AT&T CEO Calls Apple’s $1,999 iPhone Duo ‘Not New’ as Samsung Fights for Foldable Lead

NEW YORK — AT&T Chief Executive John Stankey did not treat Apple’s first foldable iPhone as a Jobs-era reset. He treated it as another book-style phone in a category his stores have already sold.

“The best characterization I can give is, looking at the foldable phones that have been out in the market, this is not new,” Stankey told Yahoo Finance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Tech Conference on Wednesday, hours after Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo at $1,999. “Android users are as passionate about Android as iOS users are about iOS,” he said. They are “a smaller percentage of the U.S. market, but they are still passionate, and there’s been some really good foldable devices in the Android ecosystem for a couple years. And what we’ve seen is that it tends to function more as a specific niche type application as opposed to it’s broadly accepted.”

He left the door cracked. “Will iOS users view it differently or will there be some unique take that Apple comes up with that changes that penetration dynamic a little bit? I suppose it’s possible, but my guess right now is we’re going to kind of see it contained to a portion of the user base that wants that larger device and is maybe willing to invest more money to pick it up and get it.” On whether he would carry one: “I’m going to have to see if it replaces something that I use. I’m pretty adept at moving back and forth between my iPad and my mobile device right now. And if it becomes something where it says maybe I don’t need to carry the larger iPad around with me, I might be interested.”

That is a carrier talking about attach rates, not a keynote talking about magic. The Duo folds from a 5.4-inch cover display to a 7.6-inch inner panel with a matching 1:1.4 aspect ratio. Preorders open Oct. 16. Shipments start Oct. 23. Storage runs from 256GB at $1,999 to 2TB at $3,199. Apple CEO John Ternus framed rivals as unfinished work. “Others have created foldables that just feel like two phones awkwardly stuck together,” he said. Of the Duo: “It’s entirely new and at the same time remarkably familiar. A similar size to your passport, it feels familiar to hold and comfortable to use with one hand.”

Samsung spent Wednesday answering with hardware it already has on shelves. The Galaxy Z Fold 8, launched in July at $1,899, is listed at 201 grams. The Duo is listed at 254 grams. Hee-Cheul Moon, a Samsung research lead, told Wired the rivalry was “absolutely welcome” and that “the key to providing the highest customer value in this market is all about the weight of the device.” Seoul put up “Welcome to Foldables” and “The World’s Lightest Fold” billboards and posted lines on X that read as jabs at a late arrival.

Liz Lee, an associate director at Counterpoint Research, called Apple’s sticker the surprise. “Apple’s pricing was one of the most impressive parts. Keeping the iPhone Duo just under the $2,000 mark, at $1,999, and only about $100 above the Galaxy Z Fold 8 looks like a pretty bold move by Apple,” she said. “We expect that Apple will really change the competitive landscape in foldables, and Samsung will see the most visible share pressure. But Samsung also has scale, years of experience and strong global distribution.”

Counterpoint’s 2026 forecast puts Samsung at about 38 percent of global foldable shipments, Apple at 25 percent and Huawei at 22 percent, with Apple’s first-year volume capped near 6 million units by supply, not demand. Lee said even a short selling window would be “a very strong start.” An earlier Counterpoint note had Samsung at 32 percent and Apple at 25 percent depending on the cut of the year. IDC’s Nabila Popal told Wired foldables are still “around 2 percent by the end of this year of the global smartphone market.” In an IDC survey, 60 percent of consumers said they were not likely to buy a foldable at upgrade time — but almost 33 percent said they “absolutely” would if Apple made one. “Apple has such a strong market pull,” Popal said.

Francisco Jeronimo of IDC said Apple “set the price and the standard every rival will now be measured against.” Ben Wood of CCS Insight said Apple “has never been afraid to enter a product category once it has reached a certain level of maturity” and that the Duo “could act as a rising tide for all manufacturers.” Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management wrote that the phone is “sick,” with “no seam” and an ultra-thin body, and raised his fiscal 2027 revenue guess from 5 percent of iPhone sales to 10 percent. “They’re going to sell more than I thought before seeing it.”

Those forecasts and Stankey’s niche label can both be true. Foldables remain a sliver of phones and a larger sliver of premium revenue. Counterpoint sees the category rising from about 2.2 percent of global units in 2026 toward 3.1 percent by 2030, with a bigger share of dollars. AT&T will sell the Duo next to Fold 8s and Pixel folds. Stankey’s point is that passion for a hinge has not yet equaled passion for an iPhone.

Apple is selling software defaults — Split View, tent-mode StandBy, a crease it says you can feel but not see — to people who never bought a Galaxy Fold. Samsung is selling seven years of hinges and 53 fewer grams. Stankey is selling whatever customers will finance. His sentence that will follow the Duo into stores is the shortest: this is not new. The $100 gap and the Apple logo are what he is waiting to measure.