Somewhere in the last ten years, the queue disappeared.

Nobody wrote the obituary. One September there were people sleeping on footpaths outside Apple stores in Hong Kong and Sydney, and resellers buying in bulk so they could mark them up by more than a hundred percent before the week was out. Phil Whelan and I talked about all that back in 2015. A few Septembers later there were fewer of them. Then there were none worth photographing.

I said something to Phil on RTHK Radio 3 on Tuesday that I hadn’t quite put into words before. I don’t think any of us would even contemplate standing in a queue like that now. Not because the phone got worse. Because we’ve run out of surprise.

You can listen to the full segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew below:

Quick catch-up, in case you don’t follow this stuff. Apple does this every September, and has done for nearly twenty years. New phones, a stage, a lot of adjectives. This year it happened on 9 September and there were three of them. Two are the usual thing, the iPhone 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max. The third is the iPhone Duo, which folds open like a small book, and it’s Apple’s first go at this. The iPhone Duo starts at A$3,499 (HK$17,499 in Hong Kong), and the top one is A$5,899 (HK$27,999).

The part worth your time isn’t the foldable. A company that has sold three billion of something has reached the point where it has to change the shape of the object, because it’s run out of things to say about what the object does. Every business gets there eventually. Most of them don’t notice while it’s happening.

The queue didn’t go because the phone got worse

People get this backwards. The iPhone 18 Pro is a lovely piece of engineering. So was the 17. So was the 16. Quality isn’t the problem. The problem is you can’t see the improvement from where you’re sitting. When the only way to explain the difference between this year’s model and the one already in your pocket is a benchmark score, nobody queues. They shrug.

And it isn’t an Apple problem. I said that on air and I’ll say it again here, because the easy move is to turn this into a story about one company. Apple has nowhere else to go. Neither does Samsung. Neither does Google. Neither does Oppo or Xiaomi or anybody else in the mobile phone business, and it isn’t only the big names. They’ve all built a lovely rectangle that does nearly everything, and there’s nowhere obvious left to take it.

Look at what we actually do with the thing. The telephone is the least used feature on the telephone. We message, we bank, we take photos, we watch, we find our way across a city, we pay for coffee, and somewhere down the list we occasionally take a call. Phil raised telephonophobia, which is real and it’s growing. People who feel genuine dread when the handset rings.

I remember when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the phone was sacrosanct. One in the house. The family shared it, you took your turn, and the ring was so loud it got used in horror films. It never occurred to anybody not to answer. Then answering machines turned up and we got a bit less excited. Now a ringing phone is something plenty of people just let go.

That’s not nostalgia, that’s the evidence. When a device’s original purpose becomes its least used function, the device is already turning into something else. And there’s a second thing underneath it that I’ve watched build over the last couple of years. Having crushed the camera, the recorder, the television, the map and the wallet into one slab of glass, we’ve started pulling them back out again. Separate devices are interesting a second time. That’s a category loosening, not tightening.

What Apple actually put on the table

Here are the specifics, because they matter more than the adjectives.

The 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max are conventional phones, a bit faster and a hundred dollars dearer than last year’s. The iPhone Duo is the new shape, and it’s the one everybody has been writing about. It has a 5.4 inch screen on the outside and a 7.6 inch one inside, Touch ID rather than Face ID in the side button, an A20 Pro chip on a two nanometre process, and a hinge and display stack built so you stop noticing the crease. It’s a genuinely impressive object. It’s also US$1,999 to start.

In Australia that’s A$3,499 for the entry Duo, and A$5,899 if you want the two terabyte version. The 18 Pro starts at A$2,099. In Hong Kong the same Duo is HK$17,499 and runs to HK$27,999 at the top, which is the number Phil and I kept coming back to on air, because it’s the one that stops people. Twenty eight thousand Hong Kong dollars for a phone. It’s beyond barking mad.

Hong Kong is roughly ten to fifteen percent cheaper than Australia on the identical device, and that isn’t Apple being generous to Hong Kong. Hong Kong doesn’t charge sales tax. Our advertised price already has ten percent GST built into it.

