What I want from Apple — it’s not a f***ing folding phone.
Somewhere in Palo Alto, there is an engineer who was brutally attacked by a pair of pleated pants and subsequently dedicated his life to ridding the world of seams once and for all. At Apple he found his mission, and he begged Tim for ungodly sums of money to aid him in his quest.
This is the most logical explanation I’ve found for Apple’s rumored folding phone. It’s a weird vanity project.
Rumors suggest it will be the size of an iPad Mini priced at $2,000.
I’m sorry, what? For twice the price of an M5 iPad Pro, I can have — a hinge? Who buys that? What’s the use case that makes it better than a phone I can glance at without opening it?
This has all the hallmarks of a product decision responding to internet noise and market pressure rather than solving an actual design or engineering problem. In fact, it creates a problem just to solve it.
John Ternus, welcome to your new role as CEO of the richest company on Earth. For your hazing, make this a success. Good luck, champ!
Now, let’s get conspiratorial for a second.
Come closer.
What if Apple is secretly still brilliant, and this is a red herring to throw fanboys like me off the scent of the REAL announcement?
If that’s the case, what do I want to be true? What would be the most revolutionary innovation that could also benefit me personally?
Hear me out.
On-device AI.
It’s not about using a NASA-grade processor to generate AI slop for LinkedIn. The name of the game is not faux-creativity, it’s PRIVACY — and privacy is central to Apple’s brand.
While content creators are using ChatGPT to make the internet basically unusable, a massive population of professionals are unable to do something actually useful with AI because of restrictions in their fields.
Claude and GPT are legal landmines for a therapist who runs client notes through them — and rightly so, considering the bots have literally been known to induce psychosis.
A lawyer who feeds client notes into a cloud AI is potentially waiving privilege. Recently there have been reports of lawyers presenting AI-hallucinated court cases in their briefs and arguments. (Because fucking lawyers.)
A doctor trying to process patient data through an external API violates compliance laws, when an AI analysis could be helpful with diagnosis and treatment.
If Apple solves the privacy and dirty-information problems, it changes the industry landscape. Professionals who invest in the Apple ecosystem are committed. Leaving for Windows means legal exposure, not just inconvenience.
Apple is the only one who can make this move. Google and Microsoft have built cloud-dependent business models. They make money by moving your data. (So fuck them.) Apple’s business is hardware, and in the past they have even gone so far as to say that privacy IS their product. They have not always lived up to that promise, but they’ve done better than literally any other tech company besides maybe Signal.
The interface could be a chatbot style UI, like Claude or GPT, but tapped into a contained knowledge base — clean, domain-specific data. Imagine if Apple licensed all the data from the American Psychiatric Association, the American Bar Association, and medical licensing boards.
Yes, it would be expensive. But Apple has money.
Yes, it would be slow. But Apple isn’t going anywhere.
Yes, the model would be small. But it would be CLEAN — with credibility that is unmatched by any AI product that currently exists.
It could also create a marketplace for other ethically sourced, clean knowledge bases, and apps that use that data to solve field-specific problems.
Imagine the product announcement. “Every piece of knowledge in this system was ethically sourced. Nothing was scraped. This is AI you can use with your clients, your patients, because the information never leaves your device.”
That sets the professional standard to which everyone else has to respond.
Apple actually could pull this off. They have a history of making devices more capable and less dependent. The Mac broke the mainframe mold. The iPhone put the internet in your pocket. Apple Silicon made Intel irrelevant. Sovereignty is the through-line.
Then there’s the environmental impact. How necessary are all these AI data centers really? Could we get privacy protection and at the same time stop pouring our drinking water into machines during a drought?
So how does this benefit me personally? I’m a depth-oriented coach. I work with extremely personal client material — the kind of thing people only share when they trust that it stays between us. Coaching is not subject to HIPAA, but confidentiality is foundational to the work. I take digital privacy seriously because my clients’ trust depends on it.
Honestly, I don’t know exactly what on-device AI would unlock for my practice. I haven’t mapped that out. What I do know is that right now, my clients can’t use AI to explore their own inner lives without sending their most private material through someone else’s servers. Imagine a client journaling after a session — processing dreams and fantasies, tracking patterns, sitting with what came up — and having an AI tool that could help them go deeper, on their own device, with zero risk that their reflections end up in a training dataset, especially one owned by a company named after a corrupted magical object used to spy on people.
I’m rooting for John Ternus. He’s responsible for Silicon, and he knows better than anyone what those chips can do. My heartfelt hope is that after the hardware engineer finally gets his revenge on pleated khakis by making a $2,000 phone with a seamless hinge, Ternus can put Apple’s resources to work changing the AI game for the better.