Apple’s Folding iPhone Duo Is for Everyone Complaining that Apple Lost Its Touch

There are new iPhones, and there is the all-new iPhone Duo. Apple’s first folding smartphone is a product made to prove that Steve Jobs’ old joint can still innovate, and has the clout to charge you $1999 for the privilege. The pitch: what if your iPhone could open up into an iPad? A very literal “...and one more thing.”Like Carlos Alcaraz and his yellow-gold Le Mans Daytona, the Duo is not something that anyone needs. But I can personally confirm that if you get your hands on an iPhone Duo, you’ll sure as hell want to keep holding onto it.Unveiled by new Apple CEO John Ternus in the sweltering climes of late-summer Cupertino, the iPhone Duo belongs to the same lineage of devices that were once introduced with a softly spoken Jony Ive voiceover and deeply luxurious footage of brushed aluminium. Will it prove to be as transformative as the OG iPhone or MacBook Air? Doubtful. Nevertheless, the Duo is a legacy-burnishing product for a $4.6 trillion company—the kind of launch that inspires far more public fascination and intrigue than, say, next-gen AirTags.So what’s the fuss about? I braved Apple Park’s scrum of fevered influencers, grizzled journos and even one chaotic IShowSpeed appearance to find out. Here’s your first look at the iPhone Duo…1. Folding phones are good now, seriouslyCynics’ takes on the iPhone Duo won’t be hard to come by, and with good reason given Apple has spent the last five years or so trying to invent a new iPhone that could meaningfully bolster its bottom line. There was the iPhone mini, the Plus, and, most recently, last year’s ultra-thin (and largely ignored) iPhone Air. Good phones, but not exactly best-sellers.More significantly, the first folding phones were awful. They were horribly bulky, had a giant crease down the middle of their screens and would break the moment dirt got stuck in their hinges. I still remember being cornered in a Soho art gallery by a PR who insisted with righteous fervour that their new foldable was the future of technology… before all review units for the product were recalled a fortnight later, having been brought low by specks of dust.In 2026, though, folding phones are great. They have been for a while — at least since last year’s Samsung Galaxy Fold 7.The iPhone Duo is notably compact when closed flat, it doesn’t have any noticeable crease IRL, and has undergone a ton of R&D to be able to survive prolonged abuse inside the pockets of your Levi’s 501s. All of which means you can actually enjoy your $1999 phone that opens up into an iPad.2. It’s the most expensive iPhone ever madeBefore the iPhone Duo hits stores on October 23, chances are that you’ve never used a foldable before, and that’s because barely anyone has — recent research shows they account for just 3% of global smartphone sales. They are wildly expensive, relatively more fragile than the average smart phone, and not radically more useful. The Duo is no exception, at least on the pricing front. It’s almost double the price of last year’s already excellent iPhone 17 Pro Max.To help you feel better about dropping twice the price, the passport-shaped Duo oozes a kind of lavishness that’s typically reserved for Husbands’ tailoring and Christopher Nolan movies on IMAX. The thinnest iPhone yet (when unfolded) is far more svelte than I’d expected in the hand and reasonably lightweight too — both thanks to a titanium frame. Imagine two iPhone Airs sturdily hinged together, and you’re most of the way there.3. Its display tech is seriously impressiveThe appeal of any foldable is its two-screens-in-one magic trick. So with the iPhone Duo, you get a 5.4-inch display on its front (aka, the screen you’ll be using most often) and an ample 7.6-inch display when you open the thing up — the largest ever on an iPhone. For context, that makes the Duo just a smidge smaller than one of the first iPad Minis. Its compact aspect ratio is particularly well-suited to being unfurled in a business class seat over the Atlantic and outshining the in-flight entertainment system in front of you. Especially with its custom nano texture screen layer to minimise glare and eke optimal contrast and colour gamut out of The Gentlemen season 2 or whatever you’re watching right now – both screens hit an ample max brightness of 3,000 nits.Compared to a lot of foldables, the one thing I really like about the iPhone Duo is its notepad-esque shape. It’s not crazy tall and thin to hold like other foldable phones, which opt for bigger screens but a lot of awkward stretching with your thumbs to navigate across them. In its current guise, the Ultra has a surprising amount in common with those very first, delightfully tactile iPhones. And if you want to use the Duo like an actual notebook, it’ll work with the Apple Pencil stylus.4. All the power of an iPhone Pro (with a few compromises)Just as Apple waited the best part of a decade to make its own foldable so that it wouldn’t have to release a breeze block in the shape of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it can now craft an iPhone Duo that’s more or less blessed with exactly the same power as the top-tier iPhone Pro models. That means Apple’s latest A20 Pro chip and its substantial performance improvements across raw computing power and graphics, as well as the newly upgraded (and finally good) Siri AI. Battery life will vary wildly from person to person depending on how much you actually make use of its bigger display, but Apple claims you’ll get up to 44 hours of usage from the thing.5. So what’s the catch?Compared to the iPhone Pro models, you’ll only get a dual lens camera setup: a 48-megapixel wide-angle lens and a 2x telephoto lens. Unless you’re leaning hard on the iPhone Pro’s 4x zoom, there’s a decent chance that you might not notice its absence too much.Also missing: Face ID. The Duo’s surprisingly retro use of fingerprint-reading Touch ID instead of the near-instant Face ID that’s been a feature on iPhone since 2017 is a notable loss. Apple has at least stuck the Touch ID scanner on the side of the case where your thumb sits, so that you’re using the same “unlock” mechanism whether the Duo is flat or folded.Courtesy of the writerCourtesy of the writer6. It’s out this OctoberHere’s something only the Apple obsessives will notice whenever it makes a game-shifting new iPhone iteration: the company tends to delay the release from the usual September on-sale date. That’s what happened with 2017’s all-screen iPhone X and the same thing is happening again with the Duo. Why? It gives the standard iPhones a little time to shine on their own—and, likely, some breathing room for any last-minute tweaks to, in this case, the Duo.Pre-orders for the Duo begin on Friday, October 16, in advance of an on-sale date a week later, on Friday, October 23. You can pick up the entry-level 256GB model for $1,999 in “star white” or “night sky” (read: black) and prices scale all the way up to $3,199 for a fully-loaded 2TB model.Apple’s iPhone Duo is available from $1,999 at apple.com