New foldable iPhone sells well short-term due to scarcity; long-term mass adoption delayed by high entry cost.

It's new for Apple, but if you follow the consumer tech space, you know, foldables have been around for a half a decade at this point. So Samsung, especially United States, has been making these devices.

Google makes the Pixel. Uh so these devices have been out there. They just never been available to Apple users. And you know, Apple took their time with it, but they did a really nice job of coming out with a Gen One product that basically beats sort of where Gen 7 and Gen 8 products are currently for Samsung.

Yeah, I think it's going to be um don't get me wrong, this device will sell well. It'll sell out, but that's also I think partly because there's going to be some supply constraints here on making such a complicated device.

Uh, but I think it'll take a couple generations for people to get on board. You know, it does start at $2,000, which is much higher than what people are used to with phones. Now, you can make the argument, hey, I'm in the market for a new iPhone, and I usually like having an iPad mini, you know, you can just get one device now, basically, and do all that.

So, for those people, it does make sense. But if you're just coming from the last gen iPhone, you know, this is a big ask for a lot of people. So, I think it's going to um we'll see a big increase.

It's going to help the foldable category as in as a whole, but I still think, you know, it's going to take a little while for your average person to sort of get on board with it.

My guess is that Apple is actually eating a lot of the costs here and raising the prices on its MacBooks and iPads and other devices versus trying to increase the prices as much as they can on the iPhone because the iPhone makes up over 50% of their business.

So, they don't really want to jack up the cost too much. I think $100 is not a lot per se compared to some other companies, but it is an increase, right? But it could have been a lot more. or it could have been $200 more, which would have been more significant.

So, I think they're just moving the numbers around here. They're trying to keep the iPhone line as affordable as it can considering the circumstances.

I do believe they're catching up. I'll also say just in general with the consumer market, AI really hasn't been a big seller for a lot of these devices. It's not a reason to upgrade.

I do think the AI authentication of images is actually kind of a cool idea that they're doing and I think that helps uh the conversation. I don't think it's a reason why people are going necessarily upgrade outside of a very niche group of people who need that sort of functionality.

But um you know the AI here I think is interesting but I don't think it's a reason for people to upgrade. There are some other good reasons to get the new iPhone 18 uh Pro and Pro Max for instance.

Yeah. So the question is going to be about usability and functionality, right? So a lot of times they see show demonstrations of like someone texts you and it's like oh it's going to go make a reservation for you at a restaurant and it's kind of neat but your average person actually isn't really kind of doing that kind of stuff.

So I think this comes down to what is the kind of killer feature that people learn that they can't live without and so far when it comes to AI we really haven't seen that in the consumer space.

Enterprise is a bit different. So I'm a little cautious about this. I think Apple is in a good position financially both to pursue AI because they're not as invested as some other companies are.

But at the same time, we really haven't seen that many killer uh products or reasons to upgrade to these devices for those features. And I think it's just something to watch. That may change in a couple years, but right now it's not much there right now.

Well, Apple having a nice response to this release and John Turnis' first event as CEO. They're up two and a half%.