Summary

Gruber offers an exhaustive first-look at Apple's September 2026 event, framing it as a historic transition from Tim Cook to John Ternus as the face of Apple. He praises the Bond-homage keynote opening and finds Ternus's 'intelligent personal hub' doctrine a credible echo of Jobs's 2001 digital hub strategy. The iPhone 18 Pro gets qualified praise for incremental but meaningful camera and chip improvements, with notable price hikes at higher storage tiers. The new Apple Watch ambient audio features (Live Rewind, Siri Recap) draw measured defense from Gruber, who argues Apple leading with privacy-minded implementations is better than ceding the space to less careful competitors. The centerpiece is the iPhone Duo: Gruber concludes Apple has almost certainly executed the foldable form factor as well as anyone could, but remains genuinely and openly skeptical about whether a book-shaped foldable phone is a good idea in the first place — with the lack of Face ID singled out as a potential first-generation killer.

Key Insight

Apple has almost certainly built the best possible foldable phone with the Duo's elegant 1.4:1 aspect ratio, but the deeper question — whether anyone actually wants a book-shaped foldable phone — remains wide open, and the missing Face ID gives Gruber serious pause about first-generation success.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  He's a natural born éminence grise. And if this was Cook's last appearance in a keynote, he went out on top.

• 7

  Is the Duo good? I do not know. Is it different? Very much.

• 8

  The lack of Face ID is a serious sad-trombone bummer, and in my opinion could sink the first-generation model.

• 8

  Square being a shitty aspect ratio is half the reason almost no one has bought those things. The other half of the reason is that no developers truly adapted software to take advantage of the double-area inner displays.

• 6

  In some ways iOS on the Duo feels more different from iOS on all other post-iPhone-X phones than iOS on the original iPad felt from iOS on the iPhones of that time.

• 3

  No one in the keynote described the iPhone Duo as the future of iPhone, like they did when introducing the iPhone X in 2017.

• 6

  I feel quite certain already that Apple has nailed it with the Duo. But having only seen the keynote spiel and poked around with one in hand for a few minutes Wednesday afternoon, I think it remains an open question whether a book-shaped foldable phone is a good idea in the first place.

• 7

  History doesn't repeat but it does echo, and Ternus's 'intelligent personal hub' sure sounds exactly like Jobs's 'digital hub' echoing a quarter century later.

Tone

opinionated, analytical, skeptical