We was like, "Yes, that's it." Right? And like, "This is what I want."
We're here at Apple Park and there's a lot to unpack from the iPhone event. And Apple finally entered the foldable market with the iPhone Duo alongside the iPhone 18 Pro. We sat down with Apple's Jaws and new CEO John Ternus to break down everything from the new nano texture display and the variable aperture camera to Apple's whole approach to on-device AI. Here's the breakdown.
So, there was a lot of products announced at the Apple event yesterday, but I think the one that probably got the most attention is the iPhone Duo because it's Apple's first foldable phone. I think John and Jaws, I think for you, what do you feel like was the Eureka moment for Apple to say this now is the time for us to release a foldable phone and get something out there? Because obviously you're not the first to this category. You're able to study it, but what makes the Duo different? And maybe for each of you, what was that Eureka moment where you're like, we're ready, like the market is ready for an Apple foldable phone?
I think for us, it's always about when do we feel like we have a product idea that meets our bar, right? It meets our bar for quality and durability, but also for design. And what I think is particularly amazing about the Duo is it's such a good example of hardware and software coming together to make something really special. And it was, I mean, it was like a green field of opportunity for us because there was opportunity to rethink so many different things and I think you see that in the hardware and you see that in the software and the design and yeah, it all kind of came together and felt like it was the right product.
Yeah. I mean what we said in the keynote was really the way we talked internally. I mean look the concept simple.
Like you want a big display and you want to be able to fold it and put in your pocket. Uh, but as John talked about in the keynote, what we saw others doing wasn't particularly inspiring, right? And so, and as you know, look, our history had never been to rush into something with something half-baked.
And we're amazed, you know, I'm constantly amazed. I work with such incredible engineers and designers that they took it upon, how do we do this, right? How do we do this in an Apple sort of way? And to me, that was really kind of twofold, no pun intended. Uh, one was changing that aspect ratio, right? Instead of having the two phones, you know, as John talked about, awkwardly stuck together, create this big square and this kind of awkward big bulky product that wasn't really designed for the way you want to use a phone. Having the different aspect ratio that was much more made for us and then, which I think everybody really got yesterday and seeing the product, the amount of work that our software teams did from both the design side and execution side that just says this is unlike any foldable that's out there because the experience is so poor, you know, and this is like, this feels like what Apple does and yeah, it's amazing.
And obviously you guys not first to market. This is a foldable industry. It's been around for almost a decade. But I'm kind of curious about for you where you really sort of had that understanding that the thing that was going to make the critical difference, the thing that people talk the most about when it comes to foldables is the crease. And you guys came up with this nano texture. And as far as I know, no one else has that. People have tried different things. But what was the thinking behind that? Where did that sort of like come together saying you know we have this product we have this category people are talking about this thing what is the sort of simple yet natural solution?
I think, I mean, the entire approach to the display and the hinge was one of, it's kind of traditional Apple, what we do, we get into it, we go to first principles, we start thinking how can we make this great. You design it as a complete system so it's this incredibly complex hinge that's built to maximize flatness, this really unique display stackup. We have glass on both sides of the OLED so that it makes it more durable and flatter. And then the nano texture, you know, people love the nano texture on iPad and on MacBook Pros. And we kind of came up with an entirely new way of making that because what's interesting is, you know, the inner display, that front top surface, unlike a traditional phone, isn't a glass surface. It's a polymer surface. And I think if you've seen what's been out there, all these just kind of cheap feeling plastic surfaces. They don't feel good to touch. They're kind of wavy, wrinkly, all that sort of things. And the nano texture just wipes that all out. It's beautifully flat. It feels amazing to touch. And it's incredibly durable.
So, first time you saw that, what did you think? What did you feel?
It was like, yes, that's it. This is what happens when we get, you know, we always know we're on the right track when we get that first, you know, design model or prototype. You go, oh, this is it, right? And like this is what I want. And then once we have that, then it's like, okay, how do we go make it happen and make it real?
And I will say what I'm super proud of, kept it secret.
That was one that we put the extra security on it, right? We didn't talk about it to anybody. We had a very funny code name, which I won't even repeat, you know, that had nothing to do with it. Uh but we said we're going to keep this one extra secret because look, people knew through leaks that we were working on a foldable. Unfortunately, they got the aspect ratio and a lot of coincidental instances of people finding that an interesting aspect ratio. Uh and this is one we said, okay, we're going to really keep this one locked down. And it worked.
Worked. Yeah.
