AAPL Shows Off iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 & AirPods 5 at "Surprise and Shine" Event

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Our tech spotlight is all Apple. The company held its Surprise and Shine product launch event. There he is, Jeremy Roberts, Senior Director of Research Content InfoTech Research Group. So glad to see you. So today is the day. What's your favorite takeaway? I mean, there's a long list with phones and AirPod and watch, but what's your favorite moment here?

Jeremy Roberts (0:23)

Oh, it's got to be the new iPhone Duo, which I thought they were going to call the iPhone Ultra. They come out and they call it a Duo. It's a new 5.4-inch phone that unfolds into what looks like an iPad Mini-shaped device from Apple, and that's incredibly exciting. There have been rumors about this for a long time. The foldable genre has been around for seven years, give or take, and this is the first time Apple's taken a serious shot at actually launching one of their own, so that's incredibly exciting. It's a whole new category for them.

SPEAKER_1 (0:52)

Yeah, it really is. I mean, we talk about the price points. I don't know if they released the price points. I know we were worried how much it might cost, but the idea too was that it will have offerings that other foldable companies will not when we think about the competitive landscape.

Jeremy Roberts (1:09)

Oh, absolutely. I mean, the biggest thing with Apple is its ecosystem.

You can kind of see it in how they've integrated all of their products together, and they've got this Halo product, this iPhone Duo, this folding phone. It's going to be very expensive. The event actually, as I logged on here, was still ongoing. I hadn't seen the price, but the leaks suggest it's going to be about $2,000, which would be in line for a premium fold at this price, pretty consistent with what Samsung's offering, with what Google's offering. And look, Apple has always played at the premium end of the market, so this might just be an opportunity for them to squeeze more from their most affluent customers. And that's a pretty good business strategy. They've got pretty solid market share and the prices of pretty much everything going up. So what's a more expensive phone in this environment?

SPEAKER_1 (1:54)

So look, I mean, they talked about the A20 Pro chip that will power the iPhone Duo and says that the iPhone Duo is eSIM only worldwide. What do you think about some of these details? Do they matter?

Jeremy Roberts (2:09)

Well, A20 Pro is a significant improvement over the A19 Pro, the one that's powering the iPhone 17 Pro that released last year. You know, it's got some extra neural cores, very exciting, there's extra cores, excuse me, efficiency and performance cores. That's footage that you're showing there from the Pro announcement, including a vapor chamber for better cooling. It's supposed to be more efficient, improve the quality of your overall experience. It's really designed to optimize for AI, which Apple leaned pretty heavily into in this announcement. In fact, they described the iPhone as your intelligent personal hub, and I think they see this iteration, the iPhone Duo as being sort of the peak version of this personal hub, because it combines both the iPhone that we're used to with the content consumption capability that comes from something like an iPad Mini. So I think it matters. I don't think most folks are cracking open their phones and looking at the chips in them, but they do care about performance, they do care about battery life, and I guess we'll see if they care about AI.

SPEAKER_1 (3:09)

You'll be able to use the Apple Pencil with it as well. I know my son really likes the pencil for the iPad, and this is almost as you said, once it opens, it's almost like an iPad Mini. So pretty exciting there to get that piece. We also hear more about the other phones, and they're really looking for the premium phones. And by splitting the launch or cycle of phones, what they're doing is front loading the more expensive models, which I think was interesting as well. Maybe a John Ternes thought, it's interesting that they're doing it this way, but some more on the phones and final thoughts.

Jeremy Roberts (3:44)

Oh, absolutely. So, they announced the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro Max. So the smaller one and the bigger one, powered by the chip that you just noted. But what they very conspicuously did not announce was the iPhone 18 In fact, I saw no reference to the existence of an iPhone 18 So if you're in the market for an entry-level iPhone, the sort of iPhone that maybe has a 60 Hertz screen instead of what they call ProMotion, which is high refresh rate, maybe a slightly less sophisticated camera system, but comes in at a lower price point, you're going to be out of luck. Similarly, the iPhone Air didn't get an update in this announcement. And so really it's these Pro phones, the prices of which have gone up, I believe the smaller iPhone Pro is $1,200, it used to be $1,100.