Sep 11, 2026 09:26 am IST

Opinion | Apple And The Art Of Not Playing Every Game

Vinay Sarawagi Vinay Sarawagi Chief Content Officer (Digital Content)

Vinay Sarawagi Chief Content Officer (Digital Content)

John Ternus took the stage this year as Apple's new chief executive and did something odd. At the exact moment every rival was racing to prove AI supremacy, he unveiled a foldable iPhone. Samsung had launched the first Galaxy Fold in 2019. Apple's version, the $1,999 iPhone Duo, starting at Rs 3 lakh in India, arrived seven years later, wrapped around a precision hinge, dual batteries, a custom thermal system and an A20 Pro chip. Ternus called it "the most transformational change to iPhone since the original."

No frontier AI model. No AI supremacy claim. Just a folding phone, seven years behind Samsung, presented by a hardware engineer as the biggest leap since 2007.

New foldable iPhone Duo devices on display during Apple's event. Photo Credit: Reuters

That, in miniature, might be Apple's entire AI strategy. And it raises the real question about the company: not whether Apple is behind in AI, but how it can afford to be.

AI is this generation's defining theme. Every large company commanding a rich valuation premium over the past five years has had an AI story attached to it. Nvidia is the extreme case. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta have poured money, computing power and management attention into the race. The largest tech firms are now spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on AI infrastructure, a scale that has prompted the Bank for International Settlements to compare it with earlier infrastructure booms such as railways and the dot-com era.

Apple is the exception. It has not built a ChatGPT or Gemini rival. It has not matched its peers' infra spending. Instead it has bet on smaller on-device models, private cloud compute, and partnerships, most recently a January 2026 deal to run its next Foundation Models on Google's Gemini. Yet Apple still trades at a premium to most Big Tech peers, sitting atop an active installed base of 2.5 billion devices.

Apple may have spent decades building something rarer than any model: the ability to choose which races to run, which to skip, and which to enter late and still win.

Apple didn't........

© NDTV