iPhone Duo(apple.com) |
iPhone Duo(apple.com) |
Great branding by the new CEO
I’m not always in the best areas so this def comes up for me personally
Outside of that I think I’d give this a shot
Addition for anyone scrolling: Link to a case on Apple's website for this.
Another addition: Another case without the kickstand
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mkr94zm/a/iphone-duo-case...
I would not, under any circumstance, use that official case.
My experience; I walked with an iPad Pro in my hand and I went to an interview, so I was a bit nervous. I let the iPad slip out of my hand. It had the official Apple cover, which leaves the edge exposed. So it falls, and drops such that it dents the side. This in turn cracks the display. I learned that Apple will not replace a display when the frame is damaged.
The hard corners when its folded is a huge design breaker. The whole thing is THICK when folded. Jobs only added the bezel because it competed with the cases wrapped on phones. I don't see how any case will work on this behemoth.
I've seen what happens to the fold crease after a year, its a bit noticeable. It will degrade the prestigious quality of the brand.
Lastly, this copies all other fold phones. I'm surprised is all.
I mean I do understand the appeal of the idea of folding smartphones, but I did not hear about any miracle material breakthroughs lately. So.. how can this exist? Why does it say that it is durable, when it has to be made out of materials that cannot be durable or else they wouldn't fold.
Did something change there and I'm just using stale data for that assessment, or is "durability" just not as valuable to the target audience?
It's good to see Apple is taking the fold transition seriously. I have a Z Fold, and Samsung elegantly handles the app transition from fold to unfold by force closing and restarting the app for you, even if you fold it just a little. :D
So it's hard to inovate here.
Gosh I hate that idiotic marketing.
The Air particularly - the thinnest, lightest feeling, nicest to hold iPhone ever made, I think that might have been his favorite.
The Vision Pro is clearly an interesting category of device, Apple needs to be in, if it would have seen the light of day under Steve Jobs is unknowable.
He was ruthless at Apple because back then he had to be - now they can run Vision Pro and it not impact their ability run the business, if Apple had A product that did not succeed in the 90s it might have sank them.
All the three product you mentioned is exactly the kind of things Steve Jobs did. Don’t make him into this mythological flawless visionary.
If they release a second version with a ultrawide and maybe tele camera, it would be perfect.
[Jobs’] advice to me was ‘Never ask what I would do, just do the right thing,’
He had watched Disney go through this paralysis of sitting around and talking about what Walt [Disney] would do. And he did not want that for Apple.
software people have no idea how incredibly cushy they (still) have it.
I’m sure there’s a good reason but what is it?
From an experience perspective, I imagine it's just more satisfying to open it like a book. A screen on the outside would mean the inside is almost empty, just utilities like camera lenses.
not entirely sure why, but i’d guess there were durability concerns with the screen wrapping around the edge. might have also felt weird to hold. potentially the crease would be worse in unfolded mode as well.
The only ones I might consider, are the new base AirPods. I have never really warmed to the Pros (I have two pairs, but like the regular ones better).
I am looking forward to iOS27. I'm interested in seeing how the simulator presents the Duo.
And given the selfie camera position, I really doubt there is an accessibility setting to mirror the UI.
I'm sure someone will love it, but it won't be me.
But! just in my... scattered couple hours of using the iPhone Duo today, the iPhone... has a bunch... of...these tiny, frankly unnecessary, but also very awesome... quality-of-life things... that make it feel...like a more fun phone to use.
I forget the specs and numbers and like raw horsepower and megapixels and stuff, but just, just the... fit and finish and the little animations and stuff like that.
And the... feel of it. I feel like the iPhone kind of mogs the Samsung.
Like, it really all starts with that animation... switching between the inner and outer display. It's... really clean and it's fast.
[edit2] Who wants foldables? China bought more foldables than the rest of the world combined.
