In four months’ time we will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the day Steve Jobs walked on to a San Francisco stage and unveiled the first iPhone. Though “celebrate” may not be quite the word these days. The device Jobs presented to the world that January morning in 2007 is now widely reviled as the source of many modern discontents, from a teenage mental-health crisis to the shredding of collective attention spans.
Be that as it may, that presentation – in which Jobs held up a single slab of metal and plastic (glass would come later), declaring that Apple was reinventing the phone by folding an iPod, a mobile and an internet device into one – proved to be the starting gun for a media love affair with technology hardware, propelling the subject out of niche magazines and specialist websites and on to the front pages and the top of broadcast bulletins.
That has now changed. Last week, reaction was muted when, in his first major public outing, Apple’s new chief executive John Ternus presented the iPhone Duo. Retailing at $1,999 (€1,734), and rising to an eye-watering $3,199 for the fanciest version, the foldable device arrives years after broadly similar handsets from Samsung, Google and Motorola. Ternus, who took the reins from Tim Cook at the start of the month, called it the most transformational change to the iPhone since the original. The world, however, just said “meh”. In the mid-2020s, Apple, no longer the innovator, simply waits for rivals to iron out the creases (literally) before stepping in.
This is not a column about Apple losing its mojo. There have been plenty of those across Cook’s long tenure as Jobs’s anointed successor. Cook focused more on services, wearables and the relentless engineering of margin, and less on the sort of breakthrough innovations his predecessor traded in, and the company’s coffers swollen accordingly. Apple today is worth many multiples of the firm Jobs left behind. In the process, Cook also drained the drama out of the hardware launch. Or was it more that the sector as a whole simply matured and ran out of innovative fizz?
Either way, the audience drifted off. Readers, and buyers, weary of the infinitesimally small improvements to processor speed, screen size and camera resolution trotted out at each launch, correctly concluded that they did not actually need the new model after all. A decade ago, the typical smartphone owner replaced their handset a little over every two years. That cycle has now stretched to around 3½, according to Counterpoint Research. And when they do need a replacement, an increasing number turn to the thriving refurb market.
In fact, 2026 feels increasingly like 2006. Back then, there was a widespread expectation that a fresh wave of devices was about to arrive to exploit the extra capacity of the new 3G networks. Abortive efforts like Motorola’s Rokr, the clumsy iTunes phone Apple itself had lent its name to a year earlier, had failed to catch the public imagination. Research in Motion’s BlackBerry had carved out a devoted niche among executives and professionals, but it was a tool for the corporate few rather than an object of mass desire. Then came Jobs, in his trademark black turtleneck, brandishing his magic rectangle and, in a stroke, changing the world.
The sense now is that something comparable may be coming, and that it will arrive when someone finally designs a device to sit between human beings and artificial intelligence. Many eyes are on the man who actually designed that first iPhone. Jony Ive, Apple’s former design chief, has spent the past year working with OpenAI, whose chief executive Sam Altman bought Ive’s hardware start-up, io, for around $6.5 billion in 2025 and handed him design authority across the company. The pair have promised a new class of AI-native hardware.
The work is shrouded in secrecy, but leaks so far suggest something intriguing. The device is said to be pocket-sized, aware of its surroundings through cameras and microphones, and, most strikingly, screenless. Altman has described it as a calmer, more peaceful thing than the smartphone, a “third core device” to sit alongside the laptop and the handset rather than replace them, and has talked of weaning us off screens altogether. He has also promised to ship it faster than any product in history, though reports in the Financial Times suggest the team has wrestled with the gadget’s personality, its handling of privacy and its sheer computing demands. The much-trailed 2026 launch has yet to materialise.
‘Duo is the most pricey iPhone to date’: reactions to Apple’s foldable phone
These reports are fascinating, not least because they are so against the cultural grain of the past decade, in which vertical video streamed through smartphones has become the dominant form of media consumption. Will an audience raised on that endless scroll really be seduced by a screenless box that asks them to look up and out? Few people expect the hand-held screen to die. But the vision, as far as it can be discerned, is of a device that interposes itself between its owner and everything else, other gadgets included, acting as a kind of ambient go-between that listens, watches and answers on our behalf.
If successful, it would be the most profound shift since 2007, and would intensify the thicket of questions which AI has already raised about privacy, attention and who exactly is mediating our contact with the world. That is, of course, assuming the intelligence it channels does not kill us all first.