A new, anonymously-sourced Bloomberg report describes what may be Apple\u2019s gambit for getting the public to fall in love with its new CEO, John Ternus: marry him to a new product they expect the public to love too.<\/p>\n
One small problem with that product: it\u2019s reportedly going to be a foldable iPhone with a starting price that will send seasoned Apple fans reaching for their Lipitor: $2,000.<\/p>\n
According to Bloomberg\u2019s Mark Gurman<\/a>, Ternus will officially take over as CEO on September 1, and inside of two weeks, he\u2019ll be the new CEO onstage at the product release event. Apple is, according to Gurman, \u201csetting him up to become the face of what it believes will be a blockbuster new product category.\u201d<\/p>\n Ternus was the engineer who led the original iPad project, and that connection will apparently be front and center. One of Gurman\u2019s sources apparently informed him that, \u201cThe idea that Ternus drove this whole process will be put front and center during the launch period.\u201d<\/p>\n Ternus\u2019s first public act as CEO will in other words be pitched as the birth of a new product\u2014expensive or not\u2014that feels like the culmination of his entire career up until this point. This has an undeniable narrative unity marketers can really sink their teeth into, sure. But meanwhile, the Apple Vision Pro will go down in history as the last major new product introduced by CEO Tim Cook. The wind-down of Cook\u2019s career will forever be associated with the mixed record of that device, which costs<\/a> $3,499\u2014or 12 easy payments of $291.58.<\/p>\n Cook not only rolled that thing out, but he made himself the world\u2019s primary cheerleader for it, claiming he wears it every day and incorporates it into his work<\/a>. But people rather predictably didn\u2019t buy it, and conventional tech biz wisdom now goes something like this: releasing the Vision Pro as an astronomically expensive retail product instead of using it as a cool R&D demo was basically a pothole on the road to the product Apple should have focused on to begin with: smart glasses<\/a>.<\/p>\n So that brings us to the astronomically expensive iPhone Apple looks poised to release. A $2,000 phone and a $3,500 pair of goggles are both major extravagances, but a comparison of the riskiness of these two products might not hold up to much scrutiny.<\/p>\n First of all, it\u2019s not going to confuse most people. It\u2019s just a smallish iPhone, and when you open it up, it\u2019s essentially a smallish iPad<\/a>. Simple.<\/p>\n Not only is it familiar, but so is the price. Samsung rolled out a $2,000 folding phone seven years ago<\/a>. In fact, Samsung charges even more<\/a> for an even more outlandish trifold smartphone. And aside from recent money problems brought on by the AI-related memory shortage<\/a>, Samsung\u2019s foldable devices mostly make economic sense.<\/p>\n Gurman confidently writes that Apple \u201cis likely to surpass its prior December-quarter record, with analysts forecasting a haul of nearly $150 billion.\u201d Those analysts probably haven\u2019t tried the folding iPhone yet, and neither have I. But unless it sucks in some unpredictable new way, it\u2019s hard to argue that\u2019s an unwise prediction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new, anonymously-sourced Bloomberg report describes what may be Apple\u2019s gambit for getting the public to fall in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[304,56584,84,45126,59,187034,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-552504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-apple","9":"tag-apple-vision-pro","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-foldable-iphone","12":"tag-gb","13":"tag-john-ternus","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}