Nearly 10 years in to foldables, and they still bring so many caveats. They are consistently worse for size, weight, shape, cameras, battery, robustness, and longevity. I don't think I'd ever recommend one.
On the other hand, the advantages are... an iPad like experience sometimes? Or a smaller phone for the flip form factor? The flip form factor certainly does not pay off. I'm honestly not sure who the trade-offs pay off for.
I feel like the average tech enthusiast just assumes that most people have computers, but they do not. Most people have a phone as a primary computing device. Tablets have gone up in popularity, but for a significant portion of people, their only device is a phone. Those people are buying phones on carrier financing or other deals, so they don't even see the full cost of their device at all. So for people doing this type of upgrade cycle, a folding phone is quite compelling: an expanded screen size for watching video, consuming content, or heck, even maybe productivity, while being effectively a marginal upgrade in cost on a monthly payment.
Also, just for the record, some carriers in Japan are offering financing that gives you the option of paying over 48 months and Apple offers 36 months. Is that quite absurd to most people? Absolutely, but for the average person who wants a bigger screen sometimes, the cost is not even going up much on a monthly basis.
For the record, especially in Japan, folio cases where you open your phone like a book are already the default. Effectively most people on the train have their phone open in some "Duo-ish" form-factor already. So the jump from a folio case to a folding phone is already substantially lower.
Obviously the gimmick nature of folding is not the compelling reason why people want folding phones. The question is more about tradeoffs, and I think that especially in asia, the demand for folding phones is quite obvious: upgrade your primary PC to have a huge display when you want it that way, otherwise it stays compact enough to be with you all the time.
Also it's not just a cost or affordability matter. Some people who can easily afford a top of the line laptop and/or tablet simply do not want one. They want one device to do all their computing needs from.
Most of my friends who are not in tech are like this, as is my wife. None of them have personal laptops at home. Few even have tablets.
The problem with that argument is that it is stupidly expensive, no matter how you look at it. It's a $2000 phone, for the same money you can get an iPhone 18 Pro and a MacBook Neo. Or get an iPhone 17 / 17e and save yourself $300 / $500. Or swap the MacBook for an iPad and save up to an additional $350.
Carrier financing doesn't make this go away. It's still a $60/month plan vs a $100+/month one. You're paying significantly more to have a worse primary compute device. For most people, that's going to be a rather hard sell.
The only benefit is that you have it on you at all times. I would argue that this is an attractive selling point for tech enthusiasts, but most people aren't going to care.
Stupidly expensive from one perspective, but if you look at clothing and fashion it’s actually more surprising to me that the market effectively tops out where it does. Billionaires have more or less the exact same phone options as we do, and from base model to top model is only a bit more than 2x differential.
I must say i find it hard to believe that a person, who can't afford to buy a laptop, would rather buy iphone duo on loan for PC needs.
maybe it is not the culture in India (where i live). but it looks financially irresponsible. if you need a laptop and can't afford it, buy a second hand laptop instead. iphone duo can't replace a laptop in first place.
I would say it's more a matter of not wanting a laptop, versus not being able to afford one.
I'm sure there are people who fall into the financially irresponsible category, but these days there are many people who find zero use for having a laptop and have no desire for one at all.
Are you sure this phone-only segment will pay twice the price for a little more screen estate? Maybe… But why not recommend to these folks to get an ipad mini with an e-sim? You get the bigger screen at less than half the price, and it still fits into the pocket of a coat at least. You could even buy one of those Logitech BT keyboards and have a mini laptop.
Apple's financing is 0%. While it may seem absurd for a phone, the smart money is on taking financing—so long as you're a responsible spender, which many are not.
The PS5 is also a dead market. It was released over 5 years ago, so anyone who wanted to buy one has done so already, and the PS6 is expected sooner rather than later. The PS5 is, quite literally, a bargain bin product.
Is that true of both the PS5 and PS5 Pro, or just one of the two? My impression of that situation was that the PS5 Pro was in high demand because of GTA6, but the regular PS5 was plentiful.
With iOS 27 Apple introduced the iPhone handoff, which allows sharing the same phone number with two devices [1]. Maybe their thinking is that Duo is not necessarily your only iPhone.
From what I've gathered, China is much more in to mobile gaming and livestreaming than the rest of the world. Folding phones seem to appeal to those who primarily consume media on their phones, so it checks out they would want larger phones.
I suspect this might be my blindspot. I use my phone a huge amount, but almost never for watching video or gaming. Being able to have a "full screen" video, and another app running "full screen", with the effectively 2x screen space, makes sense.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, they are different markets – most people need a smartphone today, nobody really needs a PS5. A better comparison is to say that of smartphones sold in 2025 (~1.65bn), foldables represented ~1%. That's pretty niche.
I have a friend who is not at all into luxury stuff but bought one because he never used a computer and was appealed by the screen size to make the administrative stuff he was struggling to do with a regular smartphone.
Having said that he is also known to make some bad purchasing decision and living in constant debt.
A $500 console is not a "luxury good", unless you also count having a flat screen TV as a luxury good. Games is one of the most common things done in a household today
A $2000 phone (which will never be $2000, it's the minimum spec) to watch youtube videos and enjoy apps with bad layouts is in another category entirely.
That’s pre-Apple’s entry into the market, which will triple the size of the foldables market in the next 12-18 months. And cnsidering how bad foldables have been and how much better they’ll get, that’s surely not the ceiling.