Then there’s the calendar, which nobody is talking about and which tells you the most. Apple has pulled one September launch into pieces. The expensive phones went on sale this week. The Duo doesn’t open for pre-order until 16 October and doesn’t reach anybody until 23 October. And the standard iPhone 18, the one most people actually buy, has been pushed out to 2027.

Read that order again, because it’s a strategy said out loud. Show the expensive thing first, while there’s nothing cheaper sitting beside it. Let the people who were always going to buy it, buy it. Bring the middle out later. Hold the affordable one back longest. Do it the other way round and almost nobody trades up.

Seven years late, and right to be

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Fold in February 2019 and then had to pull it, because review units started failing within days of going out. It finally shipped that September. Apple has spent the seven years since not doing it, while everybody else iterated in public and broke things in public.

The obvious reading is that Apple lost its nerve. I don’t buy it. Waiting was the right call, and it’s a business model rather than an accident of caution. Apple let other companies find the failure modes. The hinges, the springs, the screens that creased and then cracked, the dust, the warranty claims. It turned up seven years later with the most finished version of somebody else’s idea and priced it like an original.

That’s the same pattern I described on this show more than a decade ago. When Apple launched the iPad Pro with a stylus in 2015, after Steve Jobs had publicly mocked the stylus, I told The New Daily that the marketplace had spoken and that’s where people wanted to go. Apple doesn’t lead into an unproven shape. It waits until the shape stops breaking, then makes the definitive version. That works. It just isn’t invention, and the launch language doesn’t always draw that line.

None of the shape is new either. Phil called it straight away on air. It’s the Nokia Communicator. Before that it was a Star Trek prop. We’ve been imagining this object for fifty years and the engineering has finally caught up with the imagination. That’s worth admiring. It isn’t the same as needing one.

The itch nobody knew they had

Phil asked me a good question halfway through. What do you call it when a company manufactures the habit instead of answering a need that was already there?

There isn’t a tidy name for it, but there’s a very clear history, and I used to teach it in marketing lectures. In 1919 a small Cincinnati outfit called Odorono was struggling to sell an antiperspirant that nobody believed they needed. Its owner, Edna Murphey, borrowed heavily and hired an advertising man named James Webb Young. Young went and asked women why they weren’t buying it, and got an honest answer: they didn’t think they had a problem. So he gave them one. The full-page ad he wrote for the Ladies’ Home Journal was headed “Within the Curve of a Woman’s Arm”, and it told American women, very politely, that they smelled and didn’t know it. Two hundred readers cancelled their subscriptions. Sales went up a hundred and twelve percent. Body odour wasn’t a public anxiety until somebody made it one. The product didn’t answer the worry. It created the worry, then answered it.

Every consumer business since has run a version of that, and there’s nothing sinister in it. It’s how categories get built. But you should be able to tell the difference between a product that solves a problem you had on Monday and a product that arrives with the problem attached.

Phil then asked whether social media has made us more suggestible. I don’t think we’re more susceptible than the people before us. I think we’re more immersed. You can’t want something until you know it exists, and that’s always been true. What’s changed is how fast we find out. The gap between not knowing a thing exists and feeling slightly behind for not owning it is now about four seconds of scrolling.

And underneath all that sits something older. A lot of us take part of our sense of security from what we own, from a brand we admire, from a particular look and feel. That’s not a character flaw. It’s ordinary human behaviour, and every technology company, clothing company and car maker on earth understands it precisely. A very good car gets you there no better than a much cheaper one. We don’t buy it for the getting there.

Four years, and what it does to anyone selling you something

Here’s the number that explains the whole month.

Counterpoint Research reported in February 2026 that the world’s active installed base of smartphones grew by two percent across 2025, because replacement cycles have stretched to nearly four years. Nearly one in four active phones on earth is an iPhone. Apple and Samsung together hold about forty four percent of every phone in use. And still, two percent, because people are keeping what they’ve got for longer than they ever have.

