Apple’s first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, did not arrive because the company suddenly discovered folding screens. It arrived, executives say, because they finally had a product that felt like Apple.

In a sit-down at Apple Park with Tom’s Guide and TechRadar after the September event, CEO John Ternus and marketing chief Greg “Joz” Joswiak described a long, stubborn process: watch the category, reject most of what they saw, then redesign the hardware and iOS until the thing in their hands made them say yes.

“Our history had never been to rush into something with something half-baked,” Joswiak said. The concept itself was simple—a big display that folds into a pocket—but “what we saw others doing wasn’t particularly inspiring.” Two phones awkwardly stuck together produced a bulky square that “wasn’t really designed for the way you want to use a phone.”

Ternus framed the wait as a quality bar, not a calendar. “It’s always about when do we feel like we have a product idea that meets our bar… for quality and durability, but also for design.” The Duo, he said, became “such a good example of hardware and software coming together.” Internally it was a “green field” — a chance to rethink aspect ratio, hinge, display stack, and the OS itself.

The crease was the industry’s loudest complaint. Apple’s answer was a polymer-glass OLED stack with glass on both sides of the panel, plus a new way of applying the nano-texture finish already familiar from iPad and MacBook Pro. The inner surface is polymer, not glass — “cheap-feeling plastic surfaces… wavy, wrinkly,” Ternus said of rivals. Nano-texture “just wipes that all out. It’s beautifully flat. It feels amazing to touch.”

The first time he saw a working prototype: “It was like, yes, that’s it. This is what I want.” Then the hard part: “How do we go make it happen and make it real?”

They also locked the project down harder than usual. Leaks had already confirmed a foldable and even guessed at the unusual aspect ratio. “We put the extra security on it,” Joswiak said. “We had a very funny code name, which I won’t even repeat… We said we’re going to keep this one extra secret… and it worked.”

Software was treated as equally unfinished. Unfolded, the Duo is meant to feel like a small iPad, not a stretched phone. Controls moved to the right so the same thumb that works the closed “passport” shape still finds them when the device opens. “You open it up, it’s there under your right thumb again,” Ternus said. Consistent aspect ratios between inner and outer screens let interfaces scale instead of breaking.

Apple Pencil support — the first on an iPhone — was presented as opportunity, not heresy. “I’ve never really thought of it as a rule,” Ternus said of Steve Jobs’s old “no stylus” line. The Duo works without a Pencil. Some people will want one on the large inner canvas. “It’s called iPhone Duo for a reason. It is like two products.”

The price, which crosses the $2,000 mark, got a familiar defense: complexity and value, plus a line of other phones for everyone else. “This is an incredibly complex and well-engineered device,” Ternus said. iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max remain “the exact right device for a lot of our customers.” Joswiak piled on: the Pros are “iPhone 17 Pro on steroids,” with “massive year-on-year improvements.”

That includes a six-blade mechanical variable aperture. Open it for more light in the dark; stop it down so a group shot keeps both the front row and the back row sharp. Everyday users get automatic choices. Photographers get manual aperture, shutter, and focus. “Best of both worlds,” Ternus said. Asked whether tiny moving blades would survive drops, he noted iPhones already have moving focus and stabilization hardware. “This is what we do… material selection… reliability testing to make sure that things are going to be just as good many years down the road as they are on day one.”

Joswiak was less measured. “The product quality that we have… there’s nobody in the industry close to what we have.” How often does an iPhone fail? “It just [doesn’t].”

The A20 Pro, Apple’s first 2nm phone chip, is sold the same way: not as a spec sheet, but as experiences. Computational photography and on-device AI get more headroom. Graphics performance is up about 40 percent year over year — “that doesn’t come around very often” — paired with a new vapor chamber. Sustained performance jumped similarly. “This thing is on steroids,” Joswiak said. Reliability and software updates, he added, are why used iPhones hold value: “You want it to be fast three years down the road, four years down the road. Something like the A20 Pro is a monster.”

Asked who actually assembles those aperture blades — hands or robots — Ternus smiled: “That’s for us to know.”

