Apple’s new CEO designed a ‘wacky’ folding iPad, but we might never get it

According to a new report, Apple intends to position its incoming CEO as the “face” of the burgeoning foldables market. But that market may not include a foldable iPad, even though that product has been one of his pet projects.

In a dramatic announcement last week, Apple revealed that John Ternus will take over as CEO on September 1, while current boss Tim Cook will simultaneously become chairman of the board. That transition has been years in the planning, and the date was chosen carefully, as Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman explains in the most recent instalment of his Power On newsletter.

Apple wants its new CEO to hit the ground running, and a start date of September 1 is perfectly calculated to achieve that. It means Ternus’s first quarter as boss will include the financially lucrative holiday period, but more importantly, it means he can take the stage at the yearly iPhone release a week or two after starting the job and stamp his mark on proceedings in front of the world’s media. The flagship reveal this September will be Apple’s first folding phone, expected to be called the iPhone Ultra, and Apple wants Ternus to be associated with that product and that market, from the very beginning.

“As part of Apple’s planning for the transition from Cook to Ternus,” Gurman reports, “the company wanted its new leader to be the one hosting the event to unveil the device–setting him up to become the face of what it believes will be a blockbuster new product category.”

This isn’t as tenuous as it might sound, with the new guy being parachuted in at the last minute to take credit for a project years in the making. On the contrary, Ternus (currently in charge of all hardware engineering at the company) has reportedly been involved with the iPhone Ultra from the start, and Apple intends to make the most of that experience. “The idea that Ternus drove this whole process will be put front and center during the launch period,” says Gurman, who expects the new CEO to be positioned as “the face of the new era.”

The new era of foldables could be an exciting one for Apple, but for the time being, it looks set to be confined to the world of smartphones. Apple has other foldable products in the pipeline, but whether or not they will ever ship remains in doubt. The giant folding iPad, for example, has reportedly been a “priority” for Ternus in his current role, but being the new boss’s pet project gives it no guarantee of making it to market.

So far from launch is the folding iPad, in fact, that Gurman says it “may end up being a wacky experiment that doesn’t see the light of day.” He cites the testimony of multiple anonymous sources who have worked not merely at Apple but on that exact product.

Gurman and his disillusioned sources do not offer any rationale for the giant folding iPad’s dubious prospects or why such a product would ever be commercially viable. However, it’s easy to see why a giany iPad might not be a hit. Apple’s best-selling iPads are the ones that are a) as cheap as possible, and b) roughly 11 inches from corner to corner. The vast majority of iPad users simply want something simple and instant-booting to use when viewing YouTube videos or answering emails on the couch, and have little need for the latest hardware or the budget to pay for it.

The iPad Pro has shown that there is a market for premium and larger tablets, but it remains a small one, and a 20-inch folding iPad would surely cost at least twice as much as even the largest iPad Pro… already a premium niche product. A foldable iPad would be glorious to use, folding down to the size of a normal iPad to fit in a bag, and then expanding to the size of a large laptop for watching movies, but it doesn’t seem like a product that would find a large enough audience. Although perhaps John Ternus, in his new role as the face of foldables, will be able to persuade us all of its advantages.