Apple’s own figures say the same thing from the other side. Three billion iPhones sold since 2007, which is Apple’s number and Apple is entitled to it. Around a billion and a half of them in use right now. Next year is the twentieth year of the product. That’s a remarkable run and it’s also a trap, because a market that saturated, with a replacement cycle that long, can’t be grown by making a slightly better rectangle.

So if you can’t grow by improving the thing, you’ve got three levers left. Change the shape. Raise the price. Change how the price gets paid. Apple pulled all three this month, and I’d argue it had very little choice.

This is the part I want leaders to take out of an Apple story that isn’t really about Apple. When your customers start keeping your product longer, your growth stops coming from the product and starts coming from packaging, pricing and timing. That’s a much shorter runway, and it’s very easy to mistake for health. Revenue holds. Margin might even improve. Meanwhile the reason anybody buys from you in the first place is quietly wearing away, and there’s no line on the monthly report built to show you that.

What an instalment plan actually admits

For the first time, Apple is selling iPhones in Australia through Afterpay. Six, twelve or twenty four months. The 18 Pro works out at about A$87 a month over two years.

Look at what that sentence does. The price didn’t come down. The sentence just got longer. A phone is now sold the way a lounge suite is sold, and that isn’t a finance story, it’s an admission. Apple has worked out that the device has gone past what a lot of people can pay for in one go, and rather than drop the number it has rebuilt the sentence around the number.

Follow it one step further, because this is where the ripple effects live. When you move a customer from a purchase to an instalment, three things change and only one of them is obvious. The obvious one: the barrier drops and more people buy. The second: you’ve turned a one off relationship into a recurring one, so you now have customers still paying for last year’s device when this year’s is announced, and they’re much harder to sell to. The third: a slice of your customer base is suddenly exposed to their own cash flow in a way they weren’t before. In a soft economy, a phone that was a purchase becomes a phone that’s a liability.

Australian businesses have watched this run its course in furniture, in dental work, in travel and in fashion. It grows the market and it changes who your customer is. It’s a decision with a very long tail, and it usually gets made as though it were a promotion.

Apple’s strongest competitor is now Apple

Phil landed the smartest consumer observation of the segment right at the end, seconds before the news. If you’re a real smarty, he said, the reconditioned approach might be the winner.

He’s right, and the interesting part is that Apple sells them. The store carries reconditioned devices from the last two or three years, which tells you something Apple would probably rather not say out loud. The last few phones were good enough that they’re still worth selling. The best argument against buying the newest iPhone is sitting in Apple’s own shop, with a warranty on it.

That’s a real bind and every business selling something durable meets it eventually. When your old product is still excellent, your second hand market competes with your new one. You can fight it, ignore it, or own it. Apple has chosen to own it, which I think is right, and the cost of being right is that it speeds up the very replacement cycle already squeezing the business. There’s no clean answer. There’s a choice about which problem you’d rather have.

From the logistics man to the builder

The other thing that happened this month is that Apple changed hands. John Ternus became chief executive on 1 September, with Tim Cook moving to executive chairman after fifteen years in the job.

Cook was a supply chain man and his fifteen years are a supply chain story. He took what Steve Jobs built and made it at a scale nobody had attempted, everywhere, reliably, with a services business stacked on top. Ternus is a different animal. He joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 and he’s an engineer. He builds things.

The last time Apple changed chief executives, it went from the man who invented the products to the man who could make a billion of them. This time it’s gone back the other way. That isn’t nostalgia, it’s a bet about which problem is harder now, and the bet reads like this: we know how to manufacture anything, what we’ve run short of is something worth manufacturing.

The obvious caution applies. The Duo was years in development. Ternus inherited it, he didn’t commission it, and eight days in the chair doesn’t make a strategy. The real measure of a hardware chief executive isn’t the device he launched in his second week. It’s what he does about the part of the business that’s visibly behind.

Three things I recommend you do

The first thing to do is write down the date your category stopped surprising people. Not the date revenue softened. The date a customer last said something you didn’t expect about your product. Most leadership teams can’t name it, and that’s the finding. If nobody in the room can date the last real surprise, you’re already competing on shape, price and timing whether you’ve admitted it or not, and you should plan for that instead of funding features as though they were still doing the work.

