John Ternus talks iPhone Duo, ‘cheap and crappy’ foldables in new interview

TIME has just published its list of the best inventions of 2026, and iPhone Duo made the list with John Ternus featured on the magazine cover. Here’s what Ternus said in his interview with TIME.

John Ternus on iPhone Duo origins, delay to market, more

John Ternus sat down with TIME for a wide-ranging interview centered on iPhone Duo, but also covering a variety of other topics, including AI.

Regarding the iPhone Duo, which is hitting the market nearly a decade after other foldables, Ternus was involved in early foldable work at Apple all the way back in 2011.

In 2011, when many people still carried around flip phones, Ternus and five other engineers filed a patent application for foldable electronic devices, exploring what kind of batteries and circuit boards might be needed for such an idea. “It felt clear that we were going to eventually get to a place where OLED displays were going to be flexible,” Ternus says.

Ternus wasn’t a fan of early attempts at foldables from other companies in the 2010s. He says, “The other examples in the world felt kind of cheap and crappy.”

The drive to achieve a foldable unlike its competitors is evidenced by a story from Richard Dinh, Apple’s VP of Product Design.

Along the way, Ternus encouraged the team to invest more time and effort in the project, even as other foldables beat them to market. Dinh says that at one point, he asked Ternus whether his team should proceed with a top surface material similar to those of its competitors, which Dinh felt had flaws but was potentially good enough.

“And he was like, ‘Look, Rich, you’ll know when it’s the right thing.’ And that gave us the confidence to really push the boundaries on innovation and manufacturing, and fly worldwide to connect our suppliers together and come up with the nanotexture [a surface technology],” Dinh says. The result—a surface made from a custom polymer and built atop a hinge with more than 100 tiny interior precision components—has impressed its first users, who have said they can barely detect a crease at all.

The story also mentions that Ternus “has devoted much of his early tenure as CEO to obsessing over design, spending multiple days a week in the studio with the industrial-design and human-interface teams.” This echoes previous Bloomberg reporting around Ternus’s early priorities.

Other topics Ternus addresses in the interview include:

• Apple Intelligence’s reliance on Gemini technology: “There’s not really a goal that we have to make every single thing in a product. We make the things where we can really bring differentiation.”
• Siri AI’s unique advantages: “Everything in your life is on your phone. With Siri AI, you can leverage all that information to do things, learn things, and figure out things in a way that nobody else can do.”
• Not sleeping much before September event: “I was on such a moment of adrenaline and caffeine and excitement for the day.”

The full TIME article is well worth a read, available here.

What are your takeaways from the latest John Ternus interview? Let us know in the comments.

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