Launch day itself, he said, is “why we do what we do.” Yesterday was “a particularly fun one.” After a decade of watching foldables, Apple’s executives sounded less like they had joined a category than like they had finally finished one.
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MacDailyNews Take: For so many years, it’s been such an easy choice: We’re getting iPhone Pro units. This year, with the Duo, we have a much more difficult choice!

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The post Apple CEO Ternus on the iPhone Duo: ‘This is what I want’ appeared first on MacDailyNews.

Apple (MacRumors):

Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants.

[…]

EU users will be able to access Siri AI on macOS 27 and visionOS 27. Developers located in the EU will not be able to test or use the new Siri AI features for their apps on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and watchOS 27.

[…]

According to EU regulators, the DMA requires Apple to give any AI system nearly unlimited access to a user’s device, as well as the ability to act on that access autonomously without a user’s ongoing visibility and control.

[…]

Apple designed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU. Apple also shared a plan to launch Siri AI in the EU while gradually rolling out this new solution over an 18-month period. The European Commission said no. In fact, the European Commission did not agree to any of Apple’s proposals.

This phrasing is not very clear, perhaps intentionally so. Apple is trying to give the impression that it did all this extra work to meet the DMA’s requirements, and yet the EC rejected its proposals, so it’s their fault Siri AI isn’t shipping in the EU. But it looks like the crux is that the Trusted System Agent is currently vaporware. What the EC rejected is that Apple wanted to be able to ship Siri AI now on the promise of future openness. The TSA would actually be built during this 18-month window of exclusivity. It’s not surprising that the EU would reject that proposal. The App Store doesn’t approve apps that flout the guidelines but promise to comply later. It doesn’t even entertain proposals of the form, “If I built this would it be approved?”

European Commission (via Steve Troughton-Smith, Update: John Gruber, Mastodon):

So first, the decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only.

Because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU.

What Apple is however not allowed to do, just like any other gatekeeper, is to close the market.

[…]

Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DA.

And this for at least 18 months on top of it. Guess what? That’s not an option.

Reuters (Hacker News):

Apple said it detailed its plans for Siri AI to EU regulators six months ago, along with a technical proposal to allow secure ​third-party access to that data.

“In essence, a commission that’s asking us to conduct a very risky experiment on many, ​many, many tens of millions of users,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing chief, told reporters, “and we only want to ship these capabilities when we can do so safely.”

The EU said not to ship it without the TSA, yet Joswiak spins this as the EU asking Apple to be reckless? And if Apple wanted to ship them safely, why did it stop working on them?

William Gallagher:

Apple spoke of having spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours on changes to comply with the EU. In the new report, though, Apple now says that it no longer knows what to work on.

So currently none of its engineers are working on adapting Siri AI to meet the EU’s demands.

It seems like Apple isn’t taking this very seriously. They’re more interested in trying to score PR points by blaming the delay on the EC rather than on building something compliant. So I guess the EC was prescient not to grant an exemption based on the promise that they’d follow through with the TSA.

Kyle Howells:

However, do I think Apple should be made to open up that level of system access?

Honestly yes. They are worried about protecting my data. But it’s MINE. Me, the user.

Stick a big privacy prompt, maybe a system settings screen and reboot, but I want access to my data!

We can look to BrowserEngineKit to see how well it works out to introduce a trusted intermediate layer that Apple doesn’t itself rely on. And this seems like a much harder problem.

Kyle Howells:

Yeah, that privacy layer is a stupid [non] starter. “Find the place my friend said we should go swimming and give me directions”

The only way that query can work with an intermediary layer is if the AI asks that layer to do the searching for them and only gets the response back.

Except that basically kills the advantage of LLM agents & instead delegate all the ‘smart’ parts to some dumb on device model Apple makes.

Previously:

• Siri AI Announced
• iOS 26.2 to Open Up iPhone–Apple Watch Wi-Fi Sync in EU
• AirPods Live Translation Blocked for EU Users
• Apple Appeals EU Digital Markets Act Interoperability Rules
• Apple Intelligence Available in EU
• Questioning EU Geo-Blocking Restrictions
• iOS Apple Intelligence in EU in April 2025
• EU iOS Envy
• No Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring in EU at Launch

Update (2026-06-11): Amy Worrall:

I keep seeing people (usually Americans) confused by where the EU is coming from with Apple and the DMA, eg “how can they care about privacy but also demand AI companies can access your data?”

