Apple's New CEO Faces Pivotal Test With Foldable iPhone and AI Strategy

John Ternus walked into one of the most consequential moments of his career on September 9, stepping onto Apple's keynote stage for the first time as CEO—a role he had assumed just over a week earlier, on September 1, after Tim Cook's fifteen-year tenure at the helm. Ternus, a hardware engineer who had spent twenty-five years climbing through Apple's ranks to become senior vice president of hardware engineering, was about to introduce products that would define not just his leadership, but the company's direction for years to come. The timing was unforgiving. Rather than inheriting a company in transition, he was taking the stage as Apple prepared to unveil one of its most significant hardware categories in years.

The centerpiece was the foldable iPhone, a device that marked Apple's long-awaited entry into a market Samsung and other manufacturers had pioneered and refined over several years. Reports suggested a price tag exceeding $2,000, positioning it at the absolute premium tier of Apple's lineup—not a replacement for the standard iPhone, but an addition to it, a bet that consumers would pay substantially more for a new form factor. The challenge was substantial: making the technology feel like an obvious next step rather than a novelty, proving that the foldable category could be more than a niche experiment. Apple had deliberately stayed out of this space while competitors iterated. Now, with Ternus leading the charge, the company was finally ready to test whether its design philosophy and manufacturing expertise could transform a category that had remained relatively small.

But hardware alone would not determine Ternus's success. Apple Intelligence—the company's artificial-intelligence initiative—loomed equally large. For two years, Apple had positioned AI as central to its future, yet delays to some of its most ambitious Siri upgrades had raised questions about whether the company was moving quickly enough to compete with Google and OpenAI. The revamped Siri would attract intense scrutiny. Reports indicated that the new version would rely partly on technology from Google, an acknowledgment of the pressure Apple faced as it tried to strengthen its position in the AI race. The real test was not whether Apple would announce an entirely new AI product, but whether it could demonstrate features that were genuinely useful, reliable, and woven into the devices people already carried in their pockets.

Ternus's background made him an unusual choice for the role. He was the first product engineer to lead Apple, according to the Financial Times—a departure from Cook's operational and supply-chain expertise. That distinction carried weight. The question now was whether Ternus could maintain the operational discipline that had defined the Cook era while charting a convincing new direction in both hardware and artificial intelligence. Apple was also expected to unveil new high-end iPhone models, the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, alongside new Apple Watch models and AirPods, though the company had not confirmed these products ahead of the event.

What made this keynote different from the dozens that had come before was its symbolic weight. This was not simply another product cycle. It was the first major public showcase of Apple under new leadership, with a foldable iPhone and an AI strategy likely to provide the clearest early signals about where the company intended to go. Ternus had inherited a company worth trillions of dollars and a product line that had defined consumer technology for nearly two decades. Now he had to prove he could move it forward.