The iPhone is now Apple’s ‘intelligent personal hub’

Twenty-five years ago, I sat near the front of the room while then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs rolled out Apple’s digital hub strategy, a vision in which the Mac would become the central manager of all manner of portable digital devices. Now, a quarter of a century later, nearly all of those digital devices have become features on your iPhone, and the arrival of AI means the iPhone has become the intelligent personal hub, the central manager of, well, of you. Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, went straight for the concept in his important opening remarks at Wednesday’s big iPhone launch, where nearly all the pre-event speculation came true. The intelligent personal hub “As we look ahead, we see a future filled with enormous discovery and transformation,” Ternus said at the Surprise and Shine event. “AI makes entirely new kinds of experiences possible. An AI can become even more useful when it brings together your life with the apps, services, and products you use every day. And this means the product at the center of your experiences becomes even more essential — what I like to think of as an intelligent personal hub.” (To be clear: He’s talking about the iPhone.) Think about it: all those tasks you now do on your iPhone are tasks AI can help you with. Siri AI lets you work on files and folders using spoken commands, while contextual AI lets you sift through all the data once gathered by your iPhone to do things, make things, create networks, or even organize luncheon.  “It’s the intersection of broad new capability, and a deep understanding of your personal context that makes this idea so powerful,” Ternus explained. AI’s brave new world That’s the context within which Apple will be introducing all its future products, a battle the company now feels confident marching into now that it appears to have resolved its historical challenges with AI. At the same time, the company also seems to be doing its best to lean into privacy — enabling life-changing AI transformation of daily lives while putting a brake on scary privacy attacks. This is going to be foundational to what happens next at Apple. Of course, you’re not reading this to look too deeply into what Ternus said about the future of Apple; you’ll also want some insight into the slew of devices the company introduced at its event. That list includes the: iPhone Duo — the long-anticipated folding iPhone, which is finally here (or rather, will be here in October). iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max — the next important evolutions of what was once Apple’s highest-end iPhone range. AirPods 5 — now with even better tech, at the same price as before. Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 — the latest iterations of the company’s popular wearables. The big surprise? Price For some, the biggest surprise in these introductions was price. All of the accessories were kept at the same price as last year’s equivalents, while the new Pro iPhones came in at only $100 more for the entry-level model, rising to around $300 more at the more price-resistant highest end. An iPhone 18 Pro Max equipped with the max 2TB storage comes in at $2,499 compared to the $1,199 iPhone 18 Pro entry point.  When it came to price, though, all eyes were certainly on the iPhone Duo, and Apple has given everyone (except competitors) a pleasant surprise on that.  With a starting price of $1,999, the folding phone’s price hit the low end of expectations, and while that grows to an eye-watering $3,199 with 2TB of storage, it compares well with the market leader, Samsung. While the Galaxy Z Fold 8 begins at $1,899, in terms of features and design, Apple’s folding phone lines up with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, which costs from $2,099.  Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that while the iPhone has IP68-rated dust and water resistance, the Samsung equivalent has only IP48. You can drop the Fold 8 into five feet of water for up to half an hour and it should be OK, but you can chuck your iPhone Duo in almost twenty feet of water, and it should survive. Though you probably shouldn’t test that unless you’re a hugely successful “influencer” already generating a small nation state of money through clicks. If that’s you, good for you. I’m only slightly envious.  A productivity powerhouse? What that suggests is that the iPhone is less likely to get damaged and is better engineered, though it’s also ever so slightly thicker. Apple’s device is powered by what the company modestly described as the most powerful mobile processor on the planet — which it is, particularly for the AI tasks all the new iPhones can handle. That matters, particularly for applied contextual AI deployed across daily lives. It also matters because the combination turns Apple’s device into a mobile productivity powerhouse, one that I think will likely affect iPad sales more than anything else. Though this wouldn’t be the first time a new Apple release ended up eating its siblings.  The productive possibilities of Apple’s premium device will also be realized as app developers embrace both the form factor and Siri AI. Apple said during the keynote that more than 300,000 apps already work with Siri AI and more than 2.5 billion Siri requests are being made each day. That latter number will only grow now that Siri performance has been dramatically improved.  While this argument applies to all Apple’s new devices, the fact of the matter is that you now have an iPad-sized object you can carry in your pocket that is capable of doing some really powerful tasks by spoken command alone. That’s the iPhone Duo – a product of an unexplored territory at the crossroads between mobile computing, daily digital existence, and the opportunities of AI. It’s not for everyone, yet I don’t expect the Duo will be for everyone; the vast majority of users won’t be spending $2,000 on a phone. But we know that the cost of technologies like this tends to decline, which suggests that in perhaps five years’ time, it will be possible to create equivalent devices for a much lower price. Right now, it’s for affluent Apple consumers, C-class executives, students, AI pros, medical professionals and others who might actually need this kind of performance and display space to get things done. This, incidentally, is precisely the same group of people that first embraced the iPad when it appeared, turning that into the world’s best-selling tablet. What might this mean for Apple?  I traded a few messages with IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo, who sees it like this: “Apple entered the foldable market and, in one keynote, set the price and the standard every rival will now be measured against.” He also pointed out, the iPhone Duo is “…a direct test of whether Apple can use design, ecosystem integration and premium positioning to reshape a segment that has so far remained selective.”  He’s right, of course, but Ternus also just defined what that segment, and the industry, is driving for. I’s the same thing Apple was aiming at 25 years ago. “iPhone sits at the center of an amazing ecosystem of intelligent features and experiences that work seamlessly across the products you use every day,” the company said — an “intelligent personal hub.” And the Macs are all right, too. Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.