My read is, the EU’s starting point is that a gatekeeper cannot treat itself as inherently more trustworthy than any other company. So if anyone’s AI can access your data, including Apple’s, it’s not up to the gatekeeper to say “we trust ourselves but don’t trust other companies” and force that on users.

The users should get to choose who they trust. And I think Apple is trying to draw a different line than it says. It worries that AI could be hijacked to steal your passwords and photos. But you can already install apps that manage and access that data. You can also install apps that access your calendar and mail data, and these apps can incorporate AI. Such apps actually get more access than what the EC wants because they must communicate with your servers directly. I would rather let an AI search my downloaded e-mails than read/write to my IMAP server, but Apple is blocking that option. The actual line it’s drawing isn’t that AI can’t access your data but that (aside from iMessage) it can only access it via additional engineering work and additional hoops for users to enter credentials. It seems like what Apple really wants is to make it hard for anyone to compete with Siri.

Update (2026-06-12): Cory Birdsong:

I’m skeptical that Siri AI is even capable of being meaningfully private or secure. As far as I know there is no mitigation for prompt injection, as Matthew Green describes here.

If it has access to private information, is exposed to external input and can access the Internet then how can they meaningfully claim it’s private or secure?

John Gruber:

There’s a lot to unpack here, including more background information — and on-the-record statements — from a briefing Apple held Tuesday that I was invited to at Apple Park.

It’s frustrating that Apple has said so little on the record. They want to communicate that their “offers for compromise have been rejected,” but what exactly did they offer? Personally, I don’t think the TSA would be a very good solution because it would lock in both the limitations of Apple’s technology and their role as a gatekeeper. But Apple did not even say that the EC rejected the idea of the TSA, only that it rejected their proposal to violate the law for 18 months while building it.

But the bottom line is that Apple’s public statements regarding the DMA and the European Commission have never been this strident before.

[…]

Now, they’re a bit more on war footing. There’s a massive gulf between what Apple is willing to do with Siri AI in the EU and what the Commission is demanding from Apple for DMA compliance.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The European Commission isn’t demanding anything, the law is demanding it. The laws have been in place for several years now, Apple is currently in default of the law on several fronts, and is fighting its existing fines.

When the Chinese government wanted access to user data, Apple complied, but when the EU parliament voted for their citizens to be able to choose how to share their own data, that put Apple on a “war footing.”

David Deller (Reddit):

There is some kind of irony in how Apple isn’t allowing Europe access to the new AI stuff; and meanwhile for the US, Apple is removing the setting for us to opt-out of it, effectively forcing it on us.

That’s how it is these days, huh? Either a government or a giant corporation makes our technology choices for us. We don’t get to choose for ourselves.

Previously:

• A Hard Bargain for Apple in China

Update (2026-06-17): John Gruber:

What exactly is the motivation for Apple and Google to engineer entirely separate systems for the EU to bring new features into compliance with the Commission’s broad interpretation of the DMA? Because if Apple doesn’t engineer a DMA-compliant version of Siri AI, iOS users in the EU will ... switch to Android, whose system-level AI was deemed noncompliant by the Commission a few months ago?

I briefly hoped that the DMA would lead to a sort of California effect for software, where products are designed for the stricter (more open, in this case) jurisdiction, and everyone else reaps the benefits, too, because that’s easier for companies than making separate versions of their products. But it turns out that Apple finds it well worth it to feature flag away the EU features it doesn’t want us to have, as well as the ones it doesn’t want to adapt for the DMA.

This doesn’t directly hurt Apple. It doesn’t force Apple to design, engineer, and ship a compliant EU-exclusive version of Siri AI that supports plug-and-play LLM back ends. It only hurts iPhone users who live in the EU, who are stuck with the old dumb version of Siri for the foreseeable future.

This demonstrates a market failure or legislative failure, depending on how you look at it. Both halves of the duopoly are in conflict with the law of the second largest economy in the word. Users will get a worse Siri, but this doesn’t bother Apple enough to do anything about it. Maybe the customers in the EU can be used as a bargaining chip. Neither Apple nor Google is worried that a competitor will come along with a compliant phone to challenge their dominance.