Apple killed the one size I wanted and then shipped a $2,000 fold. I get why the fold exists. I just wish the mini line hadn't had to die for it.
I pulled out my passport and held it in my hand like a phone: it is not possible to hold it AND use the thumb on the screen.
Look at the marketing videos: in all the one-handed-operation scenes, the phone lies on flat fingers for the thumb to access the screen. Will fall eventually.
I was really hoping they were going to slap an Apple Watch screen on the back of an iPhone Air and fold that in half.
I'll be waiting for an iPhone Duo Mini, I guess.
i hope apple give a duo mini a serious try. apple, the market segment might be smaller but like a restaurant that includes special dietary needs for one person, that brings the whole family along for dinner!
https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co...
Suspiciously could not see reviews of it yet - usually bloggers like mkbhd get their hands on early, and they release the reviews moment the embargo is off, usually when live event is over. This time nothing.
Here's a live stream of the popular obnoxious streamer, he held it a few minutes ago (also talked with MKBHD).
I think Apple is using the same method airlines use when selling seats, just in reverse. Airlines start selling seats cheaper at the beginning, and as there are fewer and fewer seats, the price increases. Apple, on the other hand, is selling at a premium price for a new product category, and I believe it is, so they can get away with it for some time, and they will lower the price as they sell more. This has nothing to do with economies of scale. They already own the premium portion of the mobile phone market.
Something less available is worth more. Those who own it now can enjoy people's attention and their curious inquiries, which are worth more than money can buy for some people.
The iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pros were released this week. The "ordinary" iPhone 18 apparently won't ship until Spring of 2027. That's the same strategy!
Naturally, I can already see people deeming it to be the most beautiful thing ever though.
Truly, I'll never understand Apple, nor their design language.
Also I think it would be quite bulky to carry the Duo in a pocket all day long.
Im having a hard time to understand what and who this is for.
For two thousand dollars
I think most people would agree the 13 Mini is the better of the two to try to use now.
Maybe after a few more iOS updates, and they're both equally impractical for current websites and apps, the SE will overtake the 13 Mini again :)
It seems they are segmenting the market on creator vs consumer between the pro and the duo, and betting the consumers want this form factor.
iPhone 18 Pro Max: 3.07 inches wide
iPhone Duo: 3.31 inches wide
my issue with phone sizes has never been their height, and has always been about resting in my palm.
Edit: Wow, I didn’t know Samsung foldable was priced similarly. It’s a lot of money to pay for something inherently fragile.
Wow, that quote should've been pinned at the top of MacRumors since 2010.
Obviously Apple knew where other foldable phones fell short; they clearly planned to overcome those shortcomings.
Matching their top competitor in price is a good look.
They could’ve absolutely floored everyone if it had been $1500, but there’s no way that’s possible, at least having margins anywhere near what Apple likes.
Plenty of people on HN earn that much money in a single day after tax.
I'm just not seeing the value proposition for a $2000 phone. I already can't comfortably hold or type single-handed on the normal-sized Pro.
This will sell great.
Can Apple do anything original?
They should've used the iPhone mini width, and adjust height to that.
Super skip..
I've long thought that the aspect ratio of a normal phone just feels old fashioned now and sucks for most tasks. So many times I go to do something on my phone and reach for my laptop instead because I know it'll be easier. But with this I could do most things on it.
1) it seems that doesn’t permit to add some mag safe accessories like extra battery or wallet with cards
2) I don’t understand if with this cover on, the first screen is not usable at all or permits to access to the “external” smaller screen
I understand that this kind of design obviously obligates to some constraints, but I think what Steve would have decided in such situation.
I hope that we don’t fall again in the Performa epoch in which we had a lot of different Mac and designs under the same line
Flagship prices have now reached the 1000€ mark, with marginal upgrades, and in many cases actual downgrades.
There is no world in which I can justify paying 2x-4x the flagship price for a device fulfilling a fundamentally similar purpose.