What about the on the software side? I think one of the things that's most ambitious and I think a little bit of a risk is just like reimagining iOS for a foldable phone like so putting all the controls on the right hand side. Yeah. For example, so what was the decision-making behind that and like how is the software experience different on a foldable phone versus a regular slab phone?
Well, I think that's what I was saying before about the kind of the joy of having something completely new and when we started as Josh said, we started with this. If you're going to build, you know, a foldable phone, you want that unfolded state to be the best thing it can possibly be. And obviously, we've been building experiences like that with iPad for a long time. We knew what we wanted. Then you get this sort of passport shape. And very quickly, the software team said, you know, we can move the controls over to the right side and recover all of that kind of vertical space that you want. And then it turns out to be an incredibly intuitive control system because it's there under your right thumb when it's closed. You open it up, it's there under your right thumb again. So, I think that's one of the biggest things with iOS is you're going to have two screens. How do you make sure that it feels continuous and you know the idea of building the aspect ratio? It's consistent between the inner and outer so everything scales proportionately and then that allows the software team to really build things that map really well from the outer screen to the inner screen.
A quick follow-up on that just because I'm an avid Procreate user and so we have two versions of Procreate. We have one for the phone, a pocket Procreate and then we have one for the tablet. Here's a device which is both the phone and ultimately it opens to a tablet. Can you give me any sense of like for an app like that does the experience transform more into a tablet experience on the inside or does it stay in some hybrid state?
One of the things that I love and John just said it is we have an incredible iPad experience. As you know those other tablets are giant phones, right? And we've always had an iPad OS experience, an iPad experience that is built around this larger canvas. And so as John said, we're bringing our expertise to our apps on that, but so are developers. Uh one of the things that you, I mean you saw some of the, you know, we went out a little bit broader than we might normally in reaching out to our third party developers to have them do some work as to how are they going to take advantage of this and certainly they were combining their experiences and their experiences in their apps that are sometimes it's the iPhone and then when you open it into the broad it feels more like they've done with the iPad. Uh and I think it's just brilliant. You saw some of the work. I mean, it's amazing. And what's really cool, it didn't take them that long. You know, this wasn't like, oh my god, we got to go through this incredible, you know, starting from scratch because they have such great iPhone experience. They have iPad experience. We already had so many APIs that allowed you to change from different sizes and aspects, you know, so easily. And then we've extended it with some new APIs for, I was going to call it the code name for the Duo. You know, they were able to, you know, we always have to convert now to talking real, the work was really good, really fast and I mean you saw, I mean the Netflix app alone was just, it's really cool, was so cool.
So, if someone has an iPad app or iPad mini app in particular, is it any easier for them to quote unquote port their apps over to the Duo experience or is it just a little bit different?
It is actually. Yeah. I part, sorry, partly because they've imagined that already. How do they treat their app when it's in this sort of size and aspect? So that's a huge benefit and again that's a benefit we have with having, you know, a couple million iPad apps whereas again on the other side it is basically how do you make their phone apps bigger and so we, yeah, it's an advantage to start with.
But I think the kind of excitement and enthusiasm that our internal developers had to exploring how can they make this experience really great. I think our developers are going to feel the same thing and we have obviously so many incredible developers. I'm super excited to see what the Procreate folks do. They are amazing and I'm sure they'll do something great.
Do you think the fact that the phone is not coming out until October gives you a little bit of an advantage because then developers have a little bit more time? So like Slack was mentioned as an example yesterday where it's not just like a blown up phone app. It'll be like dual pane. Like do you feel like?
Yeah, that's a huge thing for us. Again, that's why we went so out of our way with iPad development both internally and with our third parties. We didn't want iPad to feel like a big phone, right? And that's exactly what Android tablets felt like. They just felt like big Android phones. And same thing applies here. We don't want it to just feel like we just took that extra space and made it bigger. Sometimes that's okay. That makes sense. But it's like how do you take more advantage of this larger canvas? And our tools help us, you know, help developers do that. The enthusiasm, we had no problem getting anybody to come in and want to do this. Uh that was a lot of enthusiasm. And then their enthusiasm once they were working on it, you see it in the work. It's like they were like this is so cool.
Yeah.
So, so obviously pencil support, which is kind of a break, an unwritten rule. Maybe the iPhone doesn't need a pencil or a stylus. I mean we could use our fingers or sort of a dumb one. And then of course the iPad came along. It's a whole different experience and you have a pencil. But now we have the first iPhone that supports pencil. Like what does it feel like to break that rule? Um, and then what does that mean for future iPhones?
Well, you know, we're never going to talk about future iPhones.
