Apple Unveils First Foldable iPhone as AAPL Stock Slips 1.17% to $316.22

Ternus's First Keynote

Apple lifted the curtain on its first foldable iPhone on Tuesday, September 9, opening an autumn keynote that doubles as the first major hardware showcase under Chief Executive Officer John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook at the top of the company on September 1. The event hands the new chief the most scrutinized product stage in consumer technology, and it marks Apple's biggest design shift since the iPhone X arrived in 2017. The fall lineup centers on a book-style foldable alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max; the standard iPhone 18 is conspicuously absent, with the company having delayed that model to spring 2027. The three-phone structure gives Ternus a clean narrative: the foldable is the story, the Pro models are the volume. All three announced devices are expected to run the new A20 Pro chip, which Apple has tied directly to on-device Siri artificial intelligence improvements — silicon built to juggle everything from local model inference to the decentralized applications (DApps) that users open through Web3 browsers. The chip debut lands amid a sharp climb in memory prices, a cost wave that has already pushed iPhone 18 Pro pricing upward, and analysts expect the foldable's retail tag to sit above earlier generations as a result. The pricing question has grown more acute, not less, as component inflation accelerated through the year. Sell-side positioning was constructive heading into the keynote: HSBC held a Buy rating with a $366 price target, while Citi projected 7.3 million foldable iPhone unit sales even at a price near $2,000. The market itself was more cautious. Apple shares closed Tuesday's session down 1.17% at $316.22, per TradingView's AAPL quote, although the stock remains near the top of its 52-week range — a sign investors are treating the keynote as a pricing event as much as a product one.

China's Foldable Counterattack

Apple is not entering an empty field. On September 7, Huawei introduced its tri-fold Mate XT2, extending a line the company pioneered and pricing it between $2,980 and $3,725 — roughly double the $2,000 figure Citi assumes for Apple's device. Xiaomi debuted its passport-sized 18 Fold the same day, starting near $1,540, giving Chinese buyers a three-tier ladder of domestic foldables before Apple's hardware even reached the stage. Both devices landed two days before Apple's presentation, effectively framing the week's conversation around Chinese hardware. The silicon story underlines how far proprietary chip design has spread across the industry: Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro and Apple's A-series are both engineered in-house rather than bought from merchant vendors such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Cost pressure, though, is industry-wide, and Huawei Executive Director Richard Yu was blunt about it. “Pricing right now is a real challenge, because memory costs have risen sharply. We adopted a lot of new technology, and the cost pressure has been enormous,” Yu said. The complaint lands awkwardly for Apple, whose foldable must clear the same inflated memory market at scale. The competitive scoreboard explains the stakes for Ternus. Huawei led China's smartphone market last quarter with a 22.6% share, ahead of Apple at 18.1% and Xiaomi at 12.4%, and it also captured most of the country's foldable shipments. Apple's share in China has been under pressure for multiple quarters, and the foldable segment — the fastest-growing slice of the premium market — is precisely where its absence has been most visible. Whether Apple's entry shifts that balance may depend less on Tuesday's specifications than on the pricing leverage Ternus deploys against entrenched rivals that have already fixed their price points for the season. A premium launch that lands above Huawei's entry pricing would hand rivals an argument Ternus does not want to gift. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

Memory Costs Bind Both Camps

Memory-cost inflation is the single thread binding both storylines: it lifts Apple's bill of materials and lends weight to Huawei's public complaint, which means pricing — not specifications — will decide this foldable cycle. Our desk sees no keynote stress in the wider risk complex: Bitcoin (BTC) changes hands at $78,679.26 and Ethereum (ETH) at $2,491.64 as of publication, per COINOTAG's live market snapshot, with no unusual dislocation around the Apple event. The durable takeaway is that consumer silicon is absorbing AI workloads once reserved for data centers — a trajectory that overlaps with blockchain's own push toward edge execution, championed by projects such as Internet Computer (ICP).