Apple sold ~250m of those ~1.65bn, so if you work on it being Android only, then foldables are ~1.4% instead of ~1.1%.
For the foldable market to triple in size, Apple would need to sell 40m this year, which if we assume a flat year for overall numbers (likely given rising costs this cycle and the trend of flattening sales anyway), then it would mean the fold taking 16% of all iPhone sales. For a ~2500-3200 USD phone (base model, international pricing), that's not happening.
Why would you think foldables are about to get a lot better? They have improved over the last 10 years, but the original caveats are pretty much all still there, and the iPhone Duo doesn't appear to improve on any of them in any meaningful way.
> For the foldable market to triple in size, Apple would need to sell 40m this year
For the record, it seems like the production will not get close to 40m phones this year. According to most outlets, it is backordered to January and Apple had to ramp production higher than anticipated. I highly doubt that it will literally 3x the market this year. But the pattern has been, excepting the Vision Pro, that when Apple enters a market, it suddenly proves the viability to other market entrants, and to the general public who view it as a mature market.
> but the original caveats are pretty much all still there
I don't think this is true at all. A significant portion of people complain about the crease, light reflections, and poor software. It seems like initial reviews don't find problems due to the "nano-texture" display (probably achievable in third-parties with a matte screen protector). As for software, once apps have been optimized for Duo, I expect that designs will carry over to similar form-factor folding devices on Android.
>It seems like initial reviews don't find problems due to the "nano-texture" display
Initial reviews don't find problems on Android foldables either, but the crease becomes noticeably visible no matter the phone over time. Apple did not invent magic: their phones already crease (and break)
> As for software, once apps have been optimized for Duo
They won't. There is zero business interest in making dedicated layouts for such a small portion of the population that won't be using your app anyways, unless you're hyper specialized. I'm sure Bloomberg can justify a foldable layout, the New York Times doesn't.
Apple is going to rediscover every single issue that Android has has five years to go through, and loudly yell LA LA LA NOT A PROBLEM FOR US APPLE MAGIC TRUST US while having worse APIs for developers to properly support those layouts.
>For a ~2500-3200 USD phone (base model, international pricing), that's not happening.
Honestly I have no idea. To me spending 800usd for a phone is already completely crazy yet apparently smartphones in the 1000 to 1400 range are plenty already. What is the ceiling at which volume will go down drastically? I honestly don't know.
Same for transportation, I don't understand why people accept paying north of 35kusd on a vehicle and that is before the additional yearly expenses. Yet there are plenty of cars sold in the 50k and above. I bought mine second hand for 6.5kusd and even if it died tomorrow after 2 years of use it would still have been a better deal than leasing even the smallest and cheapest new cars on the market for 4 years. Yet I still see plenty of brand new cars in the street every day (and I am thanskful of that, otherwise the second hand market would disappear) so plenty of people are willing to buy really expensive stuff whenever much cheaper alternatives exist.
I love my Pixel 10 Fold and can't imagine ever going back to a non-foldable now. The larger screen is great for productivity. Reviewing PRs on the larger screen is way more comfortable than a normal phone size. The built-in terminal app also works nicely with herdr and Tailscale to let me connect to my work machine. I can interact with my agents and get real work done on the go. I also have saved split views so I can quickly launch two apps side-by-side. I do mobile app development, so being able to have the app I'm developing open side by side with Slack or Linear to create issues or discuss with people is very convenient.
I don't know if terminal access is as easy on iPhones, but the utility is there for many work related use-cases. I do think the more square-like form factor of the Pixel to be better for productivity than the rectangular form of the Duo, but the latter is nicer for videos.
Interesting, reviewers (Joanna Stern) said that it was not great for productivity, more for consumption. Perhaps it works for your kind of tasks, but not hers/others.
I was saying the Pixel Fold form-factor was great for productivity and that the iPhone Duo was better for video watching. But even the Duo could be nice for some productivity tasks if you hold it in a portrait orientation instead of landscape.
A big iPhone is the wrong way to think about this, it is in fact a foldable iPad mini. An iPad Mini you can comfortably fit in your pocket and take on the go with an always on cellular connection that can take phone calls.
As someone who used to carry an iPad mini in his back jeans pocket (it barely fit), I am very much looking forward to my pre-order showing up.
>Nearly 10 years in to foldables, and they still bring so many caveats. They are consistently worse for size,
And that is why Apple is only shipping theirs now, it is getter better and finally have a decent trajectory in the next 3-5 years to overcome most of those issues. I mean you can pretty much look at State of the Art from Chinese Android phones to see where we are heading in terms of hardware. They are now to the point USB-C port is the limit of how thin they could make their phone.
My iPad mini gets multiple times more use than my iPhone, there have even been times where I’ve left my iPhone by the bedside table for days.
It’s mainly a consumption device, I got it initially for reading ebooks while on the train. It’s also a surprisingly good workhorse by itself, or as a second screen for a MacBook. I even make phone calls with it (via the iPhone) simply because it’s always in or near my hands.
So the Duo certainly piqued my interest when it was announced, until I learnt it doesn’t do iPad-y stuff like universal control or sidecar. I’ll wait for the next gen.
It felt wrong to me when they split iOS in two to make the iPad OS, and now it feels super wrong.