John Gruber:

Here we are two years later and I think the answer is more clear than ever which side of the continental divide is more fun.

Simon B. Støvring:

Gotta admit that as an EU citizen, I feel handicapped when it comes to brainstorming ideas to utilize Foundation Models.

Like, if I were to build a new app around them, it’s difficult to gauge if this is something Siri AI does out of the box when it isn’t available to me.

And unlike Apple, I intend to build software for the entire world.

Jack Wellborn:

Apple is acting out of greed and spite (see their hairbrained fee structures for alternative marketplaces as an example), but also yes, the DMA and enforcement thereof seems like a particularly difficult and capricious regulatory dynamic.

[…]

Those arguing that Apple is acting purely out of spite seem to suggest there is some obvious solution for iPhone Mirroring that would satisfy the interoperability mandate, but they never go into what that obvious solution is because they don’t know. They don’t know because I would guess no one does, not even Apple and certainly not the European Commission.

As far as I can tell, the European Commission doesn’t see it as their responsibility to help gatekeepers design features ahead of time in a way that should be compliant with the DMA. What they want instead is to decide whether or not a given feature runs afoul of the DMA after its released in the EU and presumably after they’ve gotten feedback from third parties.

Wojtek Pietrusiewicz:

If a developer emails Apple and asks if an app idea they have will be approved, they will get told to build it, submit it to the App Store, and see. The EU is the App Store here, and Siri AI is the app. I guess Apple don’t like their own policies.

I sympathize, even though Apple is in a better position than the developer, because it has more resources, because it would only potentially be blocked from shipping in one market, and because it can still sell its product in the EU, just with certain features disabled. Building something that might not be accepted is risky, but if you don’t submit anything that you think would be complaint with the rules, you don’t seem very serious. It’s still unclear to me exactly what Apple’s plan is. Its press release says it “will continue working” on bringing the features to the EU, but its SVP of marketing said in an interview that “none of its engineers are currently working on solutions.” Perhaps this implies that it’s banking on a legal or political solution rather than a technical one.

Update (2026-06-25): Jack Wellborn:

While the relationship between the European Commission and Google tells us nothing about playing ball, it tells us exactly how inconsequential support for alternative marketplaces is when it comes to regulatory scrutiny of integrated features. Apple hasn’t played ball with alternative marketplaces and now its new AI-based features are being withheld from the EU lest they get scrutinized for fines by the European Commission. Google hasn’t had to play ball with alternative marketplaces and now its new AI-based features are either being scrutinized for fines by the European Commission or being withheld lest they also get scrutinized. The European Commission is, rightly so in my opinion, regulating both operating systems equally and regardless of their support for alternative marketplaces.

Manton Reece:

It struck me today what a contrast this is with the rest of the AI world, increasingly connected via MCP. Imagine if Gmail was only accessible to AI on Android phones. If Teams was only accessible from a Windows Surface laptop. That is the kind of environment Apple’s policies create, with data locked into silos and monopolies free to leverage their existing strengths into dominance of new technologies too.

No thanks. Just as I should be able to sideload an app onto my own phone, I should be able to choose whether ChatGPT can access my iMessage history. The world is not going to come crashing down by giving users control of their own data.

Update (2026-07-02): Tim Hardwick:

Apple CEO Tim Cook held “constructive” talks with EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen on Tuesday about releasing Siri AI in the bloc while complying with the bloc’s digital rules, reports the Financial Times ($).

[…]

As for Apple’s proposed Trusted System Agent, a Commission official told the publication its contact with Apple on the idea was limited, and that it lacked a concrete proposal or details on how such an agent would work beyond the general concept. The official claimed Apple “focused on obtaining a green light to delay compliance.”

Update (2026-07-03): Nick Heer:

The DMA has been in effect for nearly four years and there is no reason why either party should be having so much difficulty with this proposal stage. Either the Commission is mischaracterizing Apple’s engagement, or Apple’s representatives need to be far better prepared.

It seems like Apple’s strategy is to encourage its customers to pressure the EU into changing the rules.

Previously:

• Android AI Violates DMA