The very nature of the iPhone Duo raises numerous obvious questions about what it’s like to use. Does it not feel thick and heavy, awkward both to pocket and unpocket? Doesn’t the outer (cover) screen feel small and cramped, with an unfamiliar squat-rather-than-tall layout for UI controls in every app you use? Isn’t it weird that when you open it up to use the inner screen, that all the hardware buttons on the edges of the device are in the “wrong” places for a tablet? For anyone who’s gotten used to Face ID over the last decade, is it not frustrating to go back to Touch ID? And what about third-party apps that haven’t been updated to support the Duo’s novel displays — do they not suck to use?

Clearly, the point of a Duo review is to answer these questions, which really boil down to one question: How did Apple solve these problems?

The answer is: They didn’t.

All of these problems are real, and each of them detracts from the experience of using the Duo. Some of them have been mitigated through thoughtful design and clever engineering. Some of them might be solved in future iterations of the device. Some of them, though, I believe are endemic to the very idea of a foldable, and cannot be solved.

The Duo name is perfect. It truly is like having two devices in one. The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet, with a UI that out-iPads the iPad. For me, by far, it’s my favorite tablet experience ever. I prefer it to any iPad or Kindle-like reader I’ve ever used.

So I’ll cut to the chase. The decision of whether you might want to buy a Duo is not easy, because only one of its two selves is good. You might be delighted, despite its clear compromises, if what you value most is a pocketable small tablet and are ambivalent about your iPhone. You might be endlessly frustrated if you love your iPhone, and use it extensively, often for quick interactions throughout the day, every day.

More Than Meets the Eye

I was a kid when Transformers hit the toy market. I had a few — every boy my age did — but I was more of a GI Joe kid. It always bothered me that, as toys, Transformers were clearly compromised in both states. Folded up, they weren’t good cars / trucks / fighter jets. They had obvious seams and folds. In the cartoons — and the subsequent live action films decades later — the Transformers’ disguised states are seamless. In real life with the actual toys, the disguised states were about as convincing as a pair of Groucho glasses. A regular toy car looked like a real car, and stayed together no matter how hard you played with it. A Transformer car never quite looked like a real car and would come apart when played with. Unfolded, they looked like robots, yes, but they had obvious compromises. And it was kind of a pain folding them back into vehicles. My recollection is that we played with them a lot more as unfolded robots than as folded vehicles.

And that’s what they were. They weren’t vehicles that pretended to be robots. They were robots in disguise. The Duo isn’t really a phone. It’s a tablet in disguise. And in the same way that a true toy car was a better toy car than a folded-up Transformer-as-car could ever be, the Duo-as-phone is just not as good a phone as any regular iPhone. Honestly it’s not even close.

Consider if you could snap the Duo in half, leaving the smaller outer display as a standalone iPhone. Would anyone want an iPhone this shape and size? I think the answer is that zero people would want this. The iPhone Mini, back in 2020 and 2021 with the iPhone 12/13 generations, proved not to be popular enough for Apple to keep around. The iPhone Minis were a way better shape than the outer Duo. There’s a reason why the iPhone Air is not shaped like half a Duo — because the Duo shape stinks as an iPhone. And that’s only considering the hypothetical of a thin lightweight Duo snapped in half. In real life, with the actual Duo, when you use it folded up the device is twice as thick and twice as heavy. These Transformer watches were a fun way to smuggle a toy robot into school, but they were crummy watches. The iPhone Duo is a fun way to fit an entire iPad Mini–sized tablet into your pocket, but it’s a cumbersome phone.

It does not go into or out of my jeans pocket smoothly. Sometimes, in my pocket, it rotates 90 degrees, which is uncomfortable. Folded up it never stops feeling heavy. It is heavy, compared to other iPhones:

It’s technically only negligibly heavier than an 18 Pro Max, but because it has so much less surface area, it feels far more dense. If it did not unfold, no one would buy this.

But, of course, it does unfold. That’s the entire point. Unfolded, it not only no longer feels heavy, it feels featherweight light. It’s uncanny. An open iPhone Duo has a 7.6-inch display and the physical dimensions are 4.6&NoBreak &NoBreak×&NoBreak &NoBreak6.5 inches. An A17 Pro iPad Mini (the current model, but supposedly not for long) has an 8.3-inch display, measures 5.3&NoBreak &NoBreak×&NoBreak &NoBreak7.7 inches, and weighs 297g (that’s the cellular model’s weight, which is only fair). The iPad Mini has a slightly bigger screen but it’s heavier. In hand, I prefer the unfolded Duo over the iPad Mini as a tablet, in every single regard other than hardware button placement. (More on that below.)

You simply cannot have your cake and eat it too. The Duo allows you to take what is, in several ways, the best tablet Apple has ever made — and thus, the best tablet any company has ever made — fold it in half, and put it in your pocket to carry everywhere. While folded in half, you can use it as an entirely functional iPhone, but it’s by far the worst iPhone experience ever — frustrating, ungainly, and uncomfortable.

Using the Duo Closed, With the Outer Display

Ever since it was unveiled there’s been idle speculation that, while folded, the Duo’s design is biased against left-handed users. First, because the Touch ID side button is on the right. Second, because the Duo variant of iOS moves things like application toolbars and the home screen Dock to the right.

I am right-handed, but I’m a little bit on the ambidextrous spectrum. For example, I switched to using my mouse with my left hand around 1995, when I developed RSI in my right wrist, and I’ve used my mouse left-handed ever since. (But I use a MacBook trackpad with my right thumb.) I can shoot a basketball from close range with my left hand. So going into my Duo review, I thought I’d try to use my Duo as a pretend lefty. Turns out I didn’t have to pretend. I never realized this, but I naturally use my iPhone left-handed quite a bit throughout the day. For example, while brushing my teeth. I keep my iPhone in my right front pants pocket, but I often pick it up off my desk or kitchen counter and use it left-handed.

The Duo is not comfortable left-handed. The problem isn’t the Touch ID side button — I fixed that by registering my left index and middle fingers with the Touch ID sensor. The problem isn’t right-side bias for toolbars and the Dock in iOS Duo.¹ That’s not great for left-handed use, but the truth is there’s a reachability problem no matter which single hand you try holding the Duo in. It’s better to hold it in your right hand than left, reachability-wise, but fundamentally it’s so wide that it’s a two-handed device even when being used folded.

No, the problem with holding the Duo in your left hand alone is that the bottom left corner of its D-shaped frame digs into your palm. When you hold it in your right hand, it’s a nice round corner in the meat of your thumb’s base. In your left, it’s a crisp sharp corner, and it doesn’t feel good.

When using the small outer display, everything on screen feels cramped. I don’t even like the home screen. Moving the Dock to the right side breaks 19 years of spatial memory for me.² I keep reaching for Messages, Notes, and Safari down at the bottom of my screen, when now they’re over on the right. And they look weird too, because they’re smaller icons than the others on the home screen. Ostensibly the Dock is for your four most-used apps, but now they’re the smallest icons on your home screen? What sense does that make?

It’s such a little thing (no pun intended, I swear), but it exemplifies how many compromises Apple had to make for this small squat display.

Next, consider this screenshot from NetNewsWire:

What gets me here is the chevron “❮” back button being on the right. The iPhone’s back buttons have always been at the top left of the screen because iOS has always used a left-to-right column-view inspired spatial hierarchy. Craig Federighi just explained this spatial metaphor beautifully in a short YouTube interview a month ago. This metaphor is foundational to the iPhone experience. The back button is on the left because you go back to the left. Putting a button that takes you to the left on the right side of the screen just feels wrong. I think if I used an iPhone Duo every day for the next year (please no) I would still think this felt unnatural. It’s like having a turn signal stalk in your car that you move in the opposite direction that you turn the wheel. Now, it’s true that you can swipe from the left side of the screen to go back. You don’t have to use the “❮” button. But that button is there, in every single iPhone app that presents content in a hierarchy. And it’s always on the wrong side of the screen (unless you’re using an app on the left side of split screen multitasking — see below).

Here’s another example. Unforgetful is Marco Arment’s new reminders app. I like it a lot, and have been using it extensively since the summer. It’s properly updated to support the Duo UI layout. Here’s what it looks like when you’re creating a new task, normally:

But here’s what I saw over the weekend, when I was out running a Vonnegut errand, listening to The Vergecast:

I spent almost an entire minute trying to figure out how to save this task. I was about to text Arment with a bug report, that new tasks were unsaveable on the Duo, when I realized what happened. Because I had a Live Activity showing for the podcast I was listening to (in Arment’s Overcast, natch), the system’s time and circular status indicator were pushed down, reducing Unforgetful’s toolbar area, which meant the two buttons, “✕” and “✓” (for Close and Done, respectively), were collapsed into a single “···” overflow button. Tapping the dot-dot-dot button reveals them:

So the outer Duo display is so cramped when the keyboard is on screen that with a Live Activity showing, there is no longer room for a single pair of toolbar buttons. That turns a lot of one-tap actions into two-tap actions. And initially at least, it’s confusing. The whole point of Unforgetful is that it is not a complicated app. It really took me a minute to figure out that the Done button had moved into the “···” overflow menu.

One more examination of screen real estate, this time, with Messages, with the on-screen keyboard open. How much of the current conversation can you see?

The Duo outer display has only a smidgeon of real estate available for showing previous messages. It’s a bit like using an ancient BlackBerry. The Duo inner display in horizontal mode doesn’t show much more, but all you need to do to see more is rotate the device (which makes it easier for thumb-typing anyway).

Using the Duo Open, With the Inner Display

Once the Duo is unfolded and unlocked (more on that below), it’s a terrific experience. I absolutely love the nano-texture finish. I love how it looks, and I love how it feels.

At the outset of this review, I opened with a list of obvious problems for any foldable device. I omitted the one vexing problem that Apple has solved: annoyance at a visible crease. They solved it by applying this nano-texture finish (which apparently is an easily replaceable surface layer). But it’s not like this is a trade-off that makes the display look bad or feel weird. I’d love a display that looks and feels like this on my non-foldable iPhone 18 Pro. No glare, even in sunlight. It’s amazing. There’s no accounting for taste — some people love glossy reflective displays that draw glare from any and all light sources. Not me.

No foldable phone on the market had a matte inner display until the Duo. I suspect most of them will next year, and by 2028 all of them will.