The second thing to do is check what you’re actually selling now. Go and look at how the money arrives, not at what your product page says. If a growing share comes in through instalments, subscriptions, bundles or finance partners, you’ve changed business models without deciding to. Ask the plain questions. How many of our customers are still paying for the last one? What happens to us if a quarter of them stop? Who owns the relationship, us or the finance provider? You can answer all three in an afternoon, and almost nobody does until something breaks.

The third thing to do is separate the shape of what you sell from the job it does, on paper, in two columns. The shape is the phone, the branch, the office, the annual report, the course, the appointment. The job is what the customer was trying to get done. Every business I walk into has a version of this confusion, defending a shape while assuming the job is safe. The shape is always what gets disrupted first, and it’s also the thing everyone in the room is attached to, which is why the conversation is hard to start and worth a lot once it is.

The argument we’re actually having

Underneath the prices and the hinges and the release calendar there’s an older question sitting in the room, and Phil got close to it when he said we don’t really use phones as phones anymore.

I’ve written before that phones are form factors, delivery systems, temporary tools that exist because of the constraints of their time, and every one of them is on borrowed time. I said much the same thing on ABC radio back in 2017, when I talked about the end of mobile phones and got the usual look. What we want is seamless intelligence, wherever we are. What we’re fixated on is the shape of the object that currently carries it.

So when Phil asked whether the iPhone phenomenon has gone silly, yes or no isn’t the honest answer. The honest answer is that we’re having a passionate argument about the shape of a thing at exactly the moment the thing itself is becoming negotiable. The most interesting sentence in Apple’s September isn’t about a folding screen. It’s that a company selling roughly a quarter of the world’s phones has decided the most promising direction left is to change what the object looks like.

That tells you where we are. Not a crisis. A plateau, which is harder to see and much harder to act on. Plateaus don’t announce themselves. They just quietly take your options away one at a time until the only ones left are cosmetic.

Phil and I had a version of this conversation eleven years ago, when Apple sold thirteen million phones in three days and the Hong Kong resellers complained the magic had gone. A record-breaking launch, and the people closest to the money were already saying it had flattened. Eleven years on we’re asking the same question, which tells you the question is older than any of the answers we keep giving it.

The thing to watch isn’t whether anybody buys a foldable. It’s how much longer we’ll be carrying one of these at all, and whether your organisation has confused the shape of what it sells with the reason anybody buys it.

Not prediction. Preparation.

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If this is landing close to home for your organisation, I work with leadership teams and boards on exactly these kinds of decisions, what the signals mean, what the ripple effects are, and what to do before the moment becomes a crisis. Get in touch.

You can also subscribe to my Immediate Futures briefing, a short weekly read on the signals worth paying attention to, written for leaders who want to stay ahead of what is already arriving.

Choose Forward.

#Apple #iPhoneDuo #Foldable #ConsumerBehaviour #ProductStrategy #Leadership #ImmediateFutures #RippleEffects #RTHK #MorningBrew #MorrisMisel #ChooseForward

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Full Segment Transcript, RTHK Radio 3, The Brew, 15 September 2026 ▼ Click to expand

Morris Misel speaking with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Hello, Morris. How's it cooking, mate? You're right. Yeah, whatever. Happy Tuesday, everyone. Really good. Happy Tuesday to you, Morris. I think I've got some red lights going here. So I'm deafening you. I'll just turn me down. How's that? Good. Morris, all this Brechtian radio, you see, massive release from Apple. And as I just said in my opening, it's drip-fed release. It's the high-end stuff that the 18s they've let out now. And the big question I guess some people are asking is, do you reckon that Apple is kind of overextending itself with these super, duper expensive gadgets? It has nowhere else to go.

