Apple (AAPL) spent years watching Samsung, Google, and other smartphone makers experiment with folding phones.
Now Apple is prepared to find out how much its consumers are willing to pay for one.
Apple's first foldable iPhone may bring in almost $14 billion in sales in the December quarter, according to Morgan Stanley, with analyst Erik Woodring calling the gadget Apple's largest shift to the iPhone form factor since the iPhone X.
Demand will be so great that supply, not buyers, may become the larger issue, the bank said.
But the $14 billion is just half of the tale.
Apple's Sept. 9 event will also be the first big product announcement under new CEO John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook on Sept. 1. Cook, who has managed Apple for 15 years, has taken the position of executive chairman.
Thus, Ternus begins his term with something that few incoming CEOs get: a potentially disruptive new edition of the company's most significant product.
Morgan Stanley said Apple might make 7 million to 8 million foldable iPhones in the second half of 2026 and up to 20 million units in the device's first product cycle.
More importantly, the bank anticipates supply to be lower than initial demand.
Apple appears "more focused on securing enough components than finding enough buyers," Woodring wrote, although memory constraints could limit how many devices Apple can produce in the near term.
That's a bold assumption for a gadget that's supposed to reside at the very high-end of the smartphone market.
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Apple too is arriving to debut in a strong financial position. The business announced $109.4 billion in revenue for the fiscal third quarter, a 16 percent increase from a year ago, establishing June-quarter records for total revenue, iPhone, Mac and Services sales.
So even for Apple, a $14 billion contribution from a single new iPhone model would be significant.
More crucially, it might provide to Apple what investors have been yearning for: a visually different flagship that could deliver a new upgrade cycle rather than another incremental yearly update.
Morgan Stanley's argument is not only about the foldable phone.
Woodring anticipates that increasing NAND and DRAM prices will translate into year-over-year pricing increases of more than $200 for Pro models, perhaps providing Apple's most broad-based like-for-like iPhone price increases in years.
At the same time, Morgan Stanley also anticipates that the iPhone 18 Pro will use Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's 2-nanometer technology, powering on-device AI.
Meanwhile, Apple's foldable iPhone would cost more than $2,000, putting it squarely at the high end of an already pricey industry.
This makes the launch a test of something much more crucial than fold-screen technology.
That will challenge Apple's pricing power.
If purchasers queue up for a foldable that costs more than $2,000 and for Pro variants that cost much more, Apple will have shown that customers would still spend big bucks for real differences in hardware.
If demand falters, Apple could realize there's a ceiling on how far its brand can push smartphone costs.
The timing does add a lot to the stakes.
Ternus was Apple's hardware engineering chief for years before taking the reins from Cook, placing a product executive at the helm as worries mount about AI, product innovation, and whether the firm can deliver another significant hardware cycle.
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And his first big event is anything but normal.
The foldable is Apple's largest form-factor update for the iPhone since the iPhone X, Morgan Stanley said. The gadget might help Apple drive selling prices and profits higher, Reuters said. Experts expect the larger foldable category to rise even as the overall smartphone market shrinks.
That turns the $14 billion projection into something more than a Wall Street flash.
It represents a bet that Apple can take a category competitors have spent years developing, arrive relatively late, and rapidly turn it into a material business.
Apple has done versions of that before.
But Ternus is inheriting a particularly tricky mix: rising component prices, tight supply, aggressive pricing, and expectations that Apple must prove it can still produce real product innovation.
But if demand turns out to outweigh supply anyhow, Apple will have done something perhaps more significant than just making a successful foldable phone.
It will have shown it still has pricing power at the very top of the smartphone industry.
That would be a strong opening statement from Ternus.
For Apple investors, Sept. 9 could reveal whether the next iPhone cycle is another annual upgrade or the beginning of something much bigger.
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This story was originally published by TheStreet on Sep 7, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.