I mentioned above how close the open Duo is to the size and weight of an iPad Mini (a little smaller in size, but 15 percent lighter in weight). It just feels like a great little tablet, and this general size class has always been great for reading. Most Kindles and other e-ink readers are about this same size. I love reading on the Duo inner screen, vertically.

The Duo is great horizontally too. One obvious use case is video. Watching video, it’s easy to forget it’s an iPhone, not an iPad. Here’s as good a place as any to mention that the Duo’s speakers are great. Loud and separated. It produces surprisingly good sound for such a thin device.

Held horizontally, the iPhone Duo supports side-by-side multitasking with two apps. The user interface for this feature is brilliant. It puts every idea Apple has tried on iPadOS for multitasking to shame.

From 2010 to 2015, the iPad behaved like a big iPhone, showing only one app at a time on screen. This was limiting, yes, but delightfully simple and obvious. In 2015 with iOS 9 (this was before Apple renamed the iPad’s variant of iOS to “iPadOS”), Apple introduced both Slide Over and Split View. Both of them stunk. They stunk so bad that if you gave them a ride, you’d have to sell your car afterward. They were confusing and unintuitive. Slide Over in particular was often invoked accidentally and users couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it.

Even the newest iPads of the time (iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 4) still had Home buttons — the all-screen design without a Home button wouldn’t arrive until the iPhone X debuted in 2017, and it didn’t arrive for iPads until the late 2018 iPads Pro. The Home button was the key to all iOS interaction at the time. To launch an app, you tapped its icon on your home screen. To go back to your home screen, you clicked the Home button. You double-clicked the Home button to enter the app switcher. If you think about it, you can see how the Home-button-centric iPad hardware was incompatible with the idea of split-screen multitasking. Once you have two apps on screen at the same time, how can you control them with just one clickable Home button? What if you had, say, Notes on the left and Safari on the right, and you wanted to close Notes and replace it with Mail, while keeping Safari open on the right? How could the system know which one you wanted to close when you clicked the one Home button? The answer is it couldn’t. So Apple devised all sorts of other convoluted ways to manage this. I don’t even remember how it worked except that it was confusing and frustrating. Re-reading this old iPad developer documentation makes it seem even more unintuitive than I remember.

I was about to quip that whoever at Apple designed and approved of these multitasking UIs set the entire iPad platform back by a decade. Then I realized that, actually, it was more than a decade. The iPhone Duo is debuting 11 years after iOS 9’s terrible iPad multitasking, and only now has Apple designed and implemented a split-screen multitasking interface that is actually good. Split screen on the Duo is intuitive, natural, useful, and mostly obvious. In addition to all those accolades regarding how you purposely invoke and use it, it also is an interface that you seem unlikely ever to get into accidentally. Comparing the multitasking UI on the Duo to the iPad is like comparing the Mac to Windows — one is insanely great, the other a dog wearing a necktie pretending to be a person. Apple should throw out iPadOS’s multitasking interface and switch to this one. Honestly I’d prefer if they just threw out iPadOS and went back to running iOS — this new version of iOS created for the Duo — on iPads. The Duo flavor of iOS is a better tablet OS than iPadOS, Apple’s dedicated tablet OS.

On the Duo, split screen is only available when the device is horizontal. It’s always split 50-50. Each side of the screen gets an app that is basically the size of an app open on the outer display. Elegant. To move an app into split view, you drag the home indicator up from the bottom of the screen — the same gesture that takes you back to the home screen. But instead of letting go, you keep dragging. You get this:

Those shelves on the left and right are drop targets. Drag and drop the current app to either side to put it there and enter split screen. The other side of the display just shows you a single-screen home screen:

To open an app on that second screen, you just tap it. There is no step 2. Once you enter split screen mode, it’s like having two closed Duos side-by-side, except the left-side one is a reverse D shape. When the left side is open you can see that the Duo toolbar/Dock bias is not “put it on the right side”. It’s “put it on the outer side”. It just so happens that on the outer display, the right side is the outer side (with rounded corners, away from the spine). Open a second app, and that app’s toolbar will go on the left, if the app is on the left:

Each side of split screen acts like its own iPhone Duo. Drag up from the bottom of a side and you can go back to the home screen on that side. Or, as shown above, you can enter the multitasking switcher interface on that side — and it’s smart enough not to show you the app that is already open on the other side. Drag up from the bottom center and you return to the full-screen home screen or full-screen app switcher. Whatever you think ought to work, probably works. That’s intuitive design.

There is more to explore and think about here. These are not “windows”. But you can open the same app on both sides, like to show two Safari pages side-by-side. What this split screen UI gets fundamentally right is that it works exactly like using the iPhone for one-app-at-a-time launching and switching. The iPad’s original split-screen sin was trying to implement multiple apps on screen at the same time when the iPad still used a hardware Home button. With the modern iOS UI, where the physical Home button has been replaced by virtual on-screen home indicator bars, you can go from one home indicator (when there’s only one full-screen app) to three: one for the app on the left, one for the app on the right, and a third in the center to control them both as a pair. It’s so brilliant that most users won’t notice that there’s anything clever about the design at all. They’ll just use it. That’s the highest praise for an interaction design like this. It seems so obvious that it doesn’t seem designed at all.

Ironically, because iPhone Duo is not called an “iPad”, it gets to be what the iPad should’ve been all along.

The biggest problem I have with using the Duo on the inner display is an incorrect intuition that, after a full week of use, I am only now starting to break. What do you do when you’re done with a book for now? You close it. So what do I do when I’m done using the iPhone Duo, unfolded, before putting it in my pocket? I close it. But that doesn’t lock the Duo. It just switches to the outer display. I feel like I’ve done this a hundred times in the last week. I close it, thinking that I’ve locked it, and I put it away. But it’s still open. It eventually locks — perhaps sometimes quicker than you think. (iPhones have long used a bit of machine learning to try to detect when they’ve been pocketed or pursed while unlocked, and lock themselves before the normal auto-lock timeout.) Nothing bad has happened from doing this. But I’ve opened it up to some odd things on screen. This is not a complaint about Apple’s design, because when you want to switch from using the inner display to the outer display, you should be able to just close it. The iPhone Duo can’t read your mind. But I wish it could read my mind.

Touch ID and Authentication

The lack of Face ID on the iPhone Duo is an endless unceasing frustration. I’ll just farm this section out to what I wrote back on September 15, days after the Duo was announced, in my thoughts and observations column on Apple’s event announcements:

• The lack of Face ID is a serious sad-trombone bummer, and in my opinion could sink the first-generation model. Side-button Touch ID is OK, but OK is not good, and even good is not insanely great. Face ID is insanely great. For whatever reason, the only iPads with Face ID are the iPad Pro models. Every time I review an iPad Air or iPad Mini, my biggest gripe is the lack of Face ID. I complained about it reviewing the iPad Air in 2022 and the iPad Mini in 2021, and in the five years since then my annoyance has only grown. With Face ID, so long as you’re looking at the screen as you unlock the device, it’s like not having it locked at all. It just unlocks, seemingly automatically. With Touch ID you must think about putting one of your registered fingers on the button every single time you unlock it. It never ever feels automatic. I feel quite certain Apple tried to fit a Face ID sensor on the outer Duo display and could not make the engineering work.

• I’m much more concerned about convenience than security, but Face ID is 20× more secure than Touch ID. That’s according to Apple’s own Apple Platform Security whitepaper, updated just last month, which states:

  The probability that a random person in the population could unlock a user’s iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro is less than 1 in 1 million with Optic ID or Face ID — including when Face ID with a mask is turned on. For a user’s iPad, iPhone, Mac models with Touch ID, and those paired with a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, it’s less than 1 in 50,000. This probability increases with multiple enrolled fingerprints (up to 1 in 10,000 with five fingerprints) or appearances for Face ID (up to 1 in 500,000 with two appearances).

• As a sign of how inconvenient the lack of Face ID is, Apple is promoting the fact that the iPhone Duo can be unlocked by your Apple Watch, like a Mac. No other iPhone needs such a crutch. Based on my experience with Touch ID iPads, wearing an Apple Watch all the time to unlock the Duo will feel essential. I don’t wear an Apple Watch all the time, and don’t want to start wearing an Apple Watch all the time, so I suspect this alone will keep me from switching to an iPhone Duo personally. On the other hand, for people who do wear an Apple Watch all the time and are happy to do so, the Duo’s lack of Face ID might prove to be only an occasional inconvenience rather than a constant annoyance.

I’ve seldom been more prescient. More than anything else about the Duo experience, I despise the lack of Face ID. It is a dealbreaker for me. I’ll reconsider a future model that at least has Face ID on the front outer display, but I have no plans to purchase this one. I tried to keep track in my pocket Field Notes notebook of how many times I had to be told to authenticate with Touch ID, along with a separate tally of how many times I had to enter my full device passcode in situations where I know I would not have with an iPhone uno, and I ran out of space on the sheet of paper. If you are not wearing an Apple Watch, it is an unceasing frustration.

Apple actually made a TV commercial exemplifying the Touch ID experience on iPhone Duo 20 years ago, as part of the “Get a Mac” campaign with John Hodgman and Justin Long. Here, you can watch it on YouTube. Over and over and over, seemingly 20,000 times a day: put your goddamn finger on the Touch ID button.

Now, if you do wear an Apple Watch, and you pair it with your iPhone Duo, and you enable the off-by-default setting to allow your watch to unlock your Duo, this is much better. It’s not good, but it’s at least tolerable. If you have multiple iPhones though, this feature only works if your watch is paired with your Duo. This is a fundamental shortcoming in the architecture of WatchOS. Apple Watch should be like AirPods, where it just pairs on-the-fly with whatever device you’re currently using, so long as they’re signed into the same Apple Account. You don’t have to pair your AirPods to one single device and then completely factory reset them to use with another. AirPods wouldn’t be a hit product if that were true. But that’s how Apple Watch works. It’s true that most people only own one iPhone, but the existence of the iPhone Handoff feature is proof that Apple is thinking about the fact that some of us own more than one. If one of them is a Duo, you will want to pair your Apple Watch with the Duo. But that means that with iPhone Handoff, your Apple Watch won’t share a cellular connection when you’re using your other iPhone. Cellular carriers are now more adept at seamlessly dealing with multiple iPhones than Apple’s own watch. It’s a complete mess of Apple’s own making.

