Jonathan Rick

I am a Vice President of Product Marketing for iPhone and Mac at Apple, and this fall I approved our two newest inventions: a phone that folds and a laptop you can touch. I have been at Apple for twenty-two years. On October 20, 2010, I sat in the third row while Steve Jobs explained why we would never put a touchscreen on a Mac. "Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical," he said. "After an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off." I nodded. I took notes. They are the most valuable intellectual property I have ever produced. Outside my office in the ring at Apple Park hangs a framed sheet I call the Ledger. It lists every category we have publicly refused, with the date and the speaker. January 9, 2007: "Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away, and you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus." October 18, 2010: seven-inch tablets are "DOA, dead on arrival." April 24, 2012, Tim Cook on touchscreen laptops: "You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but you know, those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user." June 2018, Craig Federighi: lifting your arm to poke a screen "is a pretty fatiguing thing to do." People think innovation at Apple starts in a lab. It starts with a no. A public dismissal is a reservation. It tells the market we know the category exists and we are holding the table. Then we wait for somebody else to cook. We shipped the iPad mini in 2012 and the Apple Pencil in 2015. This fall the iPhone Duo became the first iPhone to support the Pencil, "later this year." Yuck is a roadmap. The waiting is my department. The cheapest research lab in the world is somebody else's. Royole unveiled the first commercial foldable in 2018. Samsung's Galaxy Fold review units broke within days in 2019. Microsoft shipped the Surface Duo in 2020 and abandoned it in 2023. Windows laptops have had touchscreens since 2012. Fourteen years of customers have lifted their arms in public, and none of their arms have fallen off. We call this the proving period. Our competitors call it their product line. Waiting is also fiscally responsible. In fiscal 2025 we spent $34.55 billion on research and development and $89.3 billion buying back our own stock. When the best investment in technology is your own share price, it would be reckless to invent things. According to Bloomberg, we pay Google about a billion dollars a year for the model that now powers Siri. We rent the brain. We own the voice. Once a category is proven, we name it. I named our foldable the iPhone Duo. Windows Latest wrote, "Microsoft did it first with the Surface Duo!" We had the PowerBook Duo in 1992. Microsoft borrowed the name and walked away from the hinge. We repossessed it. Our laptop is the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. Nobody can say it out loud, so nobody can say it's late. The headline reads "Touch for the first time on Mac." Every word is accurate. The last two do most of the work. We mine other eras too. In 2007, Windows Vista shipped Aero Glass, a desktop that looked left out in the rain. In 2025 we shipped Liquid Glass. People couldn't read it. At WWDC this June we announced we were "updating the foundations of how Liquid Glass is built to ensure exceptional readability," and explained, "there is a natural process where we take a bold leap forward, and then we continue to iterate." Microsoft needed nearly three years to get from Vista to Windows 7. We rebuilt Vista and its fix in one. Finally, we were first at something. Even the Duo's outer screen runs on the archive. A mode called Kid Cue plays Peanuts animations to hold a toddler's attention. Apple TV+ has held the Peanuts rights since 2018. We rented Snoopy before we rented Siri's brain. I wrote the line in the Duo press release about "a breakthrough foldable design that's beautiful, versatile, and durable, opening up possibilities that feel entirely new yet remarkably familiar." Legal approved it in nine minutes, because both halves are true. Nobody ever reads the second half. Last week I opened the configurator and built the touchscreen MacBook Pro the way our best customers do, with everything. MacRumors priced that machine at $14,549. Then I priced the same laptop without touch, on the same M5 chips. Touch costs $400. Our own announcement explains that "macOS automatically translates touches into clicks." We charge four hundred dollars for a feature that turns itself back into the thing you already owned. Johny Srouji called it "the magic of Touch." Magic is the word we use when the price has to cover the explanation. I kept going. A loaded Mac Studio costs $18,299. The cheapest new car