John Ternus walked on stage after a movie-trailer bit, said hello, and suddenly Apple’s biggest show of the year belonged to a new CEO. Before taking the top job, he headed hardware engineering. You can tell. He gets as worked up about screen hinges as other CEOs do about grand strategic vision.
Tim Cook handed over a company that had already won. Harder gift than it sounds. Cook turned a computer maker into the most valuable business on earth. Services alone earn like a Fortune giant now. The Watch and AirPods both happened under him too, and they get less credit than they’ve earned.
Another Apple Watch color was never going to carry Ternus through his CEO debut. The folding iPhone could, so instead of spending the night walking through minor upgrades, he had a new hinge, a new form factor, and an audience waiting to see whether Apple had finally cracked the foldable problem.
The Duo opens up to a 7.6-inch Super Retina XDR display. Fold it shut and you get a 5.4-inch screen on the front, with the phone taking on a shape that’s closer to a passport than a normal iPhone. The two displays keep the same aspect ratio, too, so whatever you’re reading stays intact when you fold it closed instead of getting cropped or boxed in.
What got me is the hinge. Over 100 components. Algorithms match each hinge to its best-fit housing during assembly, a confocal laser then scans the topology of every single unit, and up to 25 microlayers of photopolymer get 3D printed on top afterward to iron the last of the waviness out of the panel. Carbon fiber plates hold the middle flat. Grade 5 titanium around the outside. Ceramic Shield 2 on the front, plus an IP68 rating I still wouldn’t test in a pool.
Losing Face ID is an absolute pain. They buried Touch ID into the power button, so instead of just glancing at your phone to open it, you’re forced to press it every single time. Own an Apple Watch and it’ll do the job instead, which is an expensive workaround for a feature we had five years ago.
Its camera is a step down from the Pro. A 48 MP Fusion Main, an optical-quality 2x telephoto, a 48 MP Fusion Ultra Wide. Fine hardware, just not the reason to buy the phone.
Duo Preview is what won me back. Put the live camera feed on the outer display and the person you’re shooting can see the frame, which takes some of the guesswork out of getting a group shot. Smart Take can handle the shutter once everyone is in place. Then there’s Kid Cue, playing Peanuts animations to pull a toddler’s attention back toward the lens.
IDC expects Apple to grab 40% of the foldable market by 2027. I can see the camera software helping more than the hinge. A foldable that makes it easier to take a decent photo of other people has a more obvious use than one that simply folds in half.
Six laser-cut blades, each thinner than a human hair, move inside the 48 MP Fusion Main camera to give the iPhone 18 Pro an aperture that opens and closes.
Wide open, it pulls in around 50% more light in a dark room. Narrowed, it holds detail deeper into a group shot. What I’ll use most often is manual shutter speed, tucked into a new Pro controls panel next to white balance and a live histogram. Motion blur by choice on an iPhone, and it only took a decade.
The low-key star of the event was Apple Reference Image, even if most people blinked and missed it.
Snap a photo and the camera hardcodes a cryptographic signature straight into the raw pixel data. That signature gets processed through Private Cloud Compute to generate an unalterable, tamper-proof twin that lives in your camera roll right next to the edit.
That’s a useful idea for photojournalism, where proving an image hasn’t been changed matters. The annoying part is how limited the rollout is. You have to opt in, it’s unavailable in China, and capture is switched off in the EU for now.
A20 Pro moves to 2 nm. Apple lifted the memory out of the chip’s thermal path and bonded the die straight onto a vapor chamber with three times the surface area of the iPhone 17 Pro part. Strange place to hide the headline, inside the packaging. Sustained performance climbs as much as 40% off the back of it, and the GPU is up to 40% quicker than A19 Pro if you prefer your gains stated the usual way.
The Dynamic Island shrank, and it now juggles three Live Activities. Neural Engine doubled to 32 cores while nobody was looking. Burgundy is the new color next to black, silver and glacier, and I want to see it in daylight before I say anything else.
45 hours is the number that jumped out at me. That’s Apple’s video playback figure for the eSIM-only iPhone 18 Pro Max, while the smaller 18 Pro reaches 36 hours. Apple calls it the biggest battery increase in iPhone history. I’m more interested in what happens when I stop treating the phone like a video loop and use it through a normal day.
The five-minute charge figure is almost as interesting. Apple says that gets you around seven more hours of playback. The eSIM-only models also have more room for the battery because there’s no physical SIM tray taking up space.
