Apple can’t say when sold-out $1,999 foldable iPhone returns

The latest:

Apple’s $1,999 foldable iPhone Duo remains sold out more than a week after launch, and the company told analysts on Monday it cannot say when more will be available. Chief executive John Ternus, who replaced Tim Cook in September, said he was pleased with the early reaction, even as some buyers reported cracked screens along the fold.

Details:

• The shortage: Chief operating officer Sabhi Kahn told financial analysts it is hard to predict when supply and demand for the iPhone Duo will come into balance. Apple gave no restock date and did not say how many units it had produced or sold since the phone went on sale in late October.
• The defect: Some buyers have seen their screens crack. Apple said last week it would replace any handsets affected by an issue causing what it described as a small number of the new phones to crack along the inside fold. Executives did not raise the problem during Monday’s analyst call.
• The price: The foldable sells for $1,999, and £1,999 in the United Kingdom, topping Apple’s handset range. It launched late in October, after the close of the quarter Apple reported on Monday, so none of its sales appear in the latest figures.
• iPhone revenue: For the three months to 26 September, iPhone sales rose 17% to $57bn, and Apple said it sold more iPhones globally over the past year than ever before. The company has spent the year saying handset sales are surging despite component shortages it warned would weigh on results.
• The wider numbers: Mac sales grew 27% to $10.7bn, another record, and overall annual sales rose 15% to $479bn. Not every line held up: iPad sales fell 10% and wearables, including headphones and the Watch, dropped 7%.
• Chip bottleneck: Kahn said most Apple devices still face supply constraints, driven partly by difficulty securing enough microprocessors built on advanced nodes — chip technology that lets devices run faster. Most are made by Taiwan-based TSMC. He expects the squeeze to continue into next year, hitting iPads and Macs hardest.
• Memory costs: Ternus said Apple is seeing unprecedented cost increases for memory, the storage holding apps, photos and messages. Much of that capacity runs through data centres facing booming demand as AI chatbots and platforms from OpenAI and Anthropic draw more users, pushing prices up for buyers like Apple.
• Price response: Cook earlier this year called the sudden jump in data centre costs a “thousand year flood”. Apple has since raised prices across essentially all its hardware by around 20%, a move it ties to the memory and component squeeze rather than to the new foldable.
• The analyst view: Sunil Krishnan of Aviva Investors told the BBC’s Today programme Apple posted reasonably solid results with a pretty good iPhone performance. He flagged concerns over profit margin guidance and memory chip costs, but called margins well north of 45% impressive for an established company.

Between the lines:

Two of Apple’s own disclosures sit awkwardly together: executives say demand is outrunning supply, while also reporting falling iPad and wearables sales. The constraint Kahn describes — advanced-node chips and costly memory — applies across the product line, which means the sold-out foldable and the 20% price rises trace to the same bottleneck rather than to unusual enthusiasm for one device.

What’s next

Watch for an Apple restock date for the iPhone Duo, the scale of replacement claims under the cracked-screen programme, and whether the next quarterly results show iPad and Mac supply easing as Kahn indicated.