A $2,000 Foldable, a Rebuilt Siri, and a New CEO: Apple's 'Surprise and Shine' Is Its Biggest AI Test Yet

At 10 a.m. Pacific today, Apple holds what may be its most consequential product event in a decade. The invitation’s tagline — “Surprise and Shine” — sounds playful, but the stakes underneath it are not: this is the keynote where Apple has to prove it is still a first-tier AI company, where it ships its first foldable iPhone, and where John Ternus, who took over as CEO only days ago, makes his debut on the biggest stage in consumer tech.

Three stories stacked into one keynote

Every September event carries hype. This one stacks three separate narrative arcs into a single 90-minute presentation.

First, the hardware. The headline product is widely expected to be the iPhone Ultra, Apple’s first folding phone. Reporting across MacRumors, Tom’s Guide, and Reuters converges on a book-style foldable: a roughly 5.5-inch cover display that opens into a tablet-sized internal screen, an ultra-thin body, and a hinge engineered to survive years of daily folds. Leaks and analyst notes put the starting price at or above $2,000, with IDC analysts quoted by Reuters suggesting it could exceed $2,500 in some configurations — territory no iPhone has ever entered.

Alongside it: the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, both powered by the A20 Pro, Apple’s first smartphone chip built on TSMC’s 2-nanometer process, reportedly delivering roughly 15% more speed and 30% better efficiency than the previous generation. An Apple Watch Series 12 with a faster S-series chip and expanded health tracking, a fourth-generation Watch Ultra, possibly AirPods 5, and a batch of new smart-home devices round out what 9to5Mac counted as at least six major product launches.

Second, the AI. This is the part the whole industry is watching. At WWDC in June, Apple previewed the next generation of Apple Intelligence and, crucially, “Siri AI” — a ground-up rebuild of its assistant. The foundation of that rebuild is a landmark partnership announced in January: Apple chose Google’s Gemini to power the new Siri’s large-model capabilities, reportedly a deal worth around $1 billion per year, running alongside Apple’s existing ChatGPT integration with OpenAI and Apple’s own on-device and Private Cloud Compute models.

That means the assistant shipping on stage today is, in a meaningful sense, a three-lab collaboration: Apple silicon and privacy architecture on the bottom, Google Gemini doing the heavy reasoning, OpenAI’s models available as an extension. For a company that spent a decade insisting its differentiation was doing everything itself, it is a striking reversal — and an honest one. Apple looked at the frontier-model race, concluded it could not win it alone on this timeline, and bought, partnered, and architected its way to relevance instead.

Third, the leadership. Ternus, the former hardware engineering chief who succeeded Tim Cook as CEO, faces what the Financial Times called his first test: selling a $2,000 foldable and an AI story that has to land this time. Apple’s previous AI year was rocky — Siri features slipped, rivals shipped agentic assistants, and critics openly asked whether Apple had fallen permanently behind. Reuters framed today precisely: “Apple’s Ternus faces AI test as foldable iPhone takes center stage.”

Why the Siri AI bet matters more than the fold

The foldable will dominate the photos and the queues outside Apple Stores. But the durable question is whether Siri AI closes Apple’s assistant gap.

The details that matter: Apple says the new Siri combines personal context, on-screen awareness, and web knowledge for more natural, multi-step conversations — the agentic pattern that OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have turned into the industry’s default interface. The Gemini deal reportedly brings Gemini-class reasoning to the cloud side, while Apple’s on-device models and Private Cloud Compute preserve its privacy positioning. Macworld’s reporting noted a telling detail: on the new hardware, “you’ll get Siri AI answers, not the old Siri” — a clean break rather than an incremental update.

The catch, flagged repeatedly in leaks ahead of the event: Siri AI is arriving in beta, and parts of it were delayed during development. Some features may ship with the phones; others will trail into iOS 27 point releases. That cadence risk is exactly what tripped Apple up last cycle, and it is the single biggest thing for observers to watch beyond today’s glamour shots.

The competitive math

The strategic logic of the Google deal is cold and defensible. Google gets distribution on hundreds of millions of premium devices and a reported $1 billion a year; Apple gets frontier-model capability without building it, keeps its ChatGPT option open with OpenAI, and buys time for its own internal models to catch up. Samsung — whose early foldables, as the FT noted, suffered bubbling and rippling screens — now faces a foldable with Apple’s typical fit-and-finish arriving three years into the category it pioneered.

There are real risks. Pricing a first-generation foldable above $2,000 limits it to enthusiasts in a soft consumer-spending environment. Betting your flagship assistant on a rival’s model creates a dependency Apple has historically avoided at all costs. And if the beta Siri underdelivers, the narrative of Apple-as-AI-laggard hardens rather than fades.

But if it works — if the foldable survives pockets and the new Siri actually completes multi-step tasks reliably — today becomes the moment Apple re-entered the AI conversation through the only door it has ever needed: the one a billion users already walk through.

What to watch as the keynote unfolds

• The Ultra’s real price and ship date — every leak says “$2,000-plus”; the exact figure and availability window set the narrative for the holiday quarter.
• Siri AI’s scope at launch — which capabilities ship in the initial beta versus slipping to later iOS 27 releases.
• How prominently Gemini is credited — Apple’s phrasing on the Google partnership will signal how comfortable it is with the dependency.
• Ternus’s framing — a hardware CEO’s first keynote says a lot about whether Apple’s next decade is defined by industrial design or by software intelligence.
• Watch and home devices — the smart-home lineup hints at where Apple thinks ambient, multi-device AI assistants actually live.

The event streams on Apple’s site and YouTube at 10 a.m. PT. Whatever the surprises, the shine Apple needs most today is on its AI story.