The unlock-with-Apple-Watch feature doesn’t work all the time for me. When it does work, you know it, because you get a tap on your wrist from the watch every time your Duo unlocks via the nearby watch. But sometimes, even though I haven’t taken my watch off since it last unlocked the Duo, it doesn’t work, and I have to use Touch ID. Oftentimes, for reasons I do not understand, Touch ID isn’t enough, and I have to enter my passcode. I think it’s because I so often inadvertently press the side and Camera Control buttons while folding and unfolding the Duo — that might put it in a state where it wants to authenticate the most secure way possible, with my passcode.

It’s mildly annoying that your Apple Watch taps your wrist every time it automatically unlocks your Duo (dozens and dozens of taps per day, every day), but it’s obviously a good thing that it does. It obviously is less secure than Face ID or even Touch ID. I handed the Duo to my son to play with the hinge over the weekend, and as soon as he started playing with it, my wrist tapped. Oops, the whole iPhone was unlocked for him. That was no big deal, and in fact we shared a laugh about it. But it couldn’t happen with Face ID or Touch ID. (It’s worth noting that the wrist tap on your watch for this gives you a button to tap to lock your iPhone immediately — it’s not just a notification that it happened, it presents you with an action to undo it.)

There’s also an optional feature where you can unlock the Duo just by “resting” a registered finger on the Touch ID button. This does add a touch of convenience (again, I swear no pun intended), when I remember to do it, but this too doesn’t seem to work all the time. My theory is that sometimes I’m resting my finger on the button and the sensor doesn’t think the finger is a match. Other times, I wind up unlocking the Duo inadvertently, just by holding it with my thumb on the button. I never ever unlock my iPhone Pros accidentally. With the Duo, it happens at least once a day.

The only tolerable way to use the Duo is by always wearing an Apple Watch, and enabling the feature to allow the watch to unlock it. I do not want to wear an Apple Watch all day every day. And it seems ridiculous that that’s the only way to make the Duo experience tolerable. As annoying as it is to use an iPad with a Touch ID button, it’s far more annoying to use an iPhone with one, because I unlock my iPhone at least an order of magnitude more frequently than I do my iPad.

I’ll reconsider a future Duo model that at least has Face ID on the outside, but I don’t think I’ll ever truly enjoy the experience of using one unless it has Face ID on both sides. I can’t wait to finish writing this review, switch my eSIM back to my iPhone 18 Pro, and set this Duo aside on my desk. I don’t think Apple should have released the Duo before they figured this out.

Buttons and Camera Orientation, the Hinge, and the Cameras Generally

My Touch ID complaints are exacerbated by the fact that, from an experiential standpoint, the side button keeps moving around. When the Duo is closed, button placement isn’t a problem. But when it’s open, the buttons feel wrongly placed. On a Touch ID iPad, held vertically, the button is on the top on the right side. And from there, to switch to horizontal orientation, you rotate it counterclockwise, which moves the Touch ID button to the left side, at the top. But this is all backwards on the Duo. Held open vertically, the Duo’s Touch ID button is on the top on the left side. And you have to rotate it clockwise to get it back to horizontal. I’ve gotten more used to it after a week, but while using the big inner display, whenever I’m pestered to authenticate with Touch ID — which, again, is all the time — there’s also a moment of “Wait, where is the Touch ID button?” Many times throughout the week, while holding it vertically, the Touch ID button has been on the bottom, because my instincts for how to rotate it from horizontal to vertical and vice-versa are backwards from how the Duo intends. It’s like the Duo has a built-in game called “Where Are the Buttons?”, and it’s not a fun game.

The main camera orientation is more frustrating, and I consider it a mistake. The main camera is aligned with the small outer display. When you’re capturing photos or videos using the outer display, you hold the Duo horizontally to capture horizontal images, and hold it vertically to capture vertical images. But when you open the Duo, the camera sensor doesn’t magically rotate. So when you’re using the big inner display, you capture horizontal images when holding the Duo vertically, and vertical images when holding the device horizontally.

You can’t have it both ways. Apple needed to choose which display to align the camera with. Apple reps told me they chose to align it with the outer display because they think that’s the display users will use most often when using the camera. They’re probably right that the outer display will be used most frequently with the camera, so maybe they made the correct decision here. But my gut feeling is they should have aligned the camera the other way. Let the outer display have the reverse camera orientation. That would feel like an old Flip camera from 20 years ago — a small handheld camera that you held vertically to capture horizontally. Who cares if the viewfinder doesn’t fill the screen, the screen is tiny anyway.

It just seems weird to me that you can open the Duo to have a truly huge viewfinder, and there’s no way to fill it. Here’s Apple’s own Camera app, when the Duo is open vertically, open horizontally, and closed:

So with the big inner screen, you can never come close to filling the screen with the image you’re trying to capture. You get thick black letterboxing or pillarboxing. The viewfinder preview is roughly the same size on the inner screen as the outer screen, despite the inner screen being twice the size. This doesn’t make sense to me. I would prefer a tiny preview on the small outer display and a huge preview on the large inner display, with the camera sensors aligned with the inner display.

Also, because the outer screen is a different aspect ratio than the camera sensor (1.44 : 1 display; 1.33 : 1 sensor), photos taken using the outer screen capture a slightly larger image than what is shown in the viewfinder. That’s because the outer screen viewfinder presents a full-screen preview, which forces all of the Camera app controls to overlay the preview image. In the screenshot above showing the Camera app on the outer display, the actual photograph from that perspective includes part of the painting frame, even though you cannot see any of the frame in the preview. Here’s the photo I snapped with that preview. This discrepancy between the viewfinder and the actual captured image is not a huge deal — it’s OK to capture more than the viewfinder shows — but it’s worth being aware of.

As for the camera itself, it’s terrific. It’s clearly not of the same caliber as the iPhone 18 Pro, but it’s good. The technical specs of the Duo’s main 1×/2× camera are nearly identical to those of the year-ago iPhone Air, and I love the iPhone Air’s camera. If anything, the Duo’s camera should be better, because it gets the year-better A20 Pro imaging pipeline. Which, notably, brings support for the same new Photographic Styles, including textures like film grain, that were introduced with the iPhone 18 Pro. However, the Duo is not “Pro” — it does not get features like “Pro controls” (variable lens aperture, shutter speed, white balance, histogram), Apple Reference Image, spatial video, ProRES (video or RAW), or Apple Log. Apple’s “shot with iPhone” keynotes will continue to use iPhones Pro.

Also, notably different from the Air, the Duo has an ultrawide 0.5× second camera lens. This brings both the ultrawide perspective and macro photography. Like the Air, the Duo’s main 1× camera has a minimum focus distance of 15cm. That’s closer than the 17 and 18 Pro cameras (20cm), but there are a lot of times you want to snap photos of receipts or documents closer than 15cm. With the Air, you can’t focus closer than 15cm, because it only has that one camera. With the Duo, you can focus on subjects down to just 2cm away, using the 0.5× lens or the 1× lens in “macro” mode (which switches to the ultrawide lens but sensor-crops to the 1× field of view).

Build quality of the Duo seems nothing short of excellent. It’s solid. It has a satisfying feel opening and closing, and it closes with a particularly pleasing snap. When it’s open it stays open and perfectly flat. When it’s closed it stays closed, with no gap. However, if forced to choose between the verbs flip and pry to describe the force necessary to open it, the more accurate verb is pry. You need two hands for sure and you kind of need to get your fingernail in the gap. It’s also tricky to open or close without inadvertently pressing the side or Camera Control buttons. I wind up clicking both of these buttons all the time, and sometimes it messes things up. I’ve snapped four accidental photos with the Camera Control button while trying to close (or open? not sure) the Duo in one week. I have zero such photos from the last 30 days taken with my iPhone 18 Pro. At least one of these even looks obscene at thumbnail scale, which gave me a momentary jolt when I saw it in my camera roll:

There’s a subtle plastic lip around the inner display. This keeps the corners of the display from smacking into each other when you close it, and in practice while the Duo is open, this lip actually feels good to the touch, not like an unwanted barrier.

The same cannot be said for Apple’s $80 first-party silicone case. I can’t believe anyone will want to use this. It adds such a big lip to the outer display that you need to go into Settings → Display & Brightness and turn on a special option: “Shift Left Edge”, which shrinks the front display away from the left edge. It even requires glue to keep it attached. The adhesive is not particularly sticky — you can pop it right off — but I mean, come on. This contraption is ridiculous. I’ve never been a regular case user with my iPhones and I think people worry needlessly about scratches, especially now with Apple’s Ceramic Shield 2. I firmly believe that putting a case on your phone makes you more likely to drop it because you’re less likely to be careful with it. But foldable phones in particular seem inherently incompatible with cases that are subtle rather than obtrusively prophylactic.

Apple’s $130 folio case is better. It’s made with Apple’s “TechWoven” fabric, which has a good high-quality feel. It’s got a kickstand that I guess might be convenient at times, but I don’t understand the lifestyle where you want to open a cover just to see the front face of your phone every time you use it. Also, it’s $130.

Live a little, I say. If you buy a Duo, try it without a case. Get AppleCare if you’re the nervous sort.

The App Situation

Using apps that haven’t been updated for the iOS 27.0 SDK is a terrible experience. They just look like little virtual iPhone Minis floating in a sea of black on the big inner display. You can zoom them, like the old “2×” button on iPads when running iPhone apps, but that stinks too. Apps that have been compiled for the 27 SDK but haven’t yet updated to the new Duo-specific APIs in the 27.1 SDK are ... OK. But even some of them blow. Take a look at the NYT Games app, and its custom crossword keyboard — it needs an orthodontist. Most of my favorite apps have already been properly updated for the Duo. Some, however, like Tapbots’s Ivory, have not. Your bank probably won’t support the Duo until the Duo 2 is out next year. I think Apple has clearly done a great job evangelizing developers to support the Duo properly. Netflix does and it’s really cool. WhatsApp is in that middle state, where because it’s been compiled with the 27 SDK, it at least fills the inner screen, but it’s just a scaled regular iPhone layout. Signal, which has always been a particularly crummy app, is one of the turds that looks like an iPhone Mini floating in a sea of black.

[Update, Thursday: One day later and there’s an updated version of the NYT Games app, and they’ve fixed the orthodontic mess of their crossword keyboard, in both orientations. Screenshot. This goes to show just how fast the Duo-optimized updates are streaming in from developers. My review was up-to-date when I published at 7:00pm ET Wednesday, and outdated by the time I woke up Thursday morning.]

