I didn't buy this iPhone Duo. I borrowed one. Every other device I've reviewed here, I spent my actual money on. This one I didn't, and Apple didn't send it to me either.
What it is
The iPhone Duo is Apple's first foldable, on sale since 23 October. It opens like a book, with a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner one. Closed, it's 84.1mm wide, 117.8mm tall and 11.3mm thick, which is roughly the shape of a passport. Open, it's 5.2mm thick. It weighs 254 grams, making it the heaviest iPhone Apple has sold. It has a titanium frame, IP68, the A20 Pro, Touch ID in the side button, two 48-megapixel rear cameras and a selfie camera under the inner display. It starts at $1,999 for 256GB and goes up to $3,199 for 2TB.
What Apple emphasised
The inner screen
Apple made the inner display wider than most of its rivals, closer to an iPad mini than to a stretched phone. It has a matte nano-texture finish and a crease that's barely there, and the camera sits under the panel so nothing interrupts the picture. The width of this screen decided the shape of the whole phone.
I'm blind. A finish that cuts glare does fuck all for me.
The hinge and the build
The titanium frame and hinge cover are unique among foldables, and the phone opens flat. The hinge action is a large part of why it feels different from a Samsung. IP68 on a first-generation folding phone is a real achievement, although dust can get into the hinge.
Performance and battery
It has the same A20 Pro as the iPhone 18 Pro, and battery life is close to the conventional flagship.
Apple's own software
Moving an app from the outer screen to the inner one is smooth, and Apple's own apps scale properly.
Split View is better than on the iPad. I hate iPadOS window management. Just let me have one app on one side and another on the other side, maybe with a third that can appear over either one and float. That's it. The Duo lets me put two apps side by side, and that's great.
It also runs iOS, so I get VoiceOver and the app accessibility that comes with it. I've spent enough time angry at TalkBack to appreciate that.
What Apple deemphasised
Size and weight
254 grams and 11.3mm closed. The Fold 7 I've carried since March is 215 grams and 8.9mm closed. Samsung's Fold 8, the same passport shape, is about 20% lighter than the Duo. The original Galaxy Fold from 2019 weighed 263 grams, so Apple is nine grams ahead of it.
The outer screen
5.4 inches, and short. It's more squeezed than an iPhone mini once the keyboard comes up.
Unlocking
No Face ID, for the first time on a flagship iPhone since 2017. Touch ID in the side button replaces it, and I'm pretty happy about that, to be honest. I can unlock the phone without looking at it, in a pocket, on a table, whatever.
You can only register five fingers, which is awkward, because the finger you use depends on which hand is holding the phone, what orientation it's in and whether it's open or closed. Last I checked, I have ten fingers. Let me add all of them.
Duo 2 prototypes are reportedly testing Face ID under the outer display. I don't really like Face ID. If it comes back, leave Touch ID where it is.
The Action Button
It's gone, which is annoying, because I liked it for context-sensitive shortcuts. VoiceOver has few spare gestures, no support for menus, and no additional sets of gestures to switch to or per app, so any extra input option is a good thing. Camera Control stuck around, which makes this worse.
Cameras
No telephoto, ProRAW, ProRes or spatial video, and the under-display selfie camera is the weakest of the lot. I have no standing on the photos, but the most expensive iPhone Apple sells doesn't have its best cameras.
Speakers
The stereo speakers are average, but at least they're stereo. When the phone is open, they're placed on the diagonal. What? It's still better than Samsung's effort on the Fold 8, but that's a low bar.
Third-party apps
Many hadn't been updated when review units went out. Apple put out a press release the day before launch about optimised apps people could expect to find. Instagram, Threads, Slack and Google moved quickly once the phone was out, but plenty of apps still haven't caught up.
Price
$1,999 to start, the most Apple has ever charged for an iPhone. An out-of-warranty inner screen replacement in the US costs $999, or $99 with AppleCare+, which costs $399.
Who the emphasis serves
The buyer this package is built for wants one device to replace an iPhone and an iPad mini, mostly opens it to watch, read and look at things, and can see the result. They have $2,000 and don't mind the weight, because they're getting a big screen with barely any crease. Reviewers are this buyer, and most of them have called it the best foldable yet.
It also serves people who were never going to buy a Samsung and have been waiting for an iPhone that folds. It doesn't have to beat the Fold 8 for them.
Where the package logic breaks down
When the hinge fails
Within hours of launch, owners started reporting inner screens breaking along the fold. One failed after about six hours and fewer than 20 openings. Another went during setup, roughly four folds in. Reports came from the US, Canada, China and India.
Nobody outside Apple knows how many. Some of what has circulated is rubbish, including at least one viral image flagged as AI-altered, and Apple Stores don't appear to be flooded with broken units. Apple says it's aware of an issue affecting the inner display on "a small number" of units and is telling people to contact AppleCare for a replacement. It hasn't said what that number is. One theory is that a centre support bar moves just enough to create a stress point.
A folding phone exists to be opened. If opening it can break it, that's on your mind every time.