For a different comparison, a 14" MacBook Pro costs that much.
More seriously though, now do just the front screen on a non-folding device. It can even remain as thick as this thing when it's folded.
My next phone is an e-ink Mudita Kompact with a hardware kill switch. I can run a service to bridge iMessage if I decide I care.
With every year since they arrived in 2005 or so and especially accelerating since 2010, smartphone capability has grown with their creepiness. The expectation that you own one has almost turned into a demand. It's a total turn off. You don't need these capabilities, life goes on without it just fine. The drawbacks for your mental health and privacy are material.
Imagine being able to hook up a small slab to a keyboard or mouse Bluetooth then connect to a monitor, tablet or hotel tv, like the Samsung Dex can do. And run full laptop/desktop applications. One can dream
The one downside of my iPhone 13 mini is the rare case where I do need more screen.
I couldn't spend $2000 on a phone, but I don't mind the direction.
On the other side I have to decide to want a big screen or a very good camera - ths sucks, too. I want one device which is high end and don’t want to make compromises at this price tag.
It’s too expensive for me to even dare to have, but I do want to use it
But if there’s no particular improvement in the user experience, I would prefer the base model of the iPhone 18 coming out next year above all
What I’m most looking forward to on a foldable iPhone is viewing photos
I really love that sharp, fresh feel when viewing photos on the iPad, and I’m excited because I think I’ll be able to experience a similar feeling on this foldable iPhone as well.
I would like a non-foldable version of this phone. Call it the iPhone Wide or IPhone Mini Wide or whatever.
Edit: Is there that many demand for a foldable iPhone that justifies Apple making such engineering investment?
It'll be a nice device for some, but I think we're at the stage where device upgrades are no longer going to be a yearly or even biennial thing with all things considered.
But what are we even doing? $2000 for a device to watch videos on, to replace the $1200 device you watched videos on last year.
I guess I’m lamenting the fact that none of this amazing technology is actually doing much for us any more. It wasn’t that long ago that every year we would get new devices that actually changed how we did our day-to-day
The problems besides price (which are still insane) until now where:
- Materials not catching up, things like the older creases, dust ingress, etc.
- Software in Android being hit or miss, specially on with third parties. Apple has the muscle to make apps compatible with the form factor.
- The "standard" foldable aspect ratio sucking ass, the only major exceptions being the Surface Duo, the original Pixel Fold and the recent Galaxy Fold. Passport format is simply better.
>Imagine if Apple dedicated this huge engineering effort onto existing products.
For what? Slab phones are practically solved, the only things that might make a normal iPhone better besides incrementally better camera, battery and processors are not Apple approved. No expandable storage or cheap battery replacements for you. The only place for real advancemnt will be foldables for a while.
$2000.
This phone will suck for the concern trolls who are best described as deeply conservative but will try their best pointing out concerns while masquerading as whatever will convince people.
If you read that back to yourself, you don't throw up in your mouth just a tiny bit? No? Tell me your secret!
Skepticism you agree with is "informed" and the rest of us plebs are just "ignorant." Gotcha.
Restoring Touch ID is one of the things that might make me upgrade my existing iPhone before its time.
then all the photos either what's on the inside it's repeated whats on the outside,
or... and hold your breath... you can show on one side the calendar and on the other side the clock... now you can breath...
Meh, another 2 or 3$k gadget that does the same as the previous one?
But once again as I said before [0][1], don't buy the first version of an Apple product.
That means, users (especially pro users / developers) lost months of productivity and had to wait for a year for the software to catch up with the hardware.
In that time-frame, you might as well have waited and bought an M2 or above. Nice try though.
I'm neither an Apple fanboy nor a marketing professional, so this might be more normal than it appears to me, but this section of text seems really strange.
1. Doesn't Apple have a standing rule to not use articles (a, an, the) in front of product names? 2. How in the world can resale value take a top spot in marketing copy, 1) for Apple, and 2) for a product that isn't even on the market yet? 3. What does switching from Android have to do with a foldable design (or value retention, for that matter)?
