's that Apple handed the company to the person who built the product line, at the exact moment the product line stops being iterative.
Ternus isn't being tested on September 9. His work is. And the harder test comes later — the first roadmap that is genuinely his, two or three years out, when there's nobody else's decisions left to ship.
Question for you: when a company promotes the engineer who built the current pipeline, is that a bet on continuity or on change? I'd argue Apple thinks it's buying both — and that those two things are usually in tension.