The whole selling point of this is that it’s an iPad mini in your pocket, IMO. It’s really a shame they couldn’t give it all of the iPad’s best features.
??? everyone I know who's gone fold hasn't gone back.
yes, battery & camera are a generation back and water/dustproof is even worse.
but productivity and fun are off the charts: slab phones feel pathetic once you've got a fold. Communication apps show you the list of conversations as well as the current one - or the current one and the details/multimedia. Google Maps shows the map and the listing details/reviews. Games and multimedia are delightful. Photos are full sized, and you can see what you're shooting in detail - if you shoot with a digital camera, remote shooting is amazing because there's enough space to show detailed focus.
Not to start an endless device debate but a good chunk of these use cases make more sense to do on an iPad or to just have a separate device in general.
I know, I know, that’s not as portable, that’s not a device you have with you all the time like a phone.
But we’ve seen pretty mixed results on the “combine devices into one” playbook. Sometimes it’s a huge hit, sometimes not so much.
You've never held an Oppo Find N6 which I have in my hands right now then.
Oppo Find N6 thickness folded 8.93mm. iPhone 18 Pro Max 8.75mm.
Oppo Find N6 battery 6000mAh. iPhone 18 Pro Max 5567 (esim-only model)
Oppo Find N6 dual nano + eSIM. iPhone 18 Pro Max eSim only (or smaller battery)
Oppo Find N6 200+50+50 MP cameras. iPhone 18 Pro Max 48+48+48. iPhone PM has 1/1.3 vs 1/1.56" only on Oppo tho.
Well, besides the software, which is very much not laptop-like.
I think the main thing is that for this kind of money you have a lot of options. You could even buy a GPD device that is an actual full blown pouch sized laptop and buy a regular iPhone for the same price.
> I think the main thing is that for this kind of money you have a lot of options. You could even buy a GPD device that is an actual full blown pouch sized laptop and buy a regular iPhone for the same price.
I have done this! I currently carry a GPD Win Max 2 around, but let me be clear about some elements of this: the keyboard on a sub-device is just as important as any other, and the keyboard on GPD devices is not great. A sub-device has to be maintained and charged and given love and care just the same as any other device. The amount of times I have found my cute linux laptop dead when I wanted it, outdated, or randomly signed out of services is quite high (and this is with an onboard LTE modem). Carrying around a folding (or even non-folding, like a Magic Keyboard) is lighter than a sub-device, will last significantly longer in terms of charge/battery, and does not require any of the secondary device maintenance that is needed with one normally.
To me a folding phone is an absolute no-brainer in terms of why it is useful. You can get a very, very good keyboard for cheap, or try many, and completely eliminate the need to carry a second device.
Another huge use case I have is transit/travel video playback. I do not normally want to bring an iPad or even a secondary laptop during travel, so this effectively deletes one more device that I have to charge, update, bring adapters for, etc. It is effectively all of the benefit of having a tablet at all times, a sub-laptop at all times, and requires absolutely no additional charging or maintenance.
On the flip side of traveling with only one device versus just having a second device, you now have the downsides of one device: now you’re using one device for everything so you’re draining the battery of that one device and only one person can use that device at a time.
When I travel solo I take my AYN Odin 2 Portal with me for gaming. That thing has a battery that’s twice the size of a typical smartphone and it can play games pretty much all day before the battery dies, while my phone is in my pocket fully charged ready to be useful at my destination.
If I played games on my phone during the plane ride I’d arrive at my destination with a seriously depleted battery and charging anxiety, or I’d need to travel with a spare battery.
Is this setup bulkier than an iPhone Duo? Sure. The AYN Odin 2 Portal is also a $230 device.
I own a GPD max 2 and a GPD win mini and both are really not suitable for my workflow: the battery life is not as good as an iPhone and the fan keep screaming. Maybe I should try installing linux on them. Now they are just gaming devices and a backup machine in case I really need to open office documents.
OTOH I have used my iPhone pro max for development for a long long time. The trick is to use a always-on linux VPS pairing with many excellent terminal emulators on iPhone (e.g. blink.sh).
Essentially I'm using iPhone as a thin client to visit a true linux development machine, and both of them play their roles perfectly. While other solutions while trying to be both roles with a single device failed miserably.
Huge screen that's pocketable and also your primary device (not a 2nd device you need to choose to carry in addition to your phone, and have a bag for) and ability to have 2 apps at once on iOS is in fact highly valuable for many.
I had a flip phone and I got it for this reason, but it honestly just sucked. The outer screens are too small to be useful, or in the case of Samsung, just don't have the right feature set to be useful. That means the phone ends up just being a full size smartphone with more steps to be able to use it.
This is a samsung issue or so I've heard. I am yet to buy one. Waiting for costs to go down
Moto screen is good enough and has a full screen, not a dummy one
Also the point about the screen being too small - that's the point! I don't want to use Android and get sucked into 10 different apps. The small screen is perfect. Useless for anything beyond clock and phone and whatsapp maybe
Spending thousands of dollars on hardware I don't own is not for me, but foldable touchscreen phones are, objectively, pretty freaking cool pieces of engineering work. Very cool breakdown of the hardware.
Maybe 2027 will be the year of the Linux desktop (thanks to AI), but meanwhile, I 'll just pay the $100/yr Apple tax to run my code on my device, and get on with my life.