Last night I wanted to watch the Sixers beat the Knicks in their NBA season opener while I worked on this review. I had to use the NBC Sports app, which has not been updated for the Duo at all. The experience sucked. I could pop video out of the mini window to play sort of full-screen, but whenever I tapped the display it went back to iPhone Mini mode. The only good experience you can have using the iPhone Duo is with apps that have been updated for it. It’s better than nothing that un-updated apps run at all, but they certainly don’t deliver a premium $2,000-phone experience.

Using the iPhone Duo for this last week, in particular, has been fascinating in this regard. When I first got the Duo set up last Tuesday, very few of my third-party apps properly supported it. The ones that did were mostly ones where I was already a beta tester through TestFlight. As the week wore on, more and more apps with proper or at least semi-proper Duo support began appearing in the App Store. This made a huge difference to my pleasure using the device. By the time the very first Duo shipments reach actual customers this Friday, there will be more updated apps than there are today. It makes such a huge difference. I honestly don’t know how folks at Apple who’ve been privately testing the Duo for months before this managed to keep their sanity, unless they just eschewed third-party apps while testing it over the summer.

Miscellaneous

• When you pair an external Bluetooth keyboard with the Duo, Command-Tab doesn’t do anything. I actually like pairing a hardware keyboard with my iPhone unos, for writing notes and Journal entries while I drink coffee in the morning. For years I’ve wished that iOS supported Command-Tab like iPadOS does. With the Duo, this seems like a glaring omission.³ The Duo plus a portable Bluetooth keyboard seems like an amazing travel or commute combination.

• Standby mode (folded like a tent) is cool. In addition to Apple’s built-in clock/calendar/photo screens that you can swipe between in this mode, if you have a Live Activity going, you can tap the Live Activity’s small icon at the top in Standby mode and make the Live Activity take the full screen. “Laptop mode” is cool too, for apps like Netflix, so you can watch video on half of the inner display while the device is folded like an L.

• There are so many nice little touches in iOS to support the Duo. Even the factory-fresh onboarding experience lets you fold and unfold it while you’re turning it on and setting it up. One of my favorite details is that when you rotate the Duo while on the home screen, the Dock doesn’t just move from the bottom (vertically) to the right (horizontally). Instead, it disappears and reappears, sliding in from off-screen in its new position. It reminds me of Pac-Man’s warp tunnel.

• Battery life has been very good for me. No problem getting through a heavy day of usage at all.

• The Duo often gets warm. Not hot, but noticeably warm. My instincts say “warm phone = bad for battery life”, but, per the previous item in this list, battery life is fine. There might be some use cases I haven’t spent much time trying, like graphics-intensive games, where thermals are a problem. But I didn’t run into them.

• iOS 27.1 is a little buggy. Sometimes when I’m rotating the device using the inner display, apps get zoomed in too big, as though they think they’re on the small outer display or something. Tapping around or folding/unfolding again clears it up. I ran into one really weird rendering glitch, on Thursday night last week. I noticed what I first thought was a smear of schmutz on the crease. I tried to rub it away but it didn’t help. I thought for a few minutes that the display was breaking, coming detached right at the crease. But I only saw the smear when holding the Duo vertically. Horizontally it vanished. Here’s a screenshot showing it — look at the words “strode to the plate” in the first line of the second paragraph. If you zoom in, you can see that it’s actually a capsule-shaped overlay atop the text. Here’s a video screen recording of it while I scroll the article. This glitch was visible in the exact same position on screen — right on the 50-yard-line of the crease — in every single app I used while holding the Duo vertically. I took some screenshots and went to bed, without restarting the Duo. When I woke up Friday morning, the glitch was gone. I haven’t seen it, or anything like it, again. My theory is that I triggered it playing around that night with different “poses” for the Duo, including a bunch where I had it in an L- or V-shape, which in many apps puts a purposeful blur across the crease.

The Duo comes in two colors: star light (off white) and night sky (very dark blue). My review unit is star light. It looks good. I’d buy night sky if I were going to buy one, which I’m not.

Pricing:

At every storage tier, it’s $800 more than an 18 Pro and $700 more than an 18 Pro Max.

The Decision

Every time you pick up the Duo to use it you face The Decision. Open it? Or be lazy and suffer with the outside display? Every time. Even if you get used to all the other things, you’ll always face The Decision, every time you pick up the Duo.

And there’s a third option. Just after writing the preceding paragraph, I took a break to pick up some sandwiches for lunch. Get out of the house, enjoy at least a few minutes of a beautiful autumn afternoon, and stretch my legs. Waiting for the sandwiches to be prepared at the bagel joint, I took the Duo out of my pocket and checked NetNewsWire. First article up was a good one. Started reading. Screen’s too small. Do I want to open the Duo? Sandwiches aren’t going to take long. I clicked the side button to sleep the Duo and put it back into my jeans pocket (where it sank like the brick that it is). I spent the rest of the wait alone with my thoughts, pondering how to finish this review.

Apple isn’t going to start an ad campaign with a slogan like “So cumbersome you’ll keep it in your pocket”, but that’s part of my experience. If you really want to do something, or sit back and read or watch something, the big display is fantastic. But that Duo-as-tablet experience is so cumbersome compared to the “just look at it” experience of using a regular iPhone uno that you simply cannot do it every time you use the Duo. You will use the outer display quite a bit. And using the outer display delivers the worst iPhone experience ever. I mean, some iPhone has to be the one that offered the worst iPhone experience ever. That iPhone is the outer half of the iPhone Duo. Perhaps for some people looking to be more mindful of their screen time, this is actually a selling point.

Here’s my steelman argument for the Duo. iPads are good devices. Almost everyone likes them, and many people love them. But wouldn’t it be better if you could fold an iPad in half to make it more portable? The answer has to be yes — if that foldability did not saddle the device with an ugly visible crease in the display. Folding in half would be a nice trick for any iPad, but especially the iPad Mini. An iPad Air folded in half would fit in more compartments in your backpack, but it would not fit in your pants. An iPad Mini folded in half would. Wouldn’t it be even better if Apple added a small screen to the outside of this hypothetical foldable iPad Mini we’re imagining? That way, even when folded, you could check the time, see recent notifications, and pay attention to Live Activities. That sounds like a great idea, right? Well, that’s the iPhone Duo.

If you’d rather trade your iPhone for an iPad Mini that you can fold in half to carry around, the iPhone Duo might be the form factor for you. Even if that’s the case, though, this first iPhone Duo might not suit you, for all the various irritations and shortcomings I’ve documented above. Plus, an actual iPad Mini costs $800 for 256 GB of storage (at this writing); an iPhone Duo with 256 GB costs a cool $2000.

It’s been a lot of fun trying the Duo out for a week, but it feels like I’ve gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype — not a finished product that I’d want to buy and carry.

Since 2009, NewsBlur has only spoken English. Plenty of you read feeds in other languages every day, and you’ve still had to find your way around the reader in English. Starting today, NewsBlur’s interface is available in 21 languages on the web, iOS, and Android. Menus, buttons, settings, dialogs, and the first-time setup all appear in your language, picked up automatically from your browser or phone.

Your stories stay exactly as they were published. NewsBlur translates its own interface, not the feeds you read. Feed titles, story text, comments, and usernames all stay in their original language. The screenshot above is NewsBlur in Japanese, reading an English article from Ars Technica.

Picked up automatically

You don’t need to do anything to switch. On the web, NewsBlur uses your browser’s language. On iOS and Android, it uses your phone’s language list. If your language isn’t one of the 21, everything stays in English.

Because a new language can be a surprise, NewsBlur tells you which one it picked the first time you open it. The dialog shows the same message side by side, in the language it detected and in English. One button keeps it, the other switches back to English. That way you can always get back, even if NewsBlur guessed wrong because you’re traveling, living abroad, or using a VPN.

If NewsBlur picked English, you’ll see a shorter version with every language listed in its own script, in case you’d rather read in another one. New accounts get the same choice as the very first step of setup.

Choose your language on the web

You can change your language anytime in Preferences, right at the top under Language. Automatic follows your browser, or you can pick any language. If you’re signed out, there’s a language menu at the top of the home page, so the sign in and sign up forms are in your language before you even have an account.

Choose your language on iOS

On iPhone and iPad, open Preferences and choose Language at the top. Pick a language and the app switches right away, no restart needed.

Everything follows along, from your feed list to the story controls.

Choose your language on Android

On Android, it’s the first row in Settings. The app switches as soon as you choose, and Android also lets you set NewsBlur’s language from the system’s per-app language settings.

Menus and numbers follow your language too.

One language, everywhere you read

When you pick a language, it’s saved to your account, so your phone and the web stay in sync. If you leave it on Automatic, each device follows its own language settings. That’s handy if your laptop is in English and your phone is in Spanish.

Here are all 21 languages:

• English
• Español
• Français
• Deutsch
• Português (Brasil)
• Italiano
• Nederlands
• Polski
• Türkçe
• Русский
• Українська
• العربية
• עברית
• हिन्दी
• Bahasa Indonesia
• Tiếng Việt
• ไทย
• 日本語
• 한국어
• 简体中文
• 繁體中文

Arabic and Hebrew switch the whole interface to read right to left.

Help me get the words right

If you read NewsBlur in one of these languages, I’d love your help. If a button reads awkwardly, a term sounds wrong, or a phrase doesn’t fit, tell me on the NewsBlur forum. Mention the language, where you saw it, and what it should say, and I’ll get it fixed.

Native language support is available now on the web and coming in the next iOS and Android updates.

I spent a lot of this release optimizing speed in the Android app. I measured scrolling across the feed list, the story list, and long articles, then fixed whatever the numbers pointed at. Then I kept going.

It’s faster

Most of the slowness came from the app doing more work than it needed to. Marking a story read rebuilt its entire row. Background syncs could pile up on top of each other. The feed list waited on the sync service before showing anything, and the reader waited for the article to finish rendering before it appeared at all.

All of that is fixed. Janky frames while scrolling the feed list dropped from 32% to 15%, and from 14% to 7% in the story list. Opening a story you’ve read before went from 0.9s to 0.2s. Your feeds now load straight from the local cache, so they show up right away, even offline.

Controls that float

The story list controls now float at the bottom of the screen, so your stories scroll right behind them. Search, display options, and settings are all within reach of your thumb. If you’d rather have them at the top, there’s a setting for that in Preferences. In the reader, the controls tuck away as you scroll down and come back as soon as you scroll up.

