The iPhone Duo – Apple’s first foldable and the most expensive iPhone to ever come out. Nobody outside Apple’s inner circle and a few very lucky reviewers have even touched it. All of this is just my attempt to understand the product launch, relive the keynote videos, and form a very firm opinion on everything in the manner that the internet has trained all of us to. After Apple spent seven years observing Samsung and Xiaomi making mistakes and learning about the technology in foldable smartphones, it seems that the company has done a great job, as the Duo does not look like an afterthought. It looks like Apple asking a different question: what if your phone just turned into an iPad when you want it to?
Here are three things that had me nodding along at my screen, and one thing that made me tilt my head a little.
All existing foldables still seem like two smartphones who fell into love, started living together but didn’t combine their possessions. John Ternus, the new CEO of Apple, tried to solve this problem during the launch of the iPhone Duo and made his point.
The Duo is based on the Split View multitasking mode and the ability to transfer things from one application to another using drag and drop. For a decade, Apple was trying to keep the iPhone and iPad as two completely different products of life. And now suddenly, they became the same product, dressed in different clothes. You can work in two applications at once and even store the combination of your apps to use it later. As someone who uses their laptop more than the phone, the PC-like drag and drop had me sold. If this feature performs at least half as good as on the stage, it will be the first time when an iPhone will feel clever instead of getting additional cameras.
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Apple does not usually do weird. Apple does “safe, refined, a little smug about it.” The Duo bends (pun intended) that pattern ever so slightly: a passport-shaped fold, a wide landscape mode when open, controls that moved to the side because someone remembered thumbs exist. Tucked under the inner screen is the return of the under-display selfie camera, no notch, no punch hole, just theatre. I don’t know yet if it takes good selfies. As a design flex on a first-gen product, though, it’s doing exactly what it’s meant to do.
Foldables live or die by the hinge, and Apple seems to have taken that personally. A nano-texture display hides the crease, matching aspect ratios stop content from jump-scare resizing when you open it. Most foldables make you feel the compromise every time you open them. On paper, Apple looks like it solved for it instead of hiding it better. I’d love to be proven right. I’d also love to be wrong in a fun way, because “Apple nailed foldables on attempt one” is an annoying sentence to write.
Now the fun part, where I get difficult. This phone costs ₹3 lakhs and goes all the way to almost 4.5 lakhs at the highest storage option. That’s not “I got a new phone” money; that’s “I took a nice vacation” money. At that price, I want every millimetre to feel agonised over. Then you flip it over and there is a camera bump staring at you. It’s not bad but it’s not the most pleasant either. However, with the plethora of ways in which I can place this fold, I don’t think it should be a world of wobbling either.
End of the world? No. I won’t be skipping the queue over this (might skip it over the cost). But when the rest of the phone hides creases and disappears cameras, a funky bump is the one place Apple stopped trying. Maybe I’m being fussy. For a device this considered everywhere else, it’s the one detail that makes me go “wait, really?”
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