I agree with the engineering, the thing is also I would like to consider a flip phone like a fold or similar, but the tradeoffs, the price, the lack of longevity AND the fact that even if the phone survives its whole life cycle, security updates would make it obsolete for certain applications, makes it difficult to even consider such a device...
Though looking at the practical engineering questions and their solutions is still entertaining.
ive been really enjoying my iPhone duo so far, its hard to imagine going back to a normal phone. it makes it so much more fun to schedule appointments, read blog posts, vibe code, update my calendar before a trip, watch movies, etc...
I felt this way since the first Pixel Fold. Now I have Pixel Fold 10 and a Duo. I need work-personal separation thus two devices, but it is a little much with two foldables.
You know how on a computer screen you can just drag any corner of a window to resize it? I had a dream once where I had a phone that worked that way. Want a bigger screen? Just drag one of the corners of the phone. Shove all the corners together and drop it in your pocket.
I used the hell out of that phone all night. Then I woke up and spent about an hour trying to figure out how to build one. I think I could do it in one dimension (i.e. make the phone wider) by rolling the screen around a tiny roller in the edge of the case, and having the case telescope. But that won't work in two dimensions at once. I never figured out how to do it in two dimensions.
Could be 4 screens overlapping each other. Pull the corners and the lower screens pull out from below the upper ones. There would be a visible seam at the boundary, but maybe there's a trick you could use to disguise it.
I noticed a race among social media to teardown or literally tear down the iphone duo this time. Bendgate is always a classic one to do for views, scratchgate is another one content makers love as they can wear an expensive watch while they carve shapes into their expensive purchase while poor people from around the world clutch pearls. The folding design is a great opportunity for content makers to target for views, but my question is why the content makers never invent something, design it, market it, pay large amounts for iso safety testing certification, then make teardown content on what they created a la banksy love is in the bin
I'm sure the 5T multinational corporation is glad you're defending it against the small-time content creators bullying it, but you might notice that the people behind this teardown do in fact sell products they've designed. So do other popular creators in the teardown category like jerryrigeverything.
They can't do teardowns of their own products though. Anything interesting they'd find in a teardown should have been caught at the design stage, and they're hardly unbiased about their own products. At most they can do design decision videos, which many do. For opinionated testing they'll send their products to another creator instead.
Why does it matter if its 5 or 5T? The teardown or tear down is what is important. I invented something a few years ago in my backyard workshop while on welfare and it got tore down which made me realise something odd is going on
nah they're right, legit teardowns with microscopes & CTs & chip identification are interesting; most 'teardowns' are little more than destruction porn. jerryrig at least gives some info (scratch test) but even he quickly devolves into uninteresting destruction.
It's nothing new - is will it blend still a thing? - but man it seems like they're everywhere now
Ifixit do? Their whole shtick is building repair guides, tools and selling spare parts...
There is definitely an incentive for content makers to discover the next Xgate and some are going to extreme lengths because drama is popular. That being said destructive testing is part of testing a product, it's not like the engineers at apple weren't doing the same sort of things internally.
Nearly 10 years in to foldables, and they still bring so many caveats. They are consistently worse for size, weight, shape, cameras, battery, robustness, and longevity. I don't think I'd ever recommend one.
On the other hand, the advantages are... an iPad like experience sometimes? Or a smaller phone for the flip form factor? The flip form factor certainly does not pay off. I'm honestly not sure who the trade-offs pay off for.
I feel like the average tech enthusiast just assumes that most people have computers, but they do not. Most people have a phone as a primary computing device. Tablets have gone up in popularity, but for a significant portion of people, their only device is a phone. Those people are buying phones on carrier financing or other deals, so they don't even see the full cost of their device at all. So for people doing this type of upgrade cycle, a folding phone is quite compelling: an expanded screen size for watching video, consuming content, or heck, even maybe productivity, while being effectively a marginal upgrade in cost on a monthly payment.
Also, just for the record, some carriers in Japan are offering financing that gives you the option of paying over 48 months and Apple offers 36 months. Is that quite absurd to most people? Absolutely, but for the average person who wants a bigger screen sometimes, the cost is not even going up much on a monthly basis.
For the record, especially in Japan, folio cases where you open your phone like a book are already the default. Effectively most people on the train have their phone open in some "Duo-ish" form-factor already. So the jump from a folio case to a folding phone is already substantially lower.
Obviously the gimmick nature of folding is not the compelling reason why people want folding phones. The question is more about tradeoffs, and I think that especially in asia, the demand for folding phones is quite obvious: upgrade your primary PC to have a huge display when you want it that way, otherwise it stays compact enough to be with you all the time.
This.
Also it's not just a cost or affordability matter. Some people who can easily afford a top of the line laptop and/or tablet simply do not want one. They want one device to do all their computing needs from.
Most of my friends who are not in tech are like this, as is my wife. None of them have personal laptops at home. Few even have tablets.
The problem with that argument is that it is stupidly expensive, no matter how you look at it. It's a $2000 phone, for the same money you can get an iPhone 18 Pro and a MacBook Neo. Or get an iPhone 17 / 17e and save yourself $300 / $500. Or swap the MacBook for an iPad and save up to an additional $350.
Carrier financing doesn't make this go away. It's still a $60/month plan vs a $100+/month one. You're paying significantly more to have a worse primary compute device. For most people, that's going to be a rather hard sell.
The only benefit is that you have it on you at all times. I would argue that this is an attractive selling point for tech enthusiasts, but most people aren't going to care.