MediaQuery.of(context).isFolded
? BuildHalfApp()
? BuildWholeApp();Compromises are battery, no additional camera lenses. Single speaker. Some niche USB limits.
Battery life is fine overall but on days of heavy use/travel it’s noticeable. Single camera lens is ok but I do miss the telephoto on occasion. Single speaker gets made fun of online, but for any serious listening you’re going to use headphones anyway.
Charge speed via USB is lower than the pros and you can’t do video-out over USB.
*Thinner which means less battery.
well, the product itself yes, but it would be the iphone, not the iphone air
While Apple certainly looked at the competitors to see what problems they had, it's far from a given that Apple has managed to actually solve the durability issues, either, much less on their first attempt.
Apple also touts ultra durable screens in their presentation and people still shatter them regularly.
I doubt you did see any from the last few years.
That looks extremely boring and unexciting. It doesn’t look like it’s Apple, it looks like Xiaoco Fold Z Duo 16.
apple is always "late to the party" and regularly takes existing tech, polishes it to a high standard of UX, and introduces a new paradigm for consumer tech products. if xiaomi has ever done that please let me know.
not to mention that chinese consumer goods companies are largely siloed to the east anyways
The thing looks totally unpolished. The corners are horrible, the UX looks subpar.
It’s the first time I feel like Apple totally rushed a new product without any real vision.
*Xiaoco, I invented this ref.
Product demos spoiling TV shows… What a time to be alive.
Looks like a cool device though.
when the google & Samsung ones first came out they were plagued with problems.
but I think apple should've also had a foldable in the form of a razr ultra since they already have an iPhone air.
It still looks quite decent though.
from the Duo page:
- Up to 31 hours video playback when using the inner display
- Up to 44 hours video playback when using the outer display
Can they even do anything new?
Would rather ditch my phone size thing and be able to pair a cellular Watch to iPad Mini size thing that also has "50% more screen" than iPhone Max
Gen AI could take telemetry like GPS from Watch and recreate most adventures without need of all the pictures; I don't care if every little thing like a day hike is captured "for real"
Would still hire a photographer for actual meaningful moments like weddings and graduations
If you're only capable of reducing the entire comment to a single piece of it you would be wise to sit and meditate on comments first rather than vomit copy pasta opinions; the whole knee jerk copy pasta approach to social media discourse is soulless in its own way
Both parent and child are now mediating their experience through technology with the parent blaring recognizable intellectual property at the child to psychologically manipulate them into a better photo.
Imagine buying a 3000 phone but typing on a screen like it’s 2015.
So much for Apple doing it better than competition despite being years late to the party.
I'm on the fence! I do like a bigger but not too big screen for movies on planes etc.
This has to be on purpose.
Are we going back to 'modified to fit your screen' days?
This is insane.
More niche use case is typing. Im on zfold 7 because I use Termux quite a bit.
Not much more than the 18 pro max - 8.78 ounces (249 grams). The Duo sure looks chonky, but that's not the end of the world.
My iPhone 15 pro survives another generation.
Now, I can't even remember what version iPhone I have. I just remember that I bought it after my last one stopped working (after maybe 5 or 6 years of having it). I won't lie: part of the reason is that I'm just getting older and care less about these things.
But a bigger part is that new tech just isn't fun anymore...
I _hate_ using my current iPhone for surfing the web... because I can't run the full suite of ad-blocking software that I run on my computer (Firefox + uBlock, sponsor block; Little Snitch with tons of block lists). I hate that all that ad-blocking software is necessary... but that's a totally different rant.
I _hate_ that I'm being asked to spend $2000 on a device that will, by default, surveil me 24x7. I can spend HOURS trying to disable every feature designed to track me... and still not be certain that somewhere in the TOS that I've still given permission for them to vacuum up SOME piece of information about me.
