苹果第一部折叠 iPhone，9 月 9 日发布：新 CEO 上任第八天的第一场大考

Let's start with a date: September the ninth.

On that day, Apple is holding a launch event.

A launch event is when a company brings out something new and shows it to everyone.

This one is a bigger deal than the launches of previous years.

Because Apple is bringing out something it has never made before: a foldable iPhone.

Let's start by looking at what this phone actually is.

It has two screens.

Closed, what you see is the outer one, five point three inches.

That size is close to an ordinary phone.

Slip it in your pocket, make a call, check the time — it's all perfectly convenient.

Open it up and there is a bigger one inside, seven point eight inches.

That screen is roughly the size of a small book.

Watching films, reading the news, getting writing done — all of it is far more comfortable than on the small screen.

One machine, two ways of using it.

And the price?

Two thousand dollars and up.

Two thousand dollars, in America, buys you two decent ordinary phones.

There is a question here worth sitting with.

Apple was not the first to make a folding phone.

As far back as 2019, other companies were already selling them.

That was seven years ago.

So why did Apple wait this long?

The answer is simple: this thing is genuinely hard to build.

Hard how?

First, the crease.

After a screen has been folded in the same place tens of thousands of times, a mark is left down the middle.

Catch it in the light and you can see it.

Second, the hinge in the middle.

The phone opens and closes over and over every day, and the hinge has to survive years of it.

The moment the hinge loosens, the screen starts to fail.

Third, dust.

An ordinary phone is one sealed piece; dust cannot get in.

A folding phone has a gap down the middle, and a single grain of sand getting in can scratch the screen.

In 2019, that first batch of folding phones ran into exactly this.

The company sent review units to journalists, and within days several of them had broken.

That launch had to be postponed.

Apple watched all of this happen.

This is really Apple's standard way of operating.

Apple is rarely the first company to do anything.

Before the iPod, the market was already full of machines that played music.

Before the iPhone, smartphones already existed.

Apple's approach is: let other people fall into the holes first, wait for the technology to mature, then build a better version.

People who like Apple call this patience.

People who don't call it slow, and say Apple no longer dares to take risks.

There is something to both readings.

Besides the phone, there will be other things at this event.

A new iPhone 18 Pro, new watches, a new operating system — all arriving together.

But everyone's attention is on the one that folds.

And there is a last thing, possibly more worth noticing than the phone itself.

Apple has changed its boss.

The previous boss was Tim Cook, and he ran Apple for well over a decade.

On September the first, he handed the seat to Ternus.

Ternus used to run hardware — phones, computers, all of that was his.

Which is to say: he takes over on the first, and holds his first launch event on the ninth.

Eight days in between.

A new boss, standing on stage for the first time, holding the most different phone the company has made in over a decade.

You could not call that an uneventful opening.

Most people will be watching two things.

First, whether this phone is actually good to use.

Second, whether Apple without Tim Cook is still the same Apple.

The first question gets answered on September the ninth.

The second one will take years.

Think about it: if the phone in your hand could open out to twice the size, but cost two thousand dollars, would you go and buy it?