John Ternus debuts as Apple CEO with iPhone 18 lineup, new Siri AI and A20 Pro chip

John Ternus ran his first keynote as Apple's chief executive on Wednesday, opening the "Surprise and Shine" event eight days into the job. He took over from Tim Cook on September 1, with Cook shifting to executive chairman after 15 years running the company.

Ternus used the stage to introduce a redesigned Siri and a new 2-nanometer chip, built with AI performance in mind.

"This is the fastest chip ever put into an iPhone," Ternus said on stage, referring to the new A20 Pro. He framed the pitch around what he called an "ideal" personal device—one that's "always with you, deeply personal, and able to bring intelligence to the moments when it matters most"—before pivoting into the iPhone 18 lineup.

Siri AI

Siri AI is Apple's biggest rework of its assistant since it shipped in 2011. It can hold conversations, reference what's on screen, and take actions across more than 300,000 third-party apps without the user re-explaining context. Apple first showed the assistant at WWDC in June, where it described Siri AI as running on an architecture that blends on-device models with Private Cloud Compute for heavier requests. Apple didn’t deliver on its promises until today.

The new Siri AI ships in beta starting this month on devices set to a supported region.

The upgraded Siri comes with some interesting agentic features and a more fluid voice that leaves behind the well-known robotic voice that has become a Siri signature since its launch.

The A20 Pro: Apple's first 2-nanometer chip, focused on AI

The A20 Pro is Apple's first chip built on TSMC's 2-nanometer (N2) process—the first time any smartphone chip has shipped on that node. Smaller transistors mean Apple can pack more processing power into the same die area without a bigger thermal or battery cost.

Apple says the chip's six-core CPU, split between two high-performance "super cores" and four efficiency cores, is up to 20% faster than the A19 Pro. The seven-core GPU, up from six cores last year, is up to 40% faster. Memory bandwidth is up 50%, which matters directly for on-device AI, since bandwidth is usually the bottleneck when running language models locally rather than in the cloud.

The headline change for AI workloads is the Neural Engine. Apple doubled it to a dual, 32-core design, after keeping the Neural Engine at 16 cores across three straight chip generations. Apple is pairing that with a new vapor chamber cooling system with triple the surface area of the previous design, letting the chip sustain heavier AI tasks—like the on-device portions of Siri AI—without throttling.

iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and the $1,999 foldable

The iPhone 18 Pro keeps its 6.3-inch display and the Pro Max its 6.9-inch screen, largely unchanged from the iPhone 17 Pro generation. Apple gave both new finishes—Black, Silver, Glacier, and Burgundy—and a smaller Dynamic Island.

Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, pairs a 5.5-inch cover display with a 7.8-inch inner screen that opens like a small tablet. It starts at $1,999 for 256GB and climbs to roughly $3,000 for the 2TB model, comes in dark blue and white, and is the first iPhone to support the Apple Pencil, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. It uses Touch ID instead of Face ID and won't reach stores until October, a month behind the rest of the lineup.

iOS 27, which carries the new Siri AI and the rest of Apple Intelligence, arrives September 14. It runs on any iPhone back to the iPhone 11 and the second-generation iPhone SE, but Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features are limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and newer.