The iPhone Duo is the riskiest Apple product in years. It’s a huge rethink of what an iPhone is and could be, and it contains the seeds of many fascinating ideas that might be great in the future.
But that future is yet to come. The iPhone Duo is also one of Apple’s messiest first-generation products in a long time, and right now it will delight gadget nerds and early adopters and likely frustrate everyone else.
It’s been a minute since the iPhone has looked or worked significantly differently. The last major change was the iPhone X, which dropped the home button almost a decade ago, and even that was a fairly subtle improvement. In fact, “subtle improvement” is really the entire story of the iPhone — it’s the foundation of Apple’s entire business, after all, and there’s a lot of risk in just up and changing it. You can see it in this year’s iPhone 18 Pro: It’s been refined in many ways, with better thermals and an interesting variable aperture lens, but it’s barely different than the iPhone 17 Pro.
But you can’t play it safe designing a foldable. You have to make some big decisions about screen sizes and what the inner and outer displays are for, and then make an even bigger set of decisions about how that big inner screen should work. All of those decisions are risky, and Apple’s riskiest decision was the Duo’s size and shape.