Stupidly expensive from one perspective, but if you look at clothing and fashion it’s actually more surprising to me that the market effectively tops out where it does. Billionaires have more or less the exact same phone options as we do, and from base model to top model is only a bit more than 2x differential.
And they all have as many laptops and desktops as the want, too
I must say i find it hard to believe that a person, who can't afford to buy a laptop, would rather buy iphone duo on loan for PC needs.
maybe it is not the culture in India (where i live). but it looks financially irresponsible. if you need a laptop and can't afford it, buy a second hand laptop instead. iphone duo can't replace a laptop in first place.
I would say it's more a matter of not wanting a laptop, versus not being able to afford one.
I'm sure there are people who fall into the financially irresponsible category, but these days there are many people who find zero use for having a laptop and have no desire for one at all.
Are you sure this phone-only segment will pay twice the price for a little more screen estate? Maybe… But why not recommend to these folks to get an ipad mini with an e-sim? You get the bigger screen at less than half the price, and it still fits into the pocket of a coat at least. You could even buy one of those Logitech BT keyboards and have a mini laptop.
Apple's financing is 0%. While it may seem absurd for a phone, the smart money is on taking financing—so long as you're a responsible spender, which many are not.
48 months financing is two years. If you upgrade your phone less often than every year, what’s absurd about that?
48 months is 4 years.
Getting into debt for a depreciating asset is not really very sensible
Wat
18-20 million foldable phones were sold in 2025. About 10 million PS5 consoles were sold in that same period. So there's definitely a bit of interest.
Why does it have to be an all-or-nothing fight for the final smartphone form? Can't it just be a semi-niche product that some people buy?
The PS5 is also a dead market. It was released over 5 years ago, so anyone who wanted to buy one has done so already, and the PS6 is expected sooner rather than later. The PS5 is, quite literally, a bargain bin product.
Is that true of both the PS5 and PS5 Pro, or just one of the two? My impression of that situation was that the PS5 Pro was in high demand because of GTA6, but the regular PS5 was plentiful.
it just becomes more and more expensive with time, I don't think that counts as a bargain bin product.
With iOS 27 Apple introduced the iPhone handoff, which allows sharing the same phone number with two devices [1]. Maybe their thinking is that Duo is not necessarily your only iPhone.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/127274
So you're meant to shell out $2000 for the Duo and then an additional $1200 for an 18 or something?
Don't forget $5-10 a month extra to the carrier for the privilege of using the feature, on top of the cost of the monthly service for both lines.
Some countries, like China, LOVE foldable phones. It’s fun to see how cultural it is.
From what I've gathered, China is much more in to mobile gaming and livestreaming than the rest of the world. Folding phones seem to appeal to those who primarily consume media on their phones, so it checks out they would want larger phones.
I suspect this might be my blindspot. I use my phone a huge amount, but almost never for watching video or gaming. Being able to have a "full screen" video, and another app running "full screen", with the effectively 2x screen space, makes sense.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, they are different markets – most people need a smartphone today, nobody really needs a PS5. A better comparison is to say that of smartphones sold in 2025 (~1.65bn), foldables represented ~1%. That's pretty niche.
I think it's a great comparison, you don't buy an expensive folding phone if you just need a smartphone, it's a luxury good just like a PS5.
I have a friend who is not at all into luxury stuff but bought one because he never used a computer and was appealed by the screen size to make the administrative stuff he was struggling to do with a regular smartphone.
Having said that he is also known to make some bad purchasing decision and living in constant debt.
A $500 console is not a "luxury good", unless you also count having a flat screen TV as a luxury good. Games is one of the most common things done in a household today
A $2000 phone (which will never be $2000, it's the minimum spec) to watch youtube videos and enjoy apps with bad layouts is in another category entirely.
That’s pre-Apple’s entry into the market, which will triple the size of the foldables market in the next 12-18 months. And cnsidering how bad foldables have been and how much better they’ll get, that’s surely not the ceiling.
Apple sold ~250m of those ~1.65bn, so if you work on it being Android only, then foldables are ~1.4% instead of ~1.1%.
For the foldable market to triple in size, Apple would need to sell 40m this year, which if we assume a flat year for overall numbers (likely given rising costs this cycle and the trend of flattening sales anyway), then it would mean the fold taking 16% of all iPhone sales. For a ~2500-3200 USD phone (base model, international pricing), that's not happening.
Why would you think foldables are about to get a lot better? They have improved over the last 10 years, but the original caveats are pretty much all still there, and the iPhone Duo doesn't appear to improve on any of them in any meaningful way.
> For the foldable market to triple in size, Apple would need to sell 40m this year
For the record, it seems like the production will not get close to 40m phones this year. According to most outlets, it is backordered to January and Apple had to ramp production higher than anticipated. I highly doubt that it will literally 3x the market this year. But the pattern has been, excepting the Vision Pro, that when Apple enters a market, it suddenly proves the viability to other market entrants, and to the general public who view it as a mature market.
> but the original caveats are pretty much all still there
I don't think this is true at all. A significant portion of people complain about the crease, light reflections, and poor software. It seems like initial reviews don't find problems due to the "nano-texture" display (probably achievable in third-parties with a matte screen protector). As for software, once apps have been optimized for Duo, I expect that designs will carry over to similar form-factor folding devices on Android.
