For a man known to not be a product guy, it was Tim Cook who pushed hard for 10 years to perfect a foldable iPhone before stepping down. It was the biggest criticism Steve Jobs ever had of Cook, that he did not share the same passion for products that Jobs or Jony Ive did. Now according to Bloomberg, while Apple engineers had been exploring foldable devices, it was Cook's direct intervention that has made the iPhone Ultra happen.

This is Cook's true last product as CEO, even as it launches after he stepped down. Reportedly beginning in 2020 when Cook was in Asia and saw growing numbers of users with foldable phones from Samsung, Huawei and more, he decided that Apple should be in this market. Samsung brought out its first foldable in 2019, but Apple was apparently investing research time into the field long before then.

The company won an extensive patent for a foldable and flexible iPhone as early as 2015 that was applied for in 2011. So at least 15 years ago, Apple engineers and designers had already been exploring foldable possibilities. A strong contender was the idea of making an iPad mini that folded out into a larger iPad.

That idea did not go away, as it wasn't until as recently as April 2026 that Apple is said to regard a folding iPad as an experiment rather than a shipping product. By that time, the idea was to fold out an iPad to a 20-inch display. Cook championed the iPhone Ultra however, directing teams to a phone rather than a tablet. "Tim was the earliest and biggest champion of this," said an unspecified source with knowledge of the situation. "He saw [foldables] everywhere in Asia and said Apple needed to play in this space.".