in America, a Kia Soul, starts at $20,490. Nissan killed the Versa last year. A 512-gigabyte memory option for the Mac Studio is due any day. The $20,000 car is dead. The $20,000 Mac is pending. The Mac mini started at $599 two years ago. It now starts at $899, and a loaded one costs $6,799. We kept the word mini. It refers to the box. Most of that money is memory, my favorite product, because nobody can see it. For years we charged $200 for every 8 gigabytes. In June 2020, when we doubled a MacBook Pro memory upgrade from $100 to $200, we told The Verge it was "a price correction, not an increase." That sentence hangs next to the Ledger. In 2023 our VP of worldwide product marketing said "8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems." We call this Apple memory math. Our gigabytes count double when we sell you the base model and half when we sell you the upgrade. For a decade we priced memory as if the world were running out of it. In 2026 the world ran out. AI data centers swallowed the supply, and TrendForce says memory prices have risen five- to sevenfold since the start of 2025. We had been charging shortage prices since before the shortage. We were visionaries of scarcity. On June 25 we raised prices across Macs and iPads and announced, "We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly." Neither had our customers, except from us. That week, upgrading a MacBook Pro from 48 to 128 gigabytes went from $1,000 to $2,000. Our statement promised we were "working tirelessly to find solutions." I wrote "tirelessly." The solution was the price. Our suppliers have studied us. According to the Korean outlet Dealsite, Samsung proposed doubling what it charges us for memory, and we accepted immediately. We recognized the pitch. In June, Micron reported an 84.9 percent gross margin. For fifteen years Apple was the most profitable memory company on earth without making a single memory chip. Now the people who make it are charging us our own prices. A leaker on Weibo says the Duo was once planned with 16 gigabytes. It shipped with 12. Samsung put 16 in a phone in 2020. We folded the phone and we folded the memory. It is the Duo's only original feature. TrendForce estimates memory has gone from about 10 percent of an iPhone Pro's parts cost to about 34 percent in a year. I extended the line in Keynote. Around 2029, the iPhone becomes a memory chip with a phone attached, and the phone is an upgrade. When WIRED asked our CEO, John Ternus, about our old taboo on touchscreen Macs, the magazine reports that he beamed and said, "Who knew?" I knew. It's on the Ledger. Tim Cook said in 2016, "It doesn't bother us that we are second, third, fourth or fifth if we still have the best." Being fifth is a strategy. Its whole promise is that waiting buys perfection. The $1,999 Duo went on sale on Friday, October 23. By the weekend, owners were posting photos of inner screens cracked along the fold. An iFixit technician told CNBC that many reports "describe folding or unfolding the phone, hearing a crunch, and pushing past it." On Monday our statement called early response "incredibly positive," then acknowledged "an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units." An inner screen out of warranty costs $999. We waited eight years for other companies to solve the crease. Then we sold a nano-texture finish that "minimizes crease visibility." The crease is still there. It's just harder to see, like everything else we charge for. Analysts ask me about the memory shortage every quarter. Nobody asks about the other one. Our memory costs $25 a gigabyte. Yours lasts about one product cycle. Every entry on the Ledger works because you forget it before we reverse it. Your memory is the only supply chain we have never had to pay for. Last night I finished the Dismissal Calendar for fiscal 2027 through 2034. Each line has a quote and a reversal date. "A phone battery you can replace belongs in 2007." EU rules requiring user-replaceable phone batteries begin in February 2027, with exemptions our engineers have read very carefully. Reversal: when the exemptions run out. "Nobody wants a computer on their finger." Oura and Samsung already sell one. Reversal: 2031. "Twelve gigabytes on iPhone is analogous to twenty-four on other phones." Reversal: when the new memory fabs come online, around 2028, and we ship 16 gigabytes as the biggest leap in iPhone memory ever. My team said the last one sounded familiar. In the early days of the PC, somebody supposedly said 640K ought to be enough for anybody, and Bill Gates has spent years denying it was him. Even our dismissals are reissues. I left the dates blank. I wrote them in pencil. Apple Pencil. Sold separately.