Apple CEO John Ternus told TIME that the first foldables from other companies “felt kind of cheap and crappy”, in a cover interview published on 15 October as iPhone Duo pre-orders open on 16 October.
TIME named the iPhone Duo one of its best inventions of 2026 and put Ternus on the cover. The magazine reports that Ternus was one of six engineers behind a 2011 patent application for foldable devices, which looked at the batteries and circuit boards such a phone might need. “It felt clear that we were going to eventually get to a place where OLED displays were going to be flexible,” he said.
Richard Dinh, Apple’s vice-president of product design, told TIME that he once asked Ternus whether to use a top surface similar to rivals’, which he felt was flawed but possibly good enough. Ternus told him he would know when it was right, Dinh said, a push that led to the Duo’s custom-polymer nanotexture surface. That surface sits on a hinge with more than 100 precision parts, and early users have said the crease is barely visible.
Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook as CEO on 1 September, spends several days a week with Apple’s industrial-design and human-interface teams, according to TIME. He also addressed the global memory shortage, calling it “absolutely a crisis” and saying “all options should be on the table”, after senators criticised Apple for testing memory chips from a Chinese supplier. 9to5Mac notes that he also acknowledged Apple Intelligence partly relies on Google’s Gemini technology.
The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 in the US. Pre-orders open at 5 a.m. Pacific Time on 16 October (1 p.m. in the UK), according to MacRumors.