When lint gets in
The gap when the phone is closed seems wider than on some other foldables, so pocket lint can make its way onto the inner screen. Plastic is still plastic. Apple do have those layers of ultra thin glass, but at the moment they aren't doing a lot for durability.
When the app doesn't fill the screen
Open almost anything that isn't made by Apple or recently updated, and you get a phone-sized app on a 7.6-inch screen with a black bar down the right-hand side. That was nearly everything I tried. Spotify, Google Maps, Discord, Gmail, Duolingo, Firefox and YouTube Studio have all done it.
It happens in Split View too. When the app on the right opens, it still has the black bar, so the right half is narrower than the left, even though the app was just nudged over. What? Why?
A black bar matters without sight because explore by touch relies on knowing where things are in relation to the edges of the device. An app pinned to one side has one real edge and one imaginary one. My finger wanders off the right side of the app into nothing.
The iPhone 5 did this in 2012, with black bars above and below un-updated apps. I walked out of an Apple Store with one on launch day. Developers fixed it fast, because that was the iPhone and they all had to care. The Duo is reportedly being built in far smaller numbers at a far higher price. The big names will sort themselves out. The small, specialist, one-developer apps blind people depend on could keep those bars for years, and filling the screen doesn't guarantee that a new layout works with VoiceOver.
Apple also reportedly had a go at Android foldables over letterboxed apps at its own launch event. I've complained about Android for years, but it's had to deal with this on foldables for years too.
When you want it to be an iPad
The iPhone Duo runs iPhone apps. That makes sense until you consider that iPad apps exist and are good. Android foldables usually open their tablet layouts when unfolded. The Duo should run iPad apps.
There's a knock-on effect. One of the things I like about iPadOS and iPad apps is that some have rich keyboard shortcut support. None of that exists on the Duo, which makes using it as an iPad simply worse.
When you want to get work done
iOS is still iOS. My Fold can be a work device, and very often is. On it, I can code, compile and crash all on the same device. Not on the iPhone. The Duo is very clearly a phone first. This might have more to do with the apps I don't have and the workflows I don't know about, but it's what I noticed.
When the shape is wrong
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is the wrong form factor for a foldable. Foldables should be the shape of the Fold 7 and Fold 8 Ultra. That shape is better for everything apart from movie-style content, and what people generally watch on their phones is vertical anyway.
When you have to type
Typing sucks. The closed keyboard takes up much of a short screen. It's a bit wider than on the iPhone 18 Pro, so the keys aren't where your thumb expects, and there's no option to shrink it for one-handed use. Touch typing with a screen reader depends on knowing where the keys are, and I've had years of iPhones to learn that. Here, they've moved.
The shape also makes braille screen input harder. With the phone closed, my fingers kept hitting the dots on the other side.
Open, the screen is too wide to thumb-type on comfortably. You can turn it to landscape and use the split keyboard, and then you're holding 254 grams out in front of you with two hands to write a text message.
When the phone is closed
Using it closed kind of sucks. Most of what I do with a closed foldable is small: checking a notification, replying to someone, finding a bus time, skipping a track. The Fold 7's cover screen is a slightly narrow phone, and that's why I came round to it.
The Duo's outer screen is cramped enough that I end up opening it, and then I get a tiny iPhone app with a black bar next to it.
When you're holding it in your left hand
The Duo sucks if you're left-handed. The dock, for example, where you put your most common apps, is on the right. I'm right-handed, but if I'm out and about, my right hand is holding a cane, not my phone.
When you can't see the screen
Most of what makes this phone expensive is visual. Without that, I get 254 grams, 11.3mm and a screen with a dead zone down one side. I also hold a phone for long stretches, in one hand, while the other explores and flicks and double taps. I notice the weight.
What I think
It's a pretty middling foldable. It feels like a prototype, unfinished, and I've never said that about an Apple product before.
The apps aren't optimised, it's thick and heavy, Crackgate exists, there's a black bar on the right of almost everything, typing sucks and using it closed kind of sucks. It's a first-generation foldable, eight years late.
The Royole FlexPai came out in late 2018. It was a bad phone, and it had the problems folding phones would spend years working through: weight, thickness, a fragile inner screen, a cover display nobody wanted and apps that didn't know what to do with the extra space. Samsung then worked through that list in public, with review units dying before the original Fold had even shipped, and got rightly battered for it. Apple watched all of that, and the Duo still has most of the list.
Reviewers keep calling this the best foldable ever made. I think a lot of that comes from strengths you can see. Without them, it's much closer to the rest of the field, and in the places I use a phone most, it's behind.
This phone should be one of two things. Either commit to the foldable idea and bring proper iPad apps, keyboard-centric workflows and the apps iPad-using pros love over to it, or drop the foldable angle entirely and just release the iPhone Solo. Come up with a better name, Apple, please. Take the form factor of the outer screen, one side only, and you've got the return of the mini, but thinner and better.
I wanted one, despite having no need for one. Usually, when I try an Apple product I originally wanted, I want it more. Not this time.
Don't buy this one. If you already have a good foldable, you'd be paying a lot for something worse at everything, unless what you don't like about your foldable is Android. If you've never had a foldable and you want one from Apple, wait for the next one.