Opinion
Apple’s iPhone Duo is the most exciting iPhone in nearly a decade, but most people shouldn’t buy one. Not yet, anyway.
I’ve spent the past week with Apple’s first folding phone, which hits shelves on Friday, and it’s a genuine “oh wow” device.
My mother-in-law wanted to hold it. So did friends who usually couldn’t care less about a new phone. After years of upgrades built on faster chips and slightly better cameras, it’s refreshing to see Apple try something different, even if Samsung and Motorola have been selling folding phones for years.
Buyers are keen, too. Within hours of pre-orders opening on October 16, delivery dates on Apple’s online store had slipped to January, and Apple said demand had been “extraordinary”.
Demand isn’t the only reason for the wait. Bloomberg’s tech columnist Mark Gurman reported that Apple knew supply would be constrained, and went global anyway. Technology site TechSpot put production yields – the percentage of good, usable phones that pass Apple’s quality checks – at about 60 per cent, meaning four in 10 Duos coming off the line didn’t make the grade.
That makes for an awkward start for Apple chief executive John Ternus, whose first big product launch comes with a three-month wait for customers.
Folded, the Duo looks more like a passport than a phone: shorter and wider than a regular iPhone, with a 5.4-inch outer screen. I love it. It sits beautifully in the hand and is easy to hold.
Don’t go looking for Face ID, though. Apple has gone back to Touch ID in the power button, and I missed Face ID more than I expected.
One big catch is weight. At 254 grams, the Duo is heavier than a standard iPhone and outweighs the taller iPhone 18 Pro Max, which weighs 249 grams. It feels dense in your pocket.
Unfold it, and you get a 7.6-inch screen, a touch smaller than an iPad mini’s, with a matte finish that Apple says cuts glare and makes the crease harder to see. Here’s the thing, though: I barely used it. On a typical day, I’d open the Duo four or five times, and use it closed probably 100 times.
That’s about 20 pick-ups as a regular phone for every one as a tablet.
The iPhone hasn’t felt this new since the iPhone X ditched the home button in 2017. But most people will be perfectly happy with a regular iPhone, for a lot less money.
Blame the apps. Apple sorts them into three tiers. Apps built for the Duo stretch the whole inner screen, with their controls moved to the side; Netflix and Slack do this. The next tier fills most of the screen. The oldest apps float in the middle surrounded by black space, and while a zoom button blows them up, in my testing they often came out soft and a bit blurry.
Multitasking doesn’t help either. You can run only two apps side by side, while Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 runs three, plus floating windows.
To be fair, things are moving quickly. During my week with the Duo, Facebook, Instagram and Threads were all updated and look and work great on the big screen. My news apps, the AFL app, my banking apps and my public transport apps? Still waiting. When so much of what you use every day isn’t ready, unfolding the phone hardly seems worth the effort.
Where the Duo shines is on the move. On a three-hour flight to Cairns for a family trip to Port Douglas, my toddler and I watched bits of Finding Nemo on the inner screen, which was vivid and looked fantastic.
Over the flight, the battery dropped 10 per cent.
It’s the same on the tram home from work, where Netflix or the NBA on the Duo beats a regular phone by a mile. This is its killer app: a tablet that folds into your pocket.
Battery life is excellent. I’d typically go to bed with about half a charge left and not need to plug in until lunchtime the next day. That’s a day and a half between charges.
Just don’t buy the Duo for its camera. It’s good, but no match for Apple’s Pro models.
Zoom tops out at 2x, and there’s no variable-aperture main camera like the one on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. Most of the time I didn’t notice. At the zoo I did, when my photos of faraway animals came nowhere near what I could see with my eyes.
The Duo does have one trick no other iPhone can match. Kid Cue plays animations on the outer screen to get small children looking at the lens, and my toddler looked right at the camera. But if photos matter most, buy the Pro Max. It’s the better camera phone, and much cheaper.
Which brings us to price. The Duo starts at $3499 for 256GB and runs to $5899 for 2TB, the highest price Apple has charged for an iPhone. At every storage tier, that’s a whopping $1200 more than the equivalent Pro Max, and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 starts at $2699.
On Apple’s Afterpay financing, the base Duo costs about $146 a month over two years. About $50 of that, every month, is the price of the fold. It’s also eSIM-only, so if you’re still using a physical SIM card, check that your telco can switch you over.
So who is it for? I love this phone and the iPhone hasn’t felt this new since the iPhone X ditched the home button in 2017. But most people will be happy with a regular iPhone, for a lot less money.
Frequent flyers and people with long commutes will get the most out of it. Artists and note-takers will too, eventually: Apple Pencil support arrives later this year, but only for the cheaper USB-C model, and there’s nowhere on the phone to attach it. Either way, I’d wait a year for the second generation, when most apps should be optimised and the rough edges sanded down.
I’m convinced the Duo will sell. I’m less convinced everyone needs one, or that foldables will overtake the humble smartphone slab.
For now, the Duo is a brilliant support act, but the regular iPhone is still the headliner.
The writer was loaned an iPhone Duo by Apple.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
