John Ternus described other folding phones as feeling ‘kind of cheap and crappy.’
John Ternus. Photo: Getty Images
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Apple’s new iPhone Duo, its first folding screen device, is available for preorder today. It’s a landmark gadget for the tech giant, and thus it’s important to promote the device in the right way to the paying public. So it’s fascinating that Apple’s new CEO John Ternus has thrown his weight behind this promotional effort by partaking in a classic business trick: talking some smack about the competition.
In an interview with TIME, Ternus was talking about the entire foldable smartphone market and, in particular, numerous earlier efforts from rivals to sell folding-screen smartphones. The category has existed for several years, with Samsung’s Galaxy Fold from 2019 as one notable example. But the Fold, and similar devices that have gone on sale since, suffered numerous serious design compromises, including the fragility of the folding screen as well as the fact that the crease tended to be visible in a way that upset the user experience.
Ternus put it more clearly. “Other examples in the world” of this kind of device “felt kind of cheap and crappy,” he said.
Can you imagine Apple’s previous CEO Tim Cook uttering such a polished, classy bit of smack talk? It’s hard to even think of Cook, famously soft-spoken and often visibly reserved when on camera, uttering a word like “crappy.”
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But Ternus did, and he owned it. He also has a point.
While critics have concentrated on the iPhone Duo’s high starting price of $2,000 as a problem for Apple, earlier folding phones weren’t exactly low cost, either. When the Galaxy Fold finally went on sale in September 2019 after months of delays, it cost $1,980. In 2024 Huawei’s Mate XT triple-screened foldable went on sale for an equivalent U.S. price of around $2,800.
It’s devices in that category that Ternus has branded as “cheap and crappy.” But he was not talking about the price directly. He was perhaps saying that for the price, you got a phone that felt like it didn’t deliver an equivalent feel in terms of quality and value for money. You were paying a premium for something that was, effectively, a weak product.