I mean, that's the bottom line on it. But neither the Samsung, neither does Nokia, I mean, neither does anyone in this space. We're all over the phone. I mean, the days where you and I would do the big announcements, I actually found a couple of hours going back to 2015 and before, literally, where we announced it. And you and I, I think I was actually in Hong Kong at the time. Probably. And there was a great line outside Apple. And everybody was literally, you know, people trying to get in, buying loads and calming them off. Yeah, yeah. The whole thing. It was just a PR, wonderful, wonderfulness.

And that's the way it used to be. And I don't think any of us have ever seen or would even contemplate being in a queue like that anymore. The phone itself has kind of gone blue. I mean, everyone has one. We're kind ofover it, there's not enough features in it anymore to make it exciting to want to buy the next one. Take off. Take off. The last one's a bit dead. So I don't know if I don't know whether it's an Apple thing. In fact I know it's not an Apple thing. It's an everything everything. They just they have to figure out that until we don't use phones anymore which I think is not that far away.

Well phones as phones I guess we don't really. Yeah exactly. And that's exactly it. Yeah that's exactly it because we call the phone but it's anything and everything but a phone. It's in fact the least yes the least used feature of that device ever. People just don't use the phone as much anymore. We do everything else on it and what's fascinating for me also and I've noticed this in the last couple of years is that we got really excited because everything was squashed into this iPhone or into the Samsung. Today it's iPhone that we're talking about. Everything. Yeah the voice recorder, you could watch television, you could do everything on this thing and now all of a sudden it's becoming really sexy again to actually have independent devices.

Have you heard of telephonophobia and you can imagine what that is. People are actually scared of proper phone calls. That's what it's called. Oh or telephobia. One of those anyway yeah. I could imagine it because you get lots of anecdotes and lots of people sitting at dinner parties and wherever else wherever else who just don't answer the phone anymore. Yeah who just saying I'll get to that later and it'll go to voicemail and they're quite happy for that and you write this screening. So screening and I think what you're talking about is a more extreme I'm talking about you see the phone ring and you actually freak out and I think I think people do that.And I agree, because we've really not, you know, we've really over it.

I remember the days when we start talking like dinosaurs roamed the earth. I remember the days where the phone was sacrosanct, where there was one in a home and it was shared by the family and you took your turn. And the ring was so loud, it was so loud that even featured in some horror and thriller movies. And you would never, ever, ever not answer it. I mean, I just couldn't imagine a family, somebody not answering the phone in the olden days when dinosaurs roamed the earth. And then it went, we had answering machines and we kind of, you know, not got not so excited and everybody had one new right now.

They're just a nothing. So I think that's where Apple is now. This announcement is really as most of them say, some of the same, which comes out around February is what can we possibly say to this group of people around the world who want to buy something when we have nothing new to say, let's do something about the form, not about the features anymore. And that's what this one's done. So basically, as I just said, so they've released the high end stuff. Yeah, the pros and friday foldable. Now, what do you understand about this, Maurice? Because it's talking about ergonomics more than technology, really. Yeah, it is.

So Apple's seven years late. I think I think for seven years, we have talked about it coming next year or this year and it hasn't done it. So finally, it has. Now, that doesn't mean it was wrong, because I think it actually I think it was actually right to wait. But foldable phones are seven years in the history. Samsung's had one, I think for three years now, if not.So they've been around for quite a while. Apple has decided for whatever Apple thinks and does and the rest of it that it wouldn't do one until this year. And it claims it waited until all the foldable stuff was out.

Sounds like a year, but no but to me. Exactly. Till all the foldables were out, till all the problems were seen and they had figured out a way to do it. Because there's this sexy, I mean like everything Apple does, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. It is a work of beauty. But it is a question of whether, I mean, you're on the big wage fill, as am I, we can afford what would turn out to be $28,000 Hong Kong to buy the iPhone, to buy the iPhone due a fully, I mean it's beyond barking mad. It's just, it's $28,000 to buy the best suit. Hong Kong $28,000.

$28,000, exactly. In Australia it's about $5,000 to buy the souped up Ferrari version, two terabyte, everything that opens and opens and downs. You've really got to have a quid and not much else to do with it to buy it. So a couple of things spring to mind on this one. I'm just curious what you think. One, anything that has like physically, you know, visible moving parts is prone to getting bugged up. And two, I'm sure the other companies who they're up against do it a lot cheaper. And they will say it's not as good of course. Samsung is a little cheaper. It's also expensive for Joe and there are much cheaper versions out.