Built for tablets

On a tablet or an unfolded foldable, NewsBlur now shows your story list and the story you’re reading side by side. Your feeds slide in over the top when you need them and slide back out when you pick one, and the list stays right where it is while the new stories fill in. Tap another story and the reader pages over to it, the same way it does when you swipe. It works in both portrait and landscape.

A better look at images

Tap any image in a story to open it full screen. Pinch or double tap to zoom, and swipe it away to go right back to the story.

Long press an image and you get the same viewer with a little more. The image’s hover text shows up above it, which is where comics like xkcd keep the punchline. Below it are Copy Image, Save Image, and Share Image. Saving keeps the original file, so a GIF stays animated, and it lands in your Pictures folder. If the image is a link, there’s an Open Link button too.

Find your next favorite site

The + button opens a small Add Site sheet. Paste an address and pick a folder, or tap one of the shortcuts into discovery: Web Feed, Popular, Trending, YouTube, Reddit, Newsletters, Podcasts, and Google News. It’s the same Add + Discover Sites catalog from the web, built right into the app. Web Feed can even turn a site without RSS into a feed.

Every site shows its latest stories with images and excerpts, along with how recently it published. Tap a story to read it, or tap Try to browse the whole site before you subscribe. When you come back, discovery is right where you left it. Related Sites uses the same cards, so you can explore outward from a site you already like.

Everything else

• Gestures are configurable. In Preferences you can choose what swiping left and right does on feeds and on stories, and what a long press does.
• Long press a feed or a story for a grouped menu that includes Mark newer as read and Mark older as read.
• Nested folders show up as an indented tree.
• The Previous button no longer gets stuck disabled.
• Jumping to the next folder no longer loops forever when nothing is unread.

NewsBlur 15 for Android is available on Google Play. The iOS and Mac release got a lot of the same work. If something doesn’t feel right, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.

I'm loving some of the descriptions of internal complexity in How Buildings Learn, like this one from Brian Eno:

That complexity builds out of shearing layers. It's a result of different timescales at work.

So partly it's about the moves you make within constraints. But it's actually a gradient of constraints. If you really want to move the wall in a building, you can, but it may be more or less difficult depending on the wall and the building. Maybe instead of moving the wall you'd like to move you make your pantry shelves in an area a little separated from the kitchen. Maybe you find some other small opportunity within that process that provides more character (a place to display all your novelty mugs... or something).

What the Eno quote gets at is that going into someone else's space, you can recover some of those decisions and responses. You can reconstruct the story of the space. And as you're doing that, you're extrapolating and remembering your own experiences.

And part of it has to also be that you're recognizing patterns of evolution from nature. where you have different organisms growing at different speeds and responding to each other in these complex feedback loops.

So the object you're looking at is not just the object. It's also to different degrees a story of its evolution. And it's interesting to try and figure out how we recognize that story, what recognizing that story does for us.

Of course, with all this, I'm thinking about software and AI. I think Eno's description of internal complexity can be a description of what's missing in generated media or programs. I don't think that's the end of the story though. I think there's probably routes where we can use the technology and build back in different kinds of productive constraints. To be written about another day.

Read on site

When I was younger, I played a lot of MUDs (“Multi-User Dungeons” — the text-only predecessors of modern MMORPGs, often played over Telnet). They were great fun, particularly during high school: a lightweight multiplayer game with no client state meant you could log in from any machine in any lab, even Windows shipped a Telnet client in those days, the Telnet protocol was light enough to run on my school’s slow PCs and limited internet connection, and the lack of flashy graphics meant it was easy to hide the window from a passing teacher or librarian.

At some point, building and tinkering with MUDs became more interesting than playing them. In those days, MUD builders and wizards (admins) were often recruited from each game’s playerbase, and many MUDs let builders edit the world through in-game commands. This was incredibly cool at the time — even through a clumsy line-oriented (ed-style) editor, there was something magical about summoning blank rooms from the void, writing rich descriptions to turn them into “real” spaces, and adding items and “mobs” (Mobile OBJects — NPCs) to make them come to life. A few of my friends and I signed up to a “builder academy” MUD, where everyone got a zone to mess around in, and we tried our hand at crafting our own areas. Most of these projects didn’t get very far, and all of them have been lost to time.

There’s only so much you can do with builder rights on someone else’s MUD. To really change the game, you needed to be able to code, and most MUDs were written “real languages” like C. We’d managed to get a copy of Visual C++ 6 and the CircleMUD source code, and started messing about. But the development cycle was pretty frustrating — for every change, you had to recompile the server, shut it down (dropping everyone’s connections), bring it back up, and wait for everyone to log back in.

Some MUDs used a very cool trick to avoid this, called “copyover” or “hotboot”. It’s an idiom that lets a stateful server replace itself while retaining its PID and open connections. It seemed like magic back then: you recompiled the server, sent the right command, everything froze for a few seconds, and (if you were lucky) it came back to life running the latest code. The trick is simple but I can’t find a detailed write-up, so I wanted to write it out while I thought of it.

The copyover method I’m most familiar with works like this:

1. The copyover command is invoked by a MUD admin.

2. The server calls pipe(2) to create a “pipe”. This is the data channel that the new version of the server will read from, and the old version of the server will write to.

3. The server calls fork(2), creating a copy of itself with the same state. We now have a parent and a child process.

4. The child closes the read end of the pipe, writes the game state into the pipe, and then exits.

5. (In parallel with №3) The parent closes the write end of the pipe and calls an exec(3) function to replace itself with the new binary. This exec usually includes a specific “copyover” flag on the command line as well as the FD for the read end of the pipe. File descriptors, including open sockets, will remain open across the exec() call.

6. (In parallel with №3) The parent, now running the new code, reads the game state through the pipe and then closes it.

7. The parent calls wait(2) to clear away the zombie child process.

At this point, we’ve achieved all of our goals. The server is running the new code with the old state under the old PID. The biggest weakness I see with this scheme is that if the new server fails to come up, you’ve got no way to abort the copyover and you lose all your state.

EDIT (2025-02-15): One of the great things about writing online is the random old-timers that speak up when you do. Erwin Andreasen, author of copyover patches for several MUDs, points out:

I believe I came up with the “copyover” name when I copied Melvin Smith (aka “Fusion”) idea about “hot reboot” from his “MUD++” code base to the popular Diku-based MERC/Envy etc. bases – that was 2000 or probably earlier. Whether Melvin originally got the idea from somewhere else I don’t know.

That version just used exec, and closed all files but network descriptors already logged in, the mapping of fds -> login names was saved in a file. When the new copy started up, it would log the users on existing file descriptors. Today, using explicit file descriptor passing (so you don’t accidentally keep files open) or a long-running proxy would be preferable.

If you give up maintaining a constant PID, I can imagine more elaborate and robust schemes; for example, swapping out the pipe for something more sophisticated allows the new server to report that it’s ready to take over. It’s also possible to be smarter about how file descriptors are handled: A server could split network connection handling off into a separate process from the game logic (and have them communicate over Unix domain sockets), pass sockets to the replacing server using SCM_RIGHTS, store copyover state in a memfd, or use systemd’s file descriptor store to hold your memfds and socket fds while systemd replaces your process. I don’t know what the most modern idioms are, I just wanted to document how it used to work.

A simple copyover server uses well-known Unix primitives — pipes, fork(2), and file descriptor persistence across exec(3) — but it doesn’t take much to prove that sufficiently clever use of Unix is indistinguishable from magic. (Other examples: Factorio using fork(2) to implement asynchronous saving on macOS and GNU/Linux; Cloudflare using SCM_RIGHTS to send TLS 1.3 connections to a separate process.) Much of the apparent magic comes not from Unix itself being magical, but because many of its primitives now lie hidden beneath cross-language runtimes or platform abstraction libraries, or are even forgotten outright. I’d started this post just looking to document the old way of copying over a stateful server, but the things I’ve found along the way make me want to dig further. What else have I missed? Is Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment still the canonical reference?

The Keynote

I loved the keynote’s “You want a great opening scene?” opening, which ran through a series of genre-inspired hook-you-from-the-first-shot pretend movie openings. Apple started with a title card that said “The following was shot on iPhone”, but the whole keynote — including the fun fake-movie openings — was shot on iPhone 18 Pros. Apple started shooting its keynote movies using iPhone Pros in October 2023, with the “Scary Fast” Mac event. That first one was shot on the then-just-released iPhone 15 Pro, the first iPhone Pro generation to support the necessary pro video features to enable Apple-level production quality (e.g. ProRes recording and Apple Log encoding).¹ For the next few years, Apple shot each of its keynotes using whatever the current iPhone Pro model was. But last year, with the September 2025 “Awe Dropping” event, they shot the keynote using the as-yet-unreleased iPhone 17 Pro itself — a bit of a risk given that it was running mid-summer iOS 26 beta software. They did the same this year, shooting the entire keynote, including the prelude fake movies, using iPhone 18 Pros. But, they couldn’t say that it was the 18 Pro on the title card because the 18 Pro wasn’t announced until later in the keynote.

There was at least one report from an ill-informed know-it-all who claimed, with odd certainty given how often he’s wrong, that Tim Cook would not appear in the keynote. But the last segment of the keynote’s cold opening gave us Cook, Tim Cook, framed in an obvious homage to the opening of 2012’s Skyfall:

I’ve stolen those comparison frames from this splendid blog post by Vaziri, Todd Vaziri, in which he points out a few other Bond homages in this keynote — including using the new variable aperture on the 18 Pro’s main camera as a reference to the Bond title-sequence gun barrel. Fun stuff all around, and a perfect way to commemorate the Cook-to-Ternus passing of the torch.² Also, the variety of visual styles in these mini movies really showed off the capabilities of the iPhone 18 Pro as a cinematic camera.

The little Cook / Bond homage that closes the opening segment starts with a voiceover from Cook himself (starting at 2m:07s):

Forget all that. Keep it classic. Open on an aerial shot, high above the California coast. A car drives down the highway. Then it disappears into a tunnel. Cut to an interior. Camera follows a mysterious figure, before revealing our main character...

No no no no no. Not me. That’s your guy. That’s your opener.

It’s a perfect segue, and Cook’s line reading is sublime. Cook’s on-screen persona improved a lot in the 15 years he served as CEO and keynote emcee, but even at his best he always came across as a bit, well, stiff. Voicing this introduction of John Ternus, on the other hand, he sounds cool as hell — relaxed, certain, and comfortable. I think the chairman role suits him better than CEO did. He’s a natural born éminence grise. And if this was Cook’s last appearance in a keynote, he went out on top.

