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 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.

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:

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.