My HRV has been lower than usual for the past few days, so this is one of the Series 12 updates I’d actually pay attention to. The watch keeps checking my heart rate in the background, and HRV gets another reading every five minutes. That gives me something to look at when a bad number shows up. Was it just a rough couple of days, or has my baseline been sliding for a while?
Apple rebuilt the sensor array to manage it, with larger electrodes, ring-arranged photodiodes and brighter green LEDs, then tested the setup against competing wearables with a chest strap as the reference.
Some mornings I feel fine until I start warming up, and other days I can tell from within 2-3 minutes that I’m not there. That’s where the 0-10 readiness score could be useful to me. I’d check it before a session and compare it with how I feel once I’m moving. If the number is low and the weights feel heavy too, I’d leave the extra set for another day.
Ceramic Shield 2 makes the aluminum cases 60% tougher than Series 11. Battery holds at 24 hours, and a 15-minute top-up returns another 12.
My granddad was a land surveyor. So whenever a tech company boasts about GPS, I instinctively squint. Apple reckons the Ultra 4 has the most accurate positioning of any sports watch on the market. Fine. I’m locking it to my wrist next to a Garmin Fenix for a proper city long run before I repeat that.
Battery went up everywhere else, and one figure does the arguing. Max Extended Workout tracks 45 hours while still logging a GPS reading every second. Apple pitches that at anyone finishing a 100-mile race. Extended Workout at 25 hours with full GPS is the setting I’d leave on, and everyday use gets past two days. Titanium stays natural or black, while Ocean Band moves to a translucent silicone I’d want to handle first.
Radiant gold titanium turns up on a Hermès Series 12 for the first time, wearing a Noir satin Clou de Selle strap, and a new Rocabar Club band knits an elongated H into the weave. The Ultra 4 band extends to clear a wetsuit. Odd feature for a luxury strap. What I want out of the collection is the Fathom and Wonder face, where the Digital Crown sinks you through four shades of ocean.
An open-ear fit gives a noise canceller almost nothing to seal against. So cutting 50% more noise than AirPods 4 with ANC counts for more than the spec line suggests. The multiport acoustic architecture comes down from AirPods Pro 3, and a new generation of Adaptive EQ widens the range of ear shapes that get decent bass out of them.
What pleases me more than any of that is Live Translation reaching the whole lineup. Siri AI works hands-free, and you answer it with a nod. Four hours with ANC, 20 in the case.
Volume swipe on the stem reaches open-ear AirPods for the first time. Have it on a Pro for a week and going without feels like a punishment. Five hours with ANC, 22 with the case, charged off an Apple Watch puck or a Qi pad or USB-C.
Miss the name of a book someone just mentioned? Double-press the Digital Crown and Live Rewind can pull the previous 15 seconds of conversation into a transcript. 15 seconds doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to catch a title you missed without stopping the conversation to ask, “What was that book again?”
Siri Recap can also keep the title and key points from a conversation in the new Siri app. Sound Recognition goes a step further for deaf and hard-of-hearing users, with alerts for sounds such as sirens and doorbells even without an iPhone nearby. My Labrador Theia still has that last one covered. She hears the doorbell before anyone else in the house.
Audio stays inside the S11 chip, where the Secure Exclave handles it and wipes the data afterward. There’s no recording saved, and Live Rewind doesn’t identify the person speaking.
I also like that the watch makes a sound when Live Rewind starts, even with silent mode on. Someone sitting across from you gets a clear signal that the watch is transcribing. Both Live Rewind and Siri Recap are coming in beta later this year, though, and that makes me want to see how well they work before I rely on either one.
Elsewhere in watchOS 27, a single-handed tap gesture opens Smart Stack widgets, and Workout Buddy now runs without an iPhone.
Siri AI digs personal context out of Mail, Messages and Photos. It reasons over what’s on screen and acts inside third-party apps, and a dedicated Siri app keeps conversation history synced through iCloud. Siri turns up inside the Camera app as well, answering questions about whatever you point it at. That’s the demo I’d try first.
Last year’s delay made a skeptic of me. Notify Me watching a Safari page for a restock is the one I’d use, assuming it works. iOS 27 arrives September 14 with Apple Intelligence in 16 languages and Siri AI as an English beta, five more languages following in October. Server-backed features carry daily usage limits, and Siri AI won’t launch in the EU on iPhone at all, leaving European users stranded between regulators and Cupertino again.