Apple Inc. debuted a foldable iPhone today called the Duo, which brings an all-new shape to the company’s smartphones.
That’s not all that came out of its September event. Apple also unveiled the iPhone 18 Pro and Max, a new lineup of phones that deliver superior cameras and battery life thanks to brand-new custom silicon. For those looking to accessorize, the company also introduced the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, with heart-sensing systems to stay on top of health and AirPods 5 with powerful active noise cancellation.
The iPhone Duo: A foldable built by Apple
Similar in size to a passport when closed, and asymmetric with rounded corners, the Apple iPhone Duo stands out as people might expect from an Apple product.
It’s designed to provide both landscape and portrait modes while open (just turn it). Conceptually, the Duo maintains the same aspect ratio while open and closed, opening into an iPad-like experience and folding down into something small. Apple said the ideal is to give users an experience that scales readily from small to large.
The company said it provides the “largest display ever on an iPhone,” while still fitting in a pocket.
It has a closed 5.4-inch outer display — about 90% of the screen area of the newly released iPhone 18 Pro — which supports the Apple Pencil and touch. It opens up to 7.6 inches. It can also be unlocked with Apple Watch. It’s crafted from Grade 5 titanium, rigid inserts and a magnetic hinge to make it simple to open and close.
“IPhone Duo is the most transformational change to iPhone since the original,” said newly minted Chief Executive John Ternus. “With an entirely new design and intuitive experiences, it shows what’s possible when hardware and software are engineered together and redefines what it means to use a foldable phone.”
When opened and set on its side, the device can split apps side by side, letting users watch a movie and text, or type a document or something else. This makes it a productivity monster. Or they could lay it on a table, partially folded, so it pops up like a laptop and lets them watch a TV show. Or they could tent it so it can be transformed into a bedside clock or calendar.
Apple said numerous apps are being updated to take advantage of the hardware. No doubt there will be games, productivity apps, content and capabilities that allow users to use the multiple screens.
The iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max
The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max deliver an advanced pro camera system alongside increases in battery life and performance, providing users what they need to sustain on-the-go productivity, entertainment and AI capabilities.
Apple focused heavily on the new phone’s ability to wield new artificial intelligence tools such as Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, becoming an intelligent personal hub for users who will use features within iOS 27. Now Siri, Apple’s AI personal assistant, winds through even more apps and features across the device hardware, enabled by voice and text.
Siri AI also can access apps, run automations, activate via the camera, interact with personal information, and interact contextually with user needs. For example, users could say what they want to do for dinner, take a picture of ingredients on a grocery shelf, and ask what they could make with them; Siri could reply with potential recipes.
Apple said the iPhone 18 Pro with eSIM-only models can deliver up to 36 hours of video playback and up to 45 hours on the iPhone 18 Pro Max. Charging enhancements also let it charge to 50% in around 15 minutes, or wirelessly to 50% in 30 minutes; the Pro Max can also charge wired in five minutes to about seven hours.
The company said it achieved many of these innovations with a new thermal management system combined with A20 Pro silicon custom packaging inspired by Apple’s M-series silicon. It places the chip’s die side by side with the memory, allowing it to attach directly within a next-generation vapor chamber. This gives the heat-generating and dissipation surfaces three times the area of the previous-generation iPhone 17, dramatically improving sustained performance and enabling a 40% gain over previous phones.
Heat is a major killer of performance and battery life in the CPU and battery. When a CPU heats up, it must throttle back to avoid damage or reduced battery life in a phone’s tight confines.
Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4
The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 bring highly accurate heart rate sensing to a wearable, with advanced health sensors and what the company says are more comprehensive health and fitness features.
Today, Apple announced the upcoming Health Sensing system and S11 chip, which will come with both watches. This will enable higher-frequency heart-rate and heart-rate variability measurements throughout the day, powering enhanced health and fitness measurements and a redesigned Health app for iPhone.
The Health app will use this enhanced data suite to provide advanced tracking for giving people a better profile of how they’re doing throughout the day. For example, it will tell them when they should rest up, pace themselves, be ready to get going again, and then push themselves. That way they don’t overdo their routine. It can base it on their basal response, stress levels and other indicators.
The company said HRV is a key indicator of stress and recovery. The watches now measure it up to 24 times more often, and users can view it in the Heart Rate app.
This indicator can be combined with lab results, such as blood draws, for even more intelligence and diagnostics.
For users who are hard of hearing or deaf, Apple is making the watches even more intuitive and useful. Since watches sit on a user’s wrist and listen all day, they can work as a watchdog (so to speak). They can work as sound recognition and buzz when important sounds happen in the environment, such as sirens, alarms, doorbells or a baby crying.
Another feature called Live Rewind allows a user to tap the crown twice and see a text snippet of the last 15 seconds of conversation on the display. This can help them quickly review what they might have missed, so they can catch up on whatever they might have missed. Users can then ask Siri about the context or save it to the app for later.
Siri Recap, an ambient listening capability, can create high-level summaries of conversations happening around them that users can review later. Since that can be a privacy problem, users can choose the times it is on – only at work, never at work, only at certain times. Apple stressed that it does not record audio and therefore audio is never available and summarized bullet points are private; only the user and the times it is active are controlled precisely by the user.
Finally, Shazam instantly detects music playing nearby and lets people quickly identify the artist and song title and quickly add it to their library.
AirPods 5 bring quiet to noisy places
Apple continued its ongoing battle against loud sounds with AirPods 5, saying that the new release delivers the “industry’s best active noise cancellation” in an open-ear design, removing up to 50% more external noise than the previous generation.
Users can also respond to Siri using head gestures, such as nodding, and use Live Translation to help understand people across languages. For example, with just a touch of the stem, it will connect to their iPhone and Siri will listen briefly to another person speaking Spanish and then begin translating live, allowing them to understand the other speaker.
In addition to ANC, AirPods 5 come with a transparency mode that uses computational audio to improve nearby sounds within the natural human vocal range, making it easier to follow conversations and other sounds users might want to notice, such as cars or machinery. Adaptive audio will blend ANC with environmental conditions to reduce ambient noise while preserving foreground voices and nearby sounds, and reduce media volume so conversations can be heard.
The company said battery life also improved to five hours of listening time with ANC, one hour more than the previous generation; with the charging case, it extends to 22 hours with ANC. The wireless charging case also supports Qi-compatible chargers and USB-C.