Ternus’s Turn

For those of us invited to Apple Park, Ternus actually took the stage in person at 9:58 am, for a brief in-person greeting and introduction. What I recall isn’t anything he said but how he was greeted, which was with tremendous enthusiasm. The annual iPhone events always have a unique charge to them. WWDC is a far bigger event attendee-count-wise, but the September iPhone event is sharper, higher pressure. The exclusivity heightens the stakes — Apple only invites as many people as fit in Steve Jobs Theater: 1,000. The new era begins energy was palpable, if subtle. In the morning meet-and-greet coffee-and-apple-tarts mingling in and outside the Steve Jobs Theater upstairs atrium, attendees were genuinely unsure what to expect. A few were genuinely wondering if Ternus would bring back live-on-stage keynotes. (The apple tarts were supposedly made using apples grown on campus, and were quite good.)

In person, Ternus wore a dark t-shirt and jacket. In the keynote video, a burgundy shirt that clearly served as a reference to burgundy as the color of the year. (It’s hard to imagine Ternus in a cosmic orange shirt if he’d taken the top job a year prior.)

I think Ternus came across fine as emcee. Not great, but fine. He’s comfortable but I think the role still feels like a new pair of shoes he hasn’t yet broken in. Ternus’s opening line in the video was “Hello, and welcome to Apple Park”. I think that’s what he said on stage too. They’re leaving “Good morning!” as Cook’s signature, as they should.

Before any product announcements, Ternus laid out his theory of an “intelligent personal hub” for the AI era, making the case that if one were to design such a device from the ground up, starting today, you’d wind up with something exactly like an iPhone — with you all the time, with a great display, ubiquitous networking, great cameras and mics, and long battery life. The cynical take would be that this is an “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” guiding doctrine. Apple is not a leading AI model company, and is completely sitting out the capex data center rat race, so of course they’re going to argue that the most popular product they make — the iPhone — is the central device of the AI era. But, well, I think it’s true. You need devices to run AI. I wrote an entire column about this back in May — “AI Is Technology, Not a Product” — responding to Steven Levy’s argument that Ternus “needs to launch a killer AI product”.

Levy, in Wired, wrote:

By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.”

I wrote:

Actual products have to be real. Actual experiences have to rely on actual products. How exactly in Levy’s end-of-this-decade scenario will we tell our “always-on AI agent” to get us home? What microphone is listening to the command? What speaker is telling us the request was understood and acted upon? What screen do we look at to see how far away the hailed car is? I’d bet a pretty large sum of money that in 2030, when someone hails a ride-share vehicle to take them home, the most common product they’ll use to do that will be their phone. Whether they’re doing it via a verbal command issued to an “always-on AI agent” or good old tapping and swiping, it’ll be a phone.

Ternus’s “intelligent personal hub” doctrine seems very much in line with my retort to Levy’s not-entirely-thought-through fantasy. It also sounds an awful lot like a modern-day reimagining of a former Apple CEO’s “digital hub” strategy for the Mac. I highly recommend you take 8 minutes of your time, right now, and watch Steve Jobs’s introduction of the digital hub strategy from January 2001’s Macworld Expo. History doesn’t repeat but it does echo, and Ternus’s “intelligent personal hub” sure sounds exactly like Jobs’s “digital hub” echoing a quarter century later. If Ternus’s “intelligent personal hub” strategy works out like Jobs’s “digital hub” one did a quarter century ago, Apple’s going to be alright.

iPhone 18 Pro

Heretofore, to my recollection, the iPhone Pro always came last in the September keynotes (including the years when the higher-tier iPhones didn’t yet have the word “Pro” in their names, like the XS in 2018 and X in 2017). This year the 18 Pro came first. This worked both as the immediate product announcement after Ternus’s expression of Apple’s intelligent personal hub strategy, and to clear the final act of the keynote for the much-anticipated Duo. (It’s somewhat telling that the Air didn’t get that cleanup spot in the announcement batting order a year ago.³)

Thoughts on the colors, based on my hands-on experience:

• Black: Truly deep black. Reminds me a lot of the flat black iPhone 7 (not to be confused with the jet black iPhone 7 — what a year for black that was).
• Silver: Looks good. Not sure how it’s different from last year’s silver, because I had no way to compare side-by-side.
• Glacier: Nice. I think this will be popular. It’s definitely blue, not silver / gray (which you’d hope would be true in general, but especially alongside an explicit silver colorway).
• Burgundy: Last year the iPhone 17 Pro only came in three colors: silver, deep blue, and cosmic orange. I sort of thought of the strategy as “light”, “dark”, and “special”. But this year there are two specials, glacier and burgundy, but burgundy seems more special. Last year cosmic orange was clearly the color of the year. It was the most-used by far in Apple’s advertising, and I suspect it was the most popular sales-wise. Burgundy is that color this year. I don’t like it nearly as much, and I don’t think it will prove to be as popular or as iconic as cosmic orange. The cosmic orange iPhone 17 Pro seems set to go down as one of the most iconic iPhone colors ever made. I don’t think that will be true for the burgundy iPhone 18 Pro.

Pricing:

Compared to the 17 Pro one year ago:⁴

So:

• Max remains $100 extra.
• 2 TB is now available on the regular-size Pro; last year it was exclusive to the Max.
• 256 and 512 GB storage options are only $100 more expensive this year.
• 1 TB costs $300 more this year.
• 2 TB costs $500 more.

256 and 512 GB are by far the most popular sizes (and I think 256 in particular far outsells 512 — the base size truly is large enough for the majority of users), so for most 18 Pro buyers, the RAM/SSD shortage is only resulting in a $100 year-over-year price increase. The higher storage tier prices aren’t too bad, all things considered.

It’s worth pointing out here that coincident with the announcement of the iPhones 18 Pro and Duo on Wednesday, Apple raised the prices of all existing iPhones in its lineup by the same amounts, depending on storage — $100 for models with 128, 256, or 512 GB storage; and $300 for the iPhone Air with 1 TB.

Technically, the iPhone 18 Pro mostly offers three new things compared to the 17 Pro: the A20 Pro SoC (faster cores, two Neural Engines instead of one, and 50% faster memory bandwidth); variable aperture on the 1× main camera, ranging from ƒ1.48 to ƒ4.0; and an all-new thermal management system, including a much larger vapor chamber. The A20 Pro means peak performance is faster; the new thermal system allows it to maintain peak performance longer.

In a curious decision, the regular-sized 18 Pro models ship with Apple’s C2 cellular modem worldwide, but the 18 Pro Max models use a Qualcomm modem in the U.S., and the C2 everywhere else. Apple’s C-series modems are power efficiency marvels, with (in my experience) just as good reception and speed. I’d be just ever so slightly bummed about this if I were a Pro Max fan in the US.

That said, both the 18 Pro and Pro Max models continue to get slightly longer battery life in the US models than worldwide models, because the US models are eSIM-only, but most (all?) models elsewhere still have a physical SIM tray. The US models use the space occupied by the SIM tray in international models to make the batteries physically larger. Going by Apple’s new “typical use” tech spec, the US Pro / Pro Max models are rated for 24 / 30 hours respectively; the international models with a physical SIM tray for 23 / 29. Not a big difference, but not nothing.

In line with my belief that modern iPhones are best thought of as cameras with phones, not phones with cameras, most of the 18 Pro’s year-over-year improvements (and the features that set the Pro models apart from all other iPhones, including the Duo) are related to photography — both still and video:

• Photographic Styles is now up to version 3, adding new controls for “texture”, film-look, and grain. One stated goal of this is to enable shooting images with a less processed look; on the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, though, I think it will also enable shooting with a more processed look, with the addition of “glow” and “soft skin” as texture alternatives alongside “film” (which is the only texture with the new grain option). The other, and default, texture option is “standard”, which effectively means no texture processing.

• Apple Reference Image is a new shooting mode (main 1× camera only, because it’s tied to new features on that sensor) that performs pixel-by-pixel signing of the sensor data and embeds that signature in the file. After capture, reference images can be sent to Private Cloud Compute servers for verification and comparison to the original image sensor data. To capture images in Apple Reference format, you must shoot them in that mode, and you must enable that shooting mode first. The embedded sensor data doesn’t make files that much larger, but the sensor data stored in the file does uniquely identify your iPhone. When you “develop” a reference image — something the user must choose to do (not something that happens automatically each time you capture one) — the raw sensor data, sensor identifier, and time window when the image was captured are sent to Private Cloud Compute. When you share a photo captured in Apple Reference Image format, the sensor identifier is not included in the developed image, and you have the option to share a plain version without the embedded verification data. Apple Reference Image capture is not available in the EU or China, the world’s two largest bastions of freedom, but according to an Apple footnote, users in the EU “with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 will be able to develop and view reference images.”

• Cinematic Mode can now be applied after shooting a regular video; on previous iPhones the Cinematic Mode effect was only available via a specific shooting mode.

To the layman’s eye, though, the 18 Pro just looks like it comes in new colors. That’s not a complaint, just a fact. Oh, but the Face ID infrared camera is now underneath pixels on the display, so the Dynamic Island cutout is now smaller. So the part of the Dynamic Island that is always black is smaller, but because there are now more display pixels next to it, the 18 Pro Dynamic Island can now show three active Live Activities, up from two. Apple is getting closer and closer each year to achieving a no-notch / no-cutout display.

AirPods 5

Just like with AirPods 4, Apple continues to make two different products under the same name. For $130, the cheaper AirPods 5 now have active noise cancellation (previously reserved for the higher-priced tier of AirPods 4), including Transparency and Adaptive modes. For $150, you get AirPods 5 with a wireless charging case (using MagSafe, Qi, or Apple Watch pucks), volume control by swiping up / down on the earbud stems, and longer battery life. It’s a much better product for just $20 extra, but it must have worked out well for Apple with a similar split with AirPods 4. I honestly can’t see why anyone should buy the $130 models, but someone must be buying them.

Apple provided me with a pair (the $150 model) to review, with no embargo. I wore them on the cross-country plane ride home, and compared them to my own AirPods Pro 3 for noise cancellation. It’s hard to make a direct comparison of the overall acoustic quality, but solely in terms of reducing the noise of the airplane cabin while trying to work, I found the new AirPods 5 with full noise cancellation to be roughly equivalent to the AirPods Pro 3 in Adaptive mode. That’s pretty good, and makes the ambient noise level in an airplane much more pleasant. But the full noise cancellation mode of the AirPods Pro 3 delivers an entire step change in noise reduction that the open-ear AirPods 5 cannot match.