>It seems like initial reviews don't find problems due to the "nano-texture" display
Initial reviews don't find problems on Android foldables either, but the crease becomes noticeably visible no matter the phone over time. Apple did not invent magic: their phones already crease (and break)
> As for software, once apps have been optimized for Duo
They won't. There is zero business interest in making dedicated layouts for such a small portion of the population that won't be using your app anyways, unless you're hyper specialized. I'm sure Bloomberg can justify a foldable layout, the New York Times doesn't.
Apple is going to rediscover every single issue that Android has has five years to go through, and loudly yell LA LA LA NOT A PROBLEM FOR US APPLE MAGIC TRUST US while having worse APIs for developers to properly support those layouts.
”A significant portion of people complain about the crease, light reflections…”
Not a fan boy, but ‘a significant portion of people’ ?
All we’ve seen is influencing grifters <retches> falling over each other in nauseating attempts to ride this new hype-wave.
>For a ~2500-3200 USD phone (base model, international pricing), that's not happening.
Honestly I have no idea. To me spending 800usd for a phone is already completely crazy yet apparently smartphones in the 1000 to 1400 range are plenty already. What is the ceiling at which volume will go down drastically? I honestly don't know.
Same for transportation, I don't understand why people accept paying north of 35kusd on a vehicle and that is before the additional yearly expenses. Yet there are plenty of cars sold in the 50k and above. I bought mine second hand for 6.5kusd and even if it died tomorrow after 2 years of use it would still have been a better deal than leasing even the smallest and cheapest new cars on the market for 4 years. Yet I still see plenty of brand new cars in the street every day (and I am thanskful of that, otherwise the second hand market would disappear) so plenty of people are willing to buy really expensive stuff whenever much cheaper alternatives exist.
> Can't it just be a semi-niche product that some people buy?
As a fan of smaller smartphones (the likes of which aren’t made anymore), I thought the answer to this was supposedly a resounding no.
I mean, Apple sold millions of iPhones mini but we were told that wasn’t a viable product.
I love my Pixel 10 Fold and can't imagine ever going back to a non-foldable now. The larger screen is great for productivity. Reviewing PRs on the larger screen is way more comfortable than a normal phone size. The built-in terminal app also works nicely with herdr and Tailscale to let me connect to my work machine. I can interact with my agents and get real work done on the go. I also have saved split views so I can quickly launch two apps side-by-side. I do mobile app development, so being able to have the app I'm developing open side by side with Slack or Linear to create issues or discuss with people is very convenient.
I don't know if terminal access is as easy on iPhones, but the utility is there for many work related use-cases. I do think the more square-like form factor of the Pixel to be better for productivity than the rectangular form of the Duo, but the latter is nicer for videos.
>Reviewing PRs on the larger screen is way more comfortable than a normal phone size.
I believe you on that.
Yet I cannot think of a worse device to do code reviews on than a phone.
> The larger screen is great for productivity.
Interesting, reviewers (Joanna Stern) said that it was not great for productivity, more for consumption. Perhaps it works for your kind of tasks, but not hers/others.
I was saying the Pixel Fold form-factor was great for productivity and that the iPhone Duo was better for video watching. But even the Duo could be nice for some productivity tasks if you hold it in a portrait orientation instead of landscape.
idk those reviewers must be bonkers if they actually said "larger screen is not great for productivity"
well of course larger screen is fking great for productivity
try reading book on iphone SE vs ipad mini
and then try taking scribbing on pdf slides with ipad mini vs galaxytab ultra (14.6inch)
you must have really good working memory to remember all the relevant context NOT shown in the screen with that iphone SE
(I noticed this because I read same stuff, but understood less stuff with that iphone se vs galtab ultra)
my only complaint is ultra tabs not getting bigger: I want 16+ inch scribble note
Yeah don't listen to the original commenter, I absolutely love my foldable too.
A big iPhone is the wrong way to think about this, it is in fact a foldable iPad mini. An iPad Mini you can comfortably fit in your pocket and take on the go with an always on cellular connection that can take phone calls.
As someone who used to carry an iPad mini in his back jeans pocket (it barely fit), I am very much looking forward to my pre-order showing up.
Phones have gotten bigger and bigger and yet you can't fathom folks want a big screen?
OPs point wasn't that people don't want a bigger screen.
The point was that there are so many tradeoffs it makes it a hard sell.
It's basically worse in every category *except* for the screen. Durability, price, battery, etc.
>Nearly 10 years in to foldables, and they still bring so many caveats. They are consistently worse for size,
And that is why Apple is only shipping theirs now, it is getter better and finally have a decent trajectory in the next 3-5 years to overcome most of those issues. I mean you can pretty much look at State of the Art from Chinese Android phones to see where we are heading in terms of hardware. They are now to the point USB-C port is the limit of how thin they could make their phone.
My iPad mini gets multiple times more use than my iPhone, there have even been times where I’ve left my iPhone by the bedside table for days.
It’s mainly a consumption device, I got it initially for reading ebooks while on the train. It’s also a surprisingly good workhorse by itself, or as a second screen for a MacBook. I even make phone calls with it (via the iPhone) simply because it’s always in or near my hands.
So the Duo certainly piqued my interest when it was announced, until I learnt it doesn’t do iPad-y stuff like universal control or sidecar. I’ll wait for the next gen.
It felt wrong to me when they split iOS in two to make the iPad OS, and now it feels super wrong.
