A new, anonymously-sourced Bloomberg report describes what may be Apple’s gambit for getting the public to fall in love with its new CEO, John Ternus: marry him to a new product they expect the public to love too.
One small problem with that product: it’s reportedly going to be a foldable iPhone with a starting price that will send seasoned Apple fans reaching for their Lipitor: $2,000.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Ternus will officially take over as CEO on September 1, and inside of two weeks, he’ll be the new CEO onstage at the product release event. Apple is, according to Gurman, “setting him up to become the face of what it believes will be a blockbuster new product category.”
Ternus was the engineer who led the original iPad project, and that connection will apparently be front and center. One of Gurman’s sources apparently informed him that, “The idea that Ternus drove this whole process will be put front and center during the launch period.”
Ternus’s first public act as CEO will in other words be pitched as the birth of a new product—expensive or not—that feels like the culmination of his entire career up until this point. This has an undeniable narrative unity marketers can really sink their teeth into, sure. But meanwhile, the Apple Vision Pro will go down in history as the last major new product introduced by CEO Tim Cook. The wind-down of Cook’s career will forever be associated with the mixed record of that device, which costs $3,499—or 12 easy payments of $291.58.
Cook not only rolled that thing out, but he made himself the world’s primary cheerleader for it, claiming he wears it every day and incorporates it into his work. But people rather predictably didn’t buy it, and conventional tech biz wisdom now goes something like this: releasing the Vision Pro as an astronomically expensive retail product instead of using it as a cool R&D demo was basically a pothole on the road to the product Apple should have focused on to begin with: smart glasses.
So that brings us to the astronomically expensive iPhone Apple looks poised to release. A $2,000 phone and a $3,500 pair of goggles are both major extravagances, but a comparison of the riskiness of these two products might not hold up to much scrutiny.
First of all, it’s not going to confuse most people. It’s just a smallish iPhone, and when you open it up, it’s essentially a smallish iPad. Simple.
Not only is it familiar, but so is the price. Samsung rolled out a $2,000 folding phone seven years ago. In fact, Samsung charges even more for an even more outlandish trifold smartphone. And aside from recent money problems brought on by the AI-related memory shortage, Samsung’s foldable devices mostly make economic sense.
Gurman confidently writes that Apple “is likely to surpass its prior December-quarter record, with analysts forecasting a haul of nearly $150 billion.” Those analysts probably haven’t tried the folding iPhone yet, and neither have I. But unless it sucks in some unpredictable new way, it’s hard to argue that’s an unwise prediction.
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