I feel bad for people who despise airplane cabin noise but whose ears aren’t comfortable with closed-ear fit earbuds like AirPods Pro. But the noise reduction quality of the AirPods 5 seems impossibly good given their open-ear design. I don’t find AirPods Pro uncomfortable, but I do find regular AirPods more comfortable, especially for long stretches like hours-long flights. I’ll take the small trade-off in comfort for the big improvement in audio quality and noise cancellation with the AirPods Pro, though. With AirPods Pro you can truly forget you’re on an airplane at all if you’re watching a movie with Vision Pro or even on a MacBook or iPad display in a dark cabin.⁵

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4

The big new health thing is a next-generation heart sensor that takes readings every 5 seconds — 60× as frequent as with Series 11 / Ultra 3 a year ago. Apple commissioned a study comparing their new watches against a slew of competing heart rate monitoring devices, and released a paper with the results, claiming that Apple Watch was the most accurate. That’s an Apple-commissioned, Apple-released study, so take it with a grain of salt, but it looks solid to me and I’m unaware of any other studies showing otherwise. (And if I’m reading the results correctly, rings like Oura’s are crummy heart rate monitors.)

Ultra 4 looks the same as Ultras 1–3 (although Ultra 1 only came in natural titanium, not black). Series 12 comes in some tweaked colors in matte aluminum ($400) and polished titanium ($700), and for the first time since Series 5 seven years ago, brings back ceramic, in two colors: pearl white and night blue ($900). Those prices are for the smaller 42mm size; add $50 to each of them for the larger 46mm size. As has been true for every Series model to date, only the higher-priced materials come with sapphire crystal displays; the entry-model aluminum models still use Ion-X glass. But now those glass displays offer Ceramic Shield 2, which treatment has proven to be a tremendous boon to scratch resistance on iPhones.

The S11 chip powering the new watches enables two very interesting, and instantly controversial Apple Intelligence features:

• Live Rewind is a feature that allows you to double-click the digital crown to bring up a transcript of the last 15 seconds of conversation around you. Apple claims, somewhat preposterously, that audio isn’t being continuously recorded, when it clearly is. What they mean is that audio is only being cached for 15 seconds, continuously. There is no way to set Live Rewind to transcribe more (or less, for that matter) than the last 15 seconds of audio.

• Siri Recap is a feature that produces Apple Intelligence-generated summaries of your conversations throughout the day, while the feature is enabled on your Apple Watch. These are not transcripts, just bullet-point style summaries. You can set Siri Recap to only be enabled during certain times (like work hours), and you can toggle it on and off in Control Center at any time. But when it’s on, that’s the only control you have over it. You can’t manually start / stop conversations to record, like you do when recording something with Voice Memos. You just turn Siri Recap on, and Siri generates summaries when it thinks you’ve had a conversation worth summarizing. It’s entirely and exclusively automatic, when the mode is enabled.

Neither of these features are available in WatchOS 27.0. They’re both described as coming “in beta later this year”. I asked Apple reps if that meant 27.1, and they wouldn’t answer other than to repeat “later this year”, but I thought I saw a smile. Both features are English-only for now.

Some people are objecting to the very existence of these features as privacy intrusive. I think they’re pretty reasonably thought out. There are surveillance cameras all over the place now. I was walking home from dinner here in Philadelphia a few weeks ago with a friend visiting from out of town, talking about this, and he stopped midway between the restaurant and my house and asked me to count how many cameras we were on at that spot. I think we counted seven or eight. Who knows how many we missed? I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just the world today. So too it’s soon going to be with personal devices recording audio. This is inevitable. I’m glad to see Apple ship features like this early, with pretty limited scope, to provide good examples before other companies ship devices that record and save audio continuously throughout the day. I think it’s better for Apple to lead with privacy-minded versions of ambient transcripts and AI-generated conversation summaries than to follow after other products have hit the market with all-day recordings and whole-life transcripts.

Think back to Apple’s announcement of AirTags. A lot of people had a perfectly reasonable “Hey I don’t know if it’s a good idea for a product like this to even exist” initial reaction. But having Apple lead the way actually proved good. I suspect Live Rewind and Siri Recap will turn out like that.

It’s also interesting to think about why these two features are only on Apple Watch, not iPhone. I think it’s because once an Apple Watch is on your wrist and unlocked, it remains a “trusted device” until you take the watch off. An iPhone is only a trusted device while it’s unlocked. It’s locked, and thus untrusted, while it’s in your pocket or bag, or even just sitting on a desk. I leave my iPhone unattended in our kitchen all the time. I’m often not in the room for conversations that take place in the kitchen while my iPhone is there, sitting on the counter. I shouldn’t get summaries of those conversations. And, thinking more nefariously, I shouldn’t be able to hide my iPhone on or near someone’s desk, or in a conference room, or in a car, or anywhere else, to get Siri Recap summaries of conversations where I’m not present. Making this an Apple Watch exclusive feature avoids that. Thus, I think Apple Watch can be trusted to “listen” ambiently, all the time while it’s unlocked on the wearer’s wrist, in ways that even an iPhone can’t.

iPhone Duo

Ternus broke out the hallowed “But actually, there is one more thing...” to introduce the Duo, which line — to circle back to the keynote’s intro — is for Apple CEOs what “Vodka martini, shaken not stirred” is for actors playing James Bond.⁶

Pre-orders for the Duo don’t start until October 16, and it doesn’t ship until October 23. In my experience, Apple never seeds review units for any product until a few days before pre-orders open, so we’re not going to hear or see anything more about the Duo until those review embargoes lift on October 20 or 21, I bet.

Duo is available in only two colors: star white (polished silver) and night sky (a deep blue-black). As predicted, the Duo is expensive. I’ll put it alongside the 18 Pro models for comparison:

At every storage tier, it’s $800 more than an 18 Pro and $700 more than an 18 Pro Max.

Key facts:

• It has no Face ID sensor, either open or closed. The only authentication is an iPad Air-style Touch ID side button.

• It has a Camera Control button, but does not have an Action button.

• The interior display has a matte nano-texture display. It looks great and apparently this is a key element of Apple’s efforts to make the crease as unnoticeable as possible. By next year I expect all competing foldables to have matte interior displays and 1.4 : 1 aspect ratio displays.

• It is very satisfying to open and close.

• The outer glossy screen has a “Center Stage” 12 megapixel front-facing camera, that seems very similar to the 18 megapixel Center Stage front cameras in the iPhone 17 generation phones. Year-ago tech but still high quality. There’s a circular hole punch in the corner of the display for this camera.

• The inner matte screen has an under-the-display “FaceTime” camera for which Apple hasn’t even given a megapixel count. Clearly this is a lesser camera — the question is how much lesser. The idea presumably is that this camera is solely for use in Zoom or FaceTime apps, where you might want to use the bigger inner display to view the meeting, and don’t care as much about your own image quality. But there’s no reason ever to capture a self portrait with the camera on the larger inner display. If the Duo is opened, and you care about image quality for self portraits, you can shoot using the main camera and use the small display to frame yourself, turning the large display around to the back. When not using the inner FaceTime camera, there is no visible cutout showing where it goes. If you look closely at the display however, you can see where it is. Under-display cameras aren’t magic.

• The regular cameras are a 1× / 2× main, and a 0.5× ultra wide. I suspect the main 1× camera is very similar optically to that of the iPhone Air, but the Duo has A20 Pro features like Photographic Styles 3, although it lacks Pro Controls, Apple Log, genlock, and other pro camera features. (The Air only has last year’s Photographic Styles 2.)

The initial introduction of the Duo was handled by two keynote newcomers: industrial design VP Molly Anderson, and human interface VP Steve Lemay. A hardware / software design duo (ahem), if you will. What made it worth having Anderson and Lemay present together is that the iPhone Duo exemplifies Apple’s integrated approach to product design. Are they a hardware company that writes their own software or a software company that makes their own hardware? The answer is yes.⁷ The defining aspect of the Duo isn’t that it folds open and closed — we’ve seen almost a decade of Android phones that do that — but its aspect ratio, roughly 1.4 : 1. Because that’s effectively the square root of 2, doubling the outer display’s shorter dimension when you unfold it produces an inner display with roughly the same aspect ratio. That’s elegant and satisfying conceptually. And I think in practice it will feel right, too.

Heretofore the iPhone has only had three display aspect ratios:

1. The original iPhone (2007) display was precisely 3 : 2 (480&NoBreak &NoBreak×&NoBreak &NoBreak320 pixels, and let’s call it 1.5 : 1 for comparison’s sake to the following ratios), and this remained true through the iPhone 4 and 4S (960&NoBreak &NoBreak×&NoBreak &NoBreak640 pixels, 2× retina).

2. Then the iPhone 5 (2012) display size went from 3.5 inches to 4 inches, but added all the extra pixels on the long dimension. Held vertically, it got taller, but not at all wider, changing the aspect ratio to 16 : 9 (roughly 1.77 : 1). This 16 : 9 aspect ratio held for all of the 5, 6, 7, and 8 generation iPhones, including the Plus models.

3. The iPhone X (2017) introduced the “all-screen” era. The actual device hardware didn’t change size or aspect ratio by much, but eliminating the chin (with Home button) and forehead and filling those areas with the screen, the display aspect ratio went to roughly 2.17 : 1, and every new model since then, including the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, has maintained that aspect ratio.⁸

Thus, over 20 years, iPhone displays (and thus all phones, since all the other phones mostly just copy iPhones) have only gotten more elongated: from 1.5 : 1 to 1.77 : 1 to 2.17 : 1. Now, though, the iPhone Duo goes squatter than the original iPhone for the first time, to 1.4 : 1 on both the outer and inner displays.⁹ That’s a noticeable change from the original iPhone, but it’s a downright striking change from every iPhone released in the last 10 years.

This aspect ratio is so different that it demands a different UI layout for the Duo to have any chance at being a good experience. That’s exactly what Apple has done, and what Steve Lemay was there in the keynote to unveil. A lot of UI chrome that previously was at the top or bottom of the display is now on the right — the dock on the home screen, the toolbars in apps, etc. And these elements are always on the right. You can’t turn the Duo upside down to move them to the left, nor is there an accessibility setting to move them to the left. This layout puts these controls on the right not because 90 percent of people are right-handed and Apple thinks lefties can get bent, but, I think (and so I’ve been told in conversations with Cupertinoites), because that’s the nature of a book-like shape. The arrow keys on keyboards always fall on the right, publishers don’t print left-handed books, and carmakers don’t make left-handed steering wheels. The right-side bias in the Duo iOS layout is like that.