The whole selling point of this is that it’s an iPad mini in your pocket, IMO. It’s really a shame they couldn’t give it all of the iPad’s best features.
??? everyone I know who's gone fold hasn't gone back.
yes, battery & camera are a generation back and water/dustproof is even worse.
but productivity and fun are off the charts: slab phones feel pathetic once you've got a fold. Communication apps show you the list of conversations as well as the current one - or the current one and the details/multimedia. Google Maps shows the map and the listing details/reviews. Games and multimedia are delightful. Photos are full sized, and you can see what you're shooting in detail - if you shoot with a digital camera, remote shooting is amazing because there's enough space to show detailed focus.
Not to start an endless device debate but a good chunk of these use cases make more sense to do on an iPad or to just have a separate device in general.
I know, I know, that’s not as portable, that’s not a device you have with you all the time like a phone.
But we’ve seen pretty mixed results on the “combine devices into one” playbook. Sometimes it’s a huge hit, sometimes not so much.
> a good chunk of these use cases make more sense to do on an iPad
Then they make perfect sense to do on an iPhone Duo, because the inner screen size is basically the same as an iPad mini.
That's the point. It's a foldable iPad that carries the iPhone name.
You've never held an Oppo Find N6 which I have in my hands right now then.
Oppo Find N6 thickness folded 8.93mm. iPhone 18 Pro Max 8.75mm. Oppo Find N6 battery 6000mAh. iPhone 18 Pro Max 5567 (esim-only model) Oppo Find N6 dual nano + eSIM. iPhone 18 Pro Max eSim only (or smaller battery) Oppo Find N6 200+50+50 MP cameras. iPhone 18 Pro Max 48+48+48. iPhone PM has 1/1.3 vs 1/1.56" only on Oppo tho.
I like the flip ones for pocket-ability. The camera trade-off is even worst unless you get the expensive galaxy one.
A foldable phone + split keyboards = a mini laptop fit inside your pouch
Well, besides the software, which is very much not laptop-like.
I think the main thing is that for this kind of money you have a lot of options. You could even buy a GPD device that is an actual full blown pouch sized laptop and buy a regular iPhone for the same price.
> I think the main thing is that for this kind of money you have a lot of options. You could even buy a GPD device that is an actual full blown pouch sized laptop and buy a regular iPhone for the same price.
I have done this! I currently carry a GPD Win Max 2 around, but let me be clear about some elements of this: the keyboard on a sub-device is just as important as any other, and the keyboard on GPD devices is not great. A sub-device has to be maintained and charged and given love and care just the same as any other device. The amount of times I have found my cute linux laptop dead when I wanted it, outdated, or randomly signed out of services is quite high (and this is with an onboard LTE modem). Carrying around a folding (or even non-folding, like a Magic Keyboard) is lighter than a sub-device, will last significantly longer in terms of charge/battery, and does not require any of the secondary device maintenance that is needed with one normally.
To me a folding phone is an absolute no-brainer in terms of why it is useful. You can get a very, very good keyboard for cheap, or try many, and completely eliminate the need to carry a second device.
Another huge use case I have is transit/travel video playback. I do not normally want to bring an iPad or even a secondary laptop during travel, so this effectively deletes one more device that I have to charge, update, bring adapters for, etc. It is effectively all of the benefit of having a tablet at all times, a sub-laptop at all times, and requires absolutely no additional charging or maintenance.
On the flip side of traveling with only one device versus just having a second device, you now have the downsides of one device: now you’re using one device for everything so you’re draining the battery of that one device and only one person can use that device at a time.
When I travel solo I take my AYN Odin 2 Portal with me for gaming. That thing has a battery that’s twice the size of a typical smartphone and it can play games pretty much all day before the battery dies, while my phone is in my pocket fully charged ready to be useful at my destination.
If I played games on my phone during the plane ride I’d arrive at my destination with a seriously depleted battery and charging anxiety, or I’d need to travel with a spare battery.
Is this setup bulkier than an iPhone Duo? Sure. The AYN Odin 2 Portal is also a $230 device.
I own a GPD max 2 and a GPD win mini and both are really not suitable for my workflow: the battery life is not as good as an iPhone and the fan keep screaming. Maybe I should try installing linux on them. Now they are just gaming devices and a backup machine in case I really need to open office documents.
OTOH I have used my iPhone pro max for development for a long long time. The trick is to use a always-on linux VPS pairing with many excellent terminal emulators on iPhone (e.g. blink.sh).
Essentially I'm using iPhone as a thin client to visit a true linux development machine, and both of them play their roles perfectly. While other solutions while trying to be both roles with a single device failed miserably.
You can get an older Google pixel fold for a fraction of their price on release.
Why would I want the ergonomics of a small laptop when a folding phone and bluetooth keyboard is much better?
What software do you need that android cannot support? Surely ssh or tailscale can fill that gap.
If you are packing a keyboard you can pack a laptop or a tablet.
you are severely underestimating the value of a pocketable ipad. this comment isn’t the type that age well
Huge screen that's pocketable and also your primary device (not a 2nd device you need to choose to carry in addition to your phone, and have a bag for) and ability to have 2 apps at once on iOS is in fact highly valuable for many.
For flip phones the payoff is that its small.
We've been asking for a small phone for so long now
And then now we have one. But its too costly. I'm waiting for the cost to come down
For foldable phones the factor is that you have a phone and a small tab all in one.