We don't know about Apple because it's only been out.it hasn't really been out, it's only been out for a week or so. It was all these things we're talking about were announced last week. So they claim, and you would expect them to say that, that's one of the reasons they waited because there were a lot of issues with all of the, with all the folding, the springs, all of that on the earlier version, seven years or so ago. It's not just that, Morris, it's people's pockets as well. I mean literally the pockets, they mess around with things in them. No, this one will fit. So what this one does is it has two screens.

It does fold like a clam. So the front screen is what you and I used to with a normal mobile phone has all the elements on it. You can do everything and never use the inside at all. If you want, you would then open it up and what you get is something closer to a tablet. The outside one that your views has just turned off temporarily, it's all moved into the front and you have this big piece of real estate in front of you to work on. You know what this is, Morris? It's the Nokia communicator. Yeah, absolutely. I mean none of this stuff is new.

It's, it's, it's, it's goes back to Star Trek days too. I mean, we all talked about these things. They had them in Star Trek, they had them in Star Wars. We've dreamed about these things. They're just coming to fruition now. Now the size of the Apple one is actually worked out. So it's ergonomic. It fits in your pocket. It fits in your handbag. It does all the things that we're used to. You don't really, you don't necessarily need, you know, a big truck or something to move around with it on. But it is a very different form factor. Well, you know, one of the things that I've heard, I don't have one.

I don't know whether I would buy.That was a prize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But for people that do have them, I mean not necessarily this one because this one's new, but have the foldable, the thing that I've noticed a lot because I ask people that do have them and that is that they often don't open it. They use the outside all the time and they even forget that the inside's there. So I'm finding and the research shows the same that people get really excited at the beginning, use it a lot and then after a couple of months, everything's just there on the front. People don't go to the back and they don't really get the full use of it.

Let me ask you a jargoni question here when it comes to marketing. What's it called when like the company tries to force our habits as opposed to us kind of organically needing something like a folding phone? They're forcing us. They're saying this is the best thing since sliced wheel. Don't know, but it's called Apple. I mean, Apple does it on every product. But so in their defence, so is everyone else. But you're right. What they're doing is they're teaching us that these things have to exist. We've talked before and I've used it in my marketing lectures in the old days. Deodorant that most of us put on at one stage or another, not every day, sometimes deodorant was invented by advertising agencies in the 1920s.

Yeah. And it was invented as Procter. Yeah, Procter and Gamble said to them, you know, we're running out of products and we need, you know, can you suggest something that's not in our line or that's in our line that can be souped up? In other words, used for another purpose. And the little boffins went away and researched. People have an issue with smell and we could put something in a can.that would get rid of it. Now that's kind of what you're talking about, that we go and find an itch that we didn't know we had to scratch and then we make this scratch something that we can't avoid anymore.

Are we more suggestible than we've ever been due to social media? We are, I don't know if we're more susceptible, but we are more immersed in it. We see it more than we did before. It's around us. We're immersed in it. I think that's closer to what it is. Humans have always been. You know, we don't know something until we know something. It's just human nature. You can't miss something or want something unless you know what it is. The difference is now that we know it exists much quicker and easier than we ever did before. Yeah. Not us. How do I put it? You know the clickbait feeling?

I know I mustn't. So is that when it comes to sales? Because of things like that, are we more likely to jump and buy something like this than we ever were before social media? Yeah, for a lot of people, a lot of people that's absolutely true. It goes to security as well, personal security that a number of us, most of us, me, maybe just only, but often we get our self-worth from something that we hold, something that we own, a brand that we admire, or a particular look and feel that we want. And there's nothing wrong with it. That's human nature. And part of human nature of queuing into that, which tech companies and clothing companies and car manufacturers, pretty much everybody that we buy from knows that.

