Apple spent 70 minutes at the Steve Jobs Theater on Wednesday doing two things at once. The first was ritual. John Ternus took over as chief executive on 1 September, after 15 years of Tim Cook. He walked on stage as the man who owns the whole company rather than its hardware. The second will outlast it. Apple raised the price of its Pro iPhone by $100 in the United States and by Rs 30,000 in India. Then it opened a tier above that with a folding phone at Rs 2,99,900, which rounds to three lakh rupees for a telephone. The year makes the move sharper. Memory chips have grown so costly that Omdia expects the average price of a phone to jump 21 per cent, the steepest rise the trade has logged. Rivals had moved first. Apple held out through four quarters of part costs going up. Then it moved, on the day a new chief took the stage. The foldable is the headline. The pricing is the story.Key HighlightsAbout The AuthorAt heart, I am a storyteller drawn to the watershed moments that bend the technology landscape. I braid narrative with data, humanise statistics, and trace the arc from first spark to world-changing impact. My reportage, features and reviews are witty, sardonic, visual and vivid, using anecdote to illuminate rather than eviscerate.