I had a flip phone and I got it for this reason, but it honestly just sucked. The outer screens are too small to be useful, or in the case of Samsung, just don't have the right feature set to be useful. That means the phone ends up just being a full size smartphone with more steps to be able to use it.
They’re good for women’s jeans.
It’s not about the steps to be able to use it, it’s about fitting in your pocket.
Everyone I have ever met with the new Motorola Razr product lineup owns that phone so it fits in women’s jeans pockets.
This is a samsung issue or so I've heard. I am yet to buy one. Waiting for costs to go down
Moto screen is good enough and has a full screen, not a dummy one
Also the point about the screen being too small - that's the point! I don't want to use Android and get sucked into 10 different apps. The small screen is perfect. Useless for anything beyond clock and phone and whatsapp maybe
Samsung, lol
Spending thousands of dollars on hardware I don't own is not for me, but foldable touchscreen phones are, objectively, pretty freaking cool pieces of engineering work. Very cool breakdown of the hardware.
Maybe 2027 will be the year of the Linux desktop (thanks to AI), but meanwhile, I 'll just pay the $100/yr Apple tax to run my code on my device, and get on with my life.
Webapps were always the way.
I agree with the engineering, the thing is also I would like to consider a flip phone like a fold or similar, but the tradeoffs, the price, the lack of longevity AND the fact that even if the phone survives its whole life cycle, security updates would make it obsolete for certain applications, makes it difficult to even consider such a device...
Though looking at the practical engineering questions and their solutions is still entertaining.
ive been really enjoying my iPhone duo so far, its hard to imagine going back to a normal phone. it makes it so much more fun to schedule appointments, read blog posts, vibe code, update my calendar before a trip, watch movies, etc...
I felt this way since the first Pixel Fold. Now I have Pixel Fold 10 and a Duo. I need work-personal separation thus two devices, but it is a little much with two foldables.
I have the same experience with 2 phones. Can't imagine having one phone anymore. No risk of screen damage either..
Try phone + foldable
> This is the most repairable foldable we've ever taken apart. But that's not saying much.
> … any out-of-warranty screen damage will cost $999.
Good heavens, if your Duo breaks, it’s cheaper to get almost ANY other new phone.
You know how on a computer screen you can just drag any corner of a window to resize it? I had a dream once where I had a phone that worked that way. Want a bigger screen? Just drag one of the corners of the phone. Shove all the corners together and drop it in your pocket.
I used the hell out of that phone all night. Then I woke up and spent about an hour trying to figure out how to build one. I think I could do it in one dimension (i.e. make the phone wider) by rolling the screen around a tiny roller in the edge of the case, and having the case telescope. But that won't work in two dimensions at once. I never figured out how to do it in two dimensions.
When somebody builds one of these, I'll buy one.
You might like this concept https://www.thezoomablemap.com/
Could be 4 screens overlapping each other. Pull the corners and the lower screens pull out from below the upper ones. There would be a visible seam at the boundary, but maybe there's a trick you could use to disguise it.
What a thorough breakdown! Must be fun working at IFixIt!
You think that's fun, there's a team of engineers at Apple that got to make the thing!
I wish they'd go back to text and images for the teardowns.
So much this. So often these days you’re looking for some info, think you found it…, and it’s some endless video, instead of simple text+image format.
I, too, preferred the internet when it was just text!
I thought these come a little later as they need more time to prepare.
I noticed a race among social media to teardown or literally tear down the iphone duo this time. Bendgate is always a classic one to do for views, scratchgate is another one content makers love as they can wear an expensive watch while they carve shapes into their expensive purchase while poor people from around the world clutch pearls. The folding design is a great opportunity for content makers to target for views, but my question is why the content makers never invent something, design it, market it, pay large amounts for iso safety testing certification, then make teardown content on what they created a la banksy love is in the bin
I'm sure the 5T multinational corporation is glad you're defending it against the small-time content creators bullying it, but you might notice that the people behind this teardown do in fact sell products they've designed. So do other popular creators in the teardown category like jerryrigeverything.
They can't do teardowns of their own products though. Anything interesting they'd find in a teardown should have been caught at the design stage, and they're hardly unbiased about their own products. At most they can do design decision videos, which many do. For opinionated testing they'll send their products to another creator instead.
Why does it matter if its 5 or 5T? The teardown or tear down is what is important. I invented something a few years ago in my backyard workshop while on welfare and it got tore down which made me realise something odd is going on
nah they're right, legit teardowns with microscopes & CTs & chip identification are interesting; most 'teardowns' are little more than destruction porn. jerryrig at least gives some info (scratch test) but even he quickly devolves into uninteresting destruction.
It's nothing new - is will it blend still a thing? - but man it seems like they're everywhere now
Ifixit do? Their whole shtick is building repair guides, tools and selling spare parts...
There is definitely an incentive for content makers to discover the next Xgate and some are going to extreme lengths because drama is popular. That being said destructive testing is part of testing a product, it's not like the engineers at apple weren't doing the same sort of things internally.
apple hardware engineering seems to be following their software department in terms of quality.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is their worst selling phone in the years to come.
Storage upgrade: https://youtu.be/AwVfVjbcjJk?is=yF4CMII4PhSJSk1d
Related:
The first broken iPhone Duos are here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223580
The iPhone Duo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189055