But if they can queue it into your psyche and make this seem important to you.on that level, then you are more than likely to go out and buy it. Because talk about a greater car as a murk is, it drives just as well as something that cost you a far lot less. So probability here, psychology, all those kind of things, how close do you think this company is to kind of wearing out its welcome with people? And let's assume these are people who've got enough silly money to buy these things. How close are they to kind of wearing out their welcome? And we're going to start going, yeah, whatever.

We're going to start going, yeah, whatever, because we're not buying it the numbers we did. You know, as I said, the Apple just doesn't sell like it used to before, but that's about every phone. The interesting thing I looked up over the years, so this is version 18. There are some versions that had a couple of years in them. So really we're coming up to the 20th year next year of iPhones. They've sold three billion iPhones, three billion with a B. This is their figures since its inception. And right now on this planet, there's about one and a half billion active iPhones being used. So there are a lot of people out there who are using it.

What's fascinating is, and this goes to the changing of the guards, the old Apple CEO who left last week, nothing untoward. It was announced a long time ago, had been there 15 years. He decided to go on to the board itself, not have a day-to-day function. He left. His role really was to take over from jobs and then to…grow the company, which he did really well. He was a logistics guy and he grew the company to this size over the last 15 years. The new guy that they've just put in is really, and he worked, the new guy and this guy both worked with jobs. That's how far but they go back, Steven Jobs, I should say, they both worked with him, the original founder.

So they've, they're kind of seeped in that. But he was a technician. He always has been. He's a builder. So he goes back to building products. And the talk now is that they have handed it over to a hardware guy again, who's very similar to the originator, Steve Jobs, who sees possibility in new things, not just taking something that exists and making it sell better. The elephant in the room, Maurice, is of course the price. I mean, you know, these things are designed to be used in various cool and funky ways, but the paranoia about losing it or damaging it, and you're not all going to have warranty, are you?

No, but the remember, as you said, this is the high end. The other thing that Apple's done now that they've never done before is they're releasing this in three stages. These are the high end, you know, this is the Rolls Royce, the best you can possibly have. And then there's going to be a middle-run announce around September, and then there's going to be another round around February. And each of them will be iPhones, but different versions of the same one. So now they're confusing us. Well, what they're saying is, look, if we gave you the cheap stuff, there's no way you're going to buy the expensive stuff.

So we're going to feed you the expensive stuff, people that want it will buy it. Then once everyone's decided that's not for them, we're going to put out.the middle stuff, people will buy that. And then the rest of the world will just say, I'm happy to wait for what is a really, really good iPhone, pretty much what we had before with a few new bells and whistles. And you can have that in February. So they're gonna make sure the other two get what they want. Sales come out of that. Because the other way around just wouldn't work from a marketing viewpoint. I think one of the reasons I asked you this question to start with is we're still on the 17 honeymoon, surely?

Yeah, we are. And we're on the 14 and the 16. Because you can buy those in the Apple stores. I've got a one somewhere. I'm wondering how much it would fetch these things. Oh, if you had a one, then you almost could retire if it was in a box and unused. I mean, they're literally worth a fortune. The Apple stores are doing all kinds of things. In Australia, it might be different for you because you might have this already, as does America. But in Australia, for the first time ever, we are, Apple stores are now selling it through Afterpay, which is the ability to pay this off in installments.

You need it. Now, this is… What is the sound of it? Yeah. But that's exactly it. Wounded bull. Honestly. They've figured out that this thing alone is just too, too expensive. Some people will buy it. That's terrific. That's the marketplace. But even the base phones now are getting beyond many people to buy. So they're giving them another option, which is, apart from all the internal, because there are ways inside that you can buy it as well. You can trade in the old one. All sorts of things Apple does. Well, that's an interesting thing, Morris. It's very nearly news time. But if you're real smarty at the reconditioned approach, that might be the winner.

And that's it. So the reconditioned one, they normally have the last two or three…years available to you from the Apple Store which tells you how good the last phones are. We'll leave it there Maurice brilliant thanks very much for joining us. Back next week if you're free take care for now Maurice Misolowski live very from Melbourne so weather-wise

This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 15 September 2026.