Apple's First Launch Under New CEO Ternus Pairs iPhone 18 Pro With Gemini-Built Siri

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max went on sale at retail stores worldwide on Friday, the first hardware launch to unfold entirely under chief executive John Ternus and the first to arrive alongside a rebuilt version of Siri built with help from Google's Gemini models. The rollout, detailed in an Apple newsroom announcement, put the new phones on shelves alongside the Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4 and AirPods 5, with lines forming outside stores from Manhattan to Shanghai to London.

The launch matters less for what is new in the hardware, which analysts describe as an incremental update, than for what surrounds it: a leadership transition completed just over two weeks earlier, and an artificial-intelligence assistant that Apple has spent more than two years trying to rebuild after a widely criticized false start. Both are now being tested in public, on the industry's most closely watched consumer product.

What happened

Sales began at 8 a.m. local time at Apple's roughly 500 retail stores, with the company's newsroom highlighting openings in New York, Shanghai, London, Mumbai and Kuala Lumpur. At the Fifth Avenue flagship in Manhattan, Ternus made his first public launch-day appearance as chief executive, greeting customers and signing autographs, according to Fox Business, which reported crowds at stores in London, Shenzhen, Malaysia and New Jersey as well.

The phones ship with iOS 27 and the first consumer release of what Apple calls Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant capable of stringing together more than 20 exchanges of conversation, reading context from a user's messages, email and photos, and taking actions inside third-party apps. Apple's own description, published in a company announcement, says the assistant runs on a new generation of Apple Foundation Models developed in part with Google and its Gemini models, splitting tasks between on-device processing and Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers.

The numbers

The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299, rising to $2,399 and $2,499 for the top 2-terabyte configurations. Those prices, combined with what several analysts called modest camera and chip upgrades, produced conflicting early demand signals. GF Securities analyst Jeff Pu described preorder wait times as "lukewarm" and cut his production forecast for the Pro line to 72 million units, citing manufacturing constraints tied to the new variable-aperture camera, according to MacRumors. He also trimmed his estimate for the separate foldable iPhone Duo, due in October, from 7 million to 6 million units.

A rival read on the same launch, published the same day the phones reached stores, points the other way. An Evercore ISI survey found the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max together drew 53 percent of prospective buyers, with 67 percent of respondents citing an aging phone as their reason to upgrade, up from 48 percent in an earlier survey, MacRumors reported. Evercore estimated average iPhone selling prices could rise roughly 28 percent this cycle. The discrepancy, the outlet noted, may reflect the difference between stated purchase intent and confirmed sales data, which will not be clear until Apple reports holiday-quarter results early next year.

How Apple got here

Friday's launch is the first since Apple announced in April that Tim Cook, after 15 years running the company, would move to executive chairman and hand the chief executive role to Ternus, effective September 1. Ternus joined Apple's design team in 2001, became vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and senior vice president in 2021, overseeing engineering on the iPad, AirPods, iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch lines along the way.

"John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and honor," Cook said in announcing the succession.

The Siri rebuild has its own longer backstory. Apple first previewed a more personalized, context-aware Siri in 2024, then delayed it repeatedly after the underlying technology fell short of internal expectations, drawing criticism that the company had fallen behind rivals on generative AI. The version now shipping folds in Apple Foundation Models built with Google's involvement, an unusual partnership between two companies that compete directly in mobile software and, in Google's case, faces its own antitrust scrutiny in search and advertising.

The most immediate effects fall on the installed base of iPhone owners deciding whether to upgrade, on Apple's retail and supply-chain partners bracing for a holiday quarter that will be read as an early verdict on the Ternus era, and on Apple investors weighing dueling analyst calls before the company's next earnings report. Siri AI's rollout is also uneven by design: the feature ships in beta and in English only at launch, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish support promised next month, and it is unavailable at launch in the European Union pending regulatory clearance and in China pending local approval. Apple's announcement also notes that expanded, higher-volume access to the assistant's server-based features will eventually carry a fee, and that the feature is not available to users under 13.

Reaction, and what happens next

The split among Wall Street analysts has become the dominant storyline of the launch itself. Pu's note framed the muted early wait times as evidence that higher prices and limited spec changes were dulling demand, particularly for the largest storage tiers. Evercore's Amit Daryanani took the opposite view, telling clients the survey data pointed to a stronger-than-expected refresh cycle driven by an aging installed base of iPhones. A widely upvoted comment on a MacRumors forum thread captured the confusion among longtime Apple watchers: the new survey, one reader wrote, "directly contradicts the stories from the last few days about sales of this model being weaker than expected." Apple itself has not commented on preorder volumes or wait times, referring only to the newsroom material describing the launch.

Apple's foldable iPhone Duo is due in October, a launch that will test whether the company's first folding phone cannibalizes Pro sales or expands the overall upgrade cycle, as Pu's revised forecasts already anticipate. Siri AI's non-English languages and its expansion into the European Union and China remain open questions that will shape how much of Apple's active device base can actually use the new assistant this year. The clearest resolution to the demand debate, however, will not come from surveys or preorder wait times but from Apple's fiscal first-quarter earnings report, expected in late January, when holiday-quarter iPhone unit sales and average selling prices will show which analyst read closer to the mark — and give the clearest early accounting of Ternus's first product cycle as chief executive.