I’ve only spent a few minutes, in total, playing with the Duo, so I really can’t say whether it succeeds or not. But I will say that it’s weird. Not saying it’s weird good or weird bad — just weird different. In some ways iOS on the Duo feels more different from iOS on all other post-iPhone-X phones than iOS on the original iPad felt from iOS on the iPhones of that time. The original iPad just felt like a much bigger iPhone. The Duo feels like a different layout entirely, in every single app that I had time to poke around with.

Is the Duo good? I do not know. Is it different? Very much.

Here’s the thing. If you take a 2 : 1 or even 2.2 : 1 aspect ratio phone display and turn that into a book-like foldable, the inner screen comes out square — or so close to square that we might as well just call it square. Nobody makes any device of any sort that just has a square display. Square is a terrible aspect ratio for a phone or a tablet or a laptop or a desktop display. The only square displays on the market are the inner displays for Android foldables from the last decade. Square being a shitty aspect ratio is half the reason almost no one has bought those things. The other half of the reason is that no developers truly adapted software to take advantage of the double-area inner displays. Google didn’t do it, Samsung didn’t do it, and since neither of them bothered to do it, of course third-party developers didn’t do it either. Nothing adapts to the inner display on Android foldables — it just expands to fill the space.

Apple’s insight to go with 1.4 : 1 on the outside and thus also 1.4 : 1 on the inside gives the Duo a chance. Maybe this will be a huge hit. But maybe not? There are no 5-inch phone displays with aspect ratios anywhere near as squat as the Duo’s. That’s a tablet aspect ratio. The current A17 Pro iPad Mini has a 2266&NoBreak &NoBreak×&NoBreak &NoBreak1488 pixel display: roughly 1.5 : 1. The 11-inch iPad Air is 1.4 : 1 and the 13-inch Air is 1.33 : 1. So I think the Duo’s inner display is going to feel just right.

But that outer display? I don’t know. Even in the best case, it’s going to be no better than a tolerable compromise. If it were actually a good idea there would be non-folding phones with 1.4 : 1-ish squat displays, and there aren’t any such phones. And even if the Duo proves to be a hit, I don’t think there will be. If you only have one display you don’t want it to be the size and shape of the Duo’s outer display. So the questions are: How tolerable has Apple’s UI redesign made it? And how will Duo users split their time between using it closed vs. using it open? Someone who spends more of their time using it open might absolutely love it with a “you’ll take it away only from my cold dead hands” fervor. Someone who winds up mostly using the outer display because so many of their iPhone interactions are quick take it out → use it for a bit to check something, jot something down, or snap a quick photo → put it back in pocket / bag situations, might wind up regretting it.

Given the design brief of creating a book-shaped foldable phone, I feel quite certain already that Apple has nailed it with the Duo. But having only seen the keynote spiel and poked around with one in hand for a few minutes Wednesday afternoon, I think it remains an open question whether a book-shaped foldable phone is a good idea in the first place. Folks from Apple who have actually spent time carrying the Duo seem genuinely enthused. I remain highly skeptical about its appeal for me personally, and somewhat skeptical about its appeal broadly. That’s OK if it’s not suited for me, but is suited for many (but not most) people. No one in the keynote described the iPhone Duo as the future of iPhone, like they did when introducing the iPhone X in 2017. I just wonder if the fundamental idea appeals to all that many people at all. We’ll find out starting in late October.

Regarding some specific Duo details:

• The lack of Face ID is a serious sad-trombone bummer, and in my opinion could sink the first-generation model. Side-button Touch ID is OK, but OK is not good, and even good is not insanely great. Face ID is insanely great. For whatever reason, the only iPads with Face ID are the iPad Pro models. Every time I review an iPad Air or iPad Mini, my biggest gripe is the lack of Face ID. I complained about it reviewing the iPad Air in 2022 and the iPad Mini in 2021, and in the five years since then my annoyance has only grown. With Face ID, so long as you’re looking at the screen as you unlock the device, it’s like not having it locked at all. It just unlocks, seemingly automatically. With Touch ID you must think about putting one of your registered fingers on the button every single time you unlock it. It never ever feels automatic. I feel quite certain Apple tried to fit a Face ID sensor on the outer Duo display and could not make the engineering work.

• I’m much more concerned about convenience than security, but Face ID is 20× more secure than Touch ID. That’s according to Apple’s own Apple Platform Security whitepaper, updated just last month, which states:

  The probability that a random person in the population could unlock a user’s iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro is less than 1 in 1 million with Optic ID or Face ID — including when Face ID with a mask is turned on. For a user’s iPad, iPhone, Mac models with Touch ID, and those paired with a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, it’s less than 1 in 50,000. This probability increases with multiple enrolled fingerprints (up to 1 in 10,000 with five fingerprints) or appearances for Face ID (up to 1 in 500,000 with two appearances).

• As a sign of how inconvenient the lack of Face ID is, Apple is promoting the fact that the iPhone Duo can be unlocked by your Apple Watch, like a Mac. No other iPhone needs such a crutch.¹⁰ Based on my experience with Touch ID iPads, wearing an Apple Watch all the time to unlock the Duo will feel essential. I don’t wear an Apple Watch all the time, and don’t want to start wearing an Apple Watch all the time, so I suspect this alone will keep me from switching to an iPhone Duo personally. On the other hand, for people who do wear an Apple Watch all the time and are happy to do so, the Duo’s lack of Face ID might prove to be only an occasional inconvenience rather than a constant annoyance.¹¹

• Contrary to some speculation, the Duo does support MagSafe. (Samsung’s latest, the Galaxy Z Fold8 and Fold8 Ultra, support inductive Qi charging but don’t have magnets, so you need to use a case or something to get chargers to snap into place.)

• Closed, the Duo has — per Molly Anderson’s dulcet keynote description — “a distinctive asymmetric shape, with two rounded corners, that invites you to open it.” Expect this to be copied by every other foldable phone in 2027, and then for Android dorks to argue that it’s a totally obvious design. (Same for the matte interior display.)

• Apple rates the Duo as IP68 for dust and water resistance, with exactly the same description as the iPhones 18 Pro (and all other iPhone models currently in the lineup): “Rated IP68 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes) under IEC standard 60529”. Samsung’s new Z Fold8 is only IP48. With these IEC ratings the second numeral is for water. The first numeral is for “solid foreign agents” (read: dirt and dust). iPhone Duo’s IP6x rating means “dust-tight”. The Z Fold8’s IP4x rating isn’t even “dust-protected” (that would be IP5x) but instead only protection against particles 1mm or larger. 1mm is pretty big for a piece of grit. That doesn’t mean it’s susceptible to ingress from every particle smaller than 1mm, but it’s not good. Pocket lint is a real thing and people put their phones in their pockets.

I’m Trying So Hard Not to Be Insufferable About Predicting the ‘Duo’ Name That I’ve Put This Entire Section 6,500 Words Deep Into the Column

Yours truly, back on April 14:

I have no inside knowledge about what Apple plans to name this device, but I’ll eat my proverbial hat if they name it “iPhone Fold”. That name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables. You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes. A good name conveys feeling, not just function. “iPhone Ultra” or “iPhone Max” would both work, and Ultra sounds more luxe. So while unsurprising, that’s probably the best bet, even without the reliable word of Mr. Digital Chat Station.

But if you want my take on a wildcard name, one with some history, how about “iPhone Duo”?

My thinking re: “Duo” seemingly jibed with that of Apple’s crack marketing team:

• It’s two devices in one.
• The early 1990s PowerBook Duo (and corresponding Duo Dock) were extraordinary Macs that were ahead of their time.
• It’s not ultra, if we take ultra to mean “better than what’s less than ultra in every way”. The iPhone Duo is different — quite different — from the iPhones Pro but, to name one conspicuous example, the iPhones Pro have better camera systems. (The Duo is ultra-priced, but one can also say it’s double-priced.)
• Duo looks and sounds so good alongside Neo.

When I suggested “Duo” in April and again the day before the event, the number one objection was that Microsoft had used the name “Duo” for one of its many forgettable Surface products. The half dozen or so readers who argued thus might be the only people alive who remember this product. No one cares. Microsoft also had a Surface Neo, and no one cares about that one either. Even if Apple hadn’t offered a line of (successful, memorable) PowerBook Duos from 30 years ago, it wouldn’t matter that Microsoft had used “Duo” in 2020. For chrissakes Cisco had the rights to the name “iPhone” in 2007 and had been making products with the name since 1998.

I love the name Duo for this iPhone. It just feels right. And, just five days in, I already find myself saying and writing just “Duo”, without “iPhone”, when referring to it.

Miscellaneous

• Too many cooks spoil the stew. It was very fun and a little touching to have the Cook hand things off to Ternus at the start, but I think there were too many presenters in the keynote. Duo was effectively introduced three or four separate times. First by the Anderson / Lemay (I’m going to pun it again) duo, then Joz, then Craig Federighi (covering much of the same software ground Lemay did), then Johny Srouji (covering much of the same ground Anderson did). Maybe the thinking was that everyone wanted a part in Ternus’s debut keynote. Maybe this is just the way of the future — many small segments, rather than one continuous on-stage live monologue. It didn’t make the keynote run overly long (running time was just 1h:17m), so maybe I’m all wet here. But I think what I wanted was to see Ternus do more of the explaining — not just the what but the why.

• Apple’s YouTube video of the entire keynote has over 49 million views, and that doesn’t count the views from Apple’s own hosted version, presented on Apple.com and Apple TV. Apple has 12 other shorter keynote-related videos on YouTube, including “Introducing the new iPhone 18 Pro” with 18 million views, and “Introducing the new iPhone Duo” with 28 million views. For comparison, this year’s WWDC keynote on YouTube has 8.9 million views. 9 million views is a hell of a view count for the introduction of operating systems, but the iPhone remains king — not just for Apple, but the industry. It remains the Super Bowl of the annual tech calendar.

• For an even better comparison, in the full version of that 2001 Macworld Expo keynote that I suggested you watch earlier in this column — the one where Steve Jobs introduced the Mac-as-digital-hub strategy — when Jobs takes the stage, he’s beaming with pride when he says there are “tens of thousands” of people watching the stream live. Both streaming and Apple have come a long way in 25 years.