And I _hate_ that Apple is now an ad company.
And yes, I acknowledge that with respect to privacy, Apple is STILL the less bad choice (compared to Android).
And yes, I acknowledge that there are other options. In fact, when this iPhone dies, I plan on getting a Pixel and putting GrapheneOS on it.
I guess what I'm saying is... I hope that there are more people like me out there... who are sick of paying thousands of dollars for devices that, instead of serving me, serve those who want to collect my information so they can sell me stuff.
edit: "because I can't" instead of "because can't"
It’s like Apple forgets there is a world outside the US where eSIM is not a thing.
Edit: Reply to nomel as I am rate limited
Cheaper than roaming cost. I have eSIMs for countries I frequently visit.
This is Europe. I can do a short walk and cross multiple countries borders. It's nice to have coverage everywhere. I just toggle my eSIMs for that. When I'm out on a boat trip and I pick up a Moroccan signal from across the Strait of Gibraltar I turn on my Moroccan eSIM so I'm not paying €2 per megabyte in roaming cost. When I get cheap gas in Gibraltar I switch on my Gibraltar eSIM and turn off roaming on my main line. When I cross into Portugal I switch to a Spanish provider since they give 15 gigabytes of roaming for free.
Typing in portrait should be very nice, however.
Imagine they have 100 previous versions as it’s been mooted to have been in development for years
In terms of usage hours, my mobile phone comes out near the top. This makes the price almost immaterial.
For those people, $2000 is a good price for a device that does all their digital work.
Pepephone has great rates and fully supports eSIM.
Developers who use Docker on Mac, Android Studio, homebrew usage and usage on embedded devices all had persistent issues and had to wait months for the ecosystem to improve for full stable support without Rosetta, instead of workarounds that break on another update.
Musicians that use DAWs such as Ableton reported that their plugins did not work and had to stay on Intel Macs. Same with those who have hardware for their instruments that need device drivers for their instrument setups also had to wait several months.
So it only made sense for power users to wait for the M2 and higher until the software was fully supported on Apple Silicon.
"for full stable support without Rosetta" is moving the goalposts because Rosetta made >99% of all workloads "just work" in a completely transparent way
Everyone knows how badly these things break with moderate use. You’re basically buying with the expectation you’ll have to replace it.
Boring company, lost vision.
The curved right side makes me think so, but it sound like a pain for people using their phone left hand dominantly.
I guess people spend more money than even this on other addictions
I have a Samsung Fold 4. The front screen is too narrow and the folding screen doesn't open all the way anymore.
Not what I expected from a 1400€ phone.
What other item do you own that you spend so many hours using
- no seriously i dont want a 6 inch / 6.5 inch screen, any recommendations?
- ok how about a 5 inch anyphone?
I'll probably wait and see how this phone does over the next few years. If it is still highly regarded by version 3 then I could imagine making the switch to a folding phone. For now I will remain conservative since my phone is such a critical piece of tech.
Basically, try to do the opposite of what HN is saying and you might just create a successful product.
Now I own a 17 pro, which feels like a brick in comparison but has 12 GB of RAM instead of 4.
I really miss my mini.
And by "nobody", you mean "actually a lot of people, just not as many as the bigger model". It's ok to have a model that meets a less common, but still extant, need in the market. If everyone followed Apple's logic on this, people with very small or very large bodies would have to go naked because companies would go "that size doesn't sell as much, we have to kill it" rather than (as actually happens) charging more per unit to make up for the overhead of lower volumes of sales.
It's hard to envisage a boardroom scenario where that's not considered successful, but apparently it exists.
If every instinct HN has is wrong then the opposite would have to be right.
Don’t expect this to sell well - too big for trouser pockets and not enough advantages to the form factor, plus inevitably wear will make it either unprofitable for Apple or an expensive mistake for the purchaser.
The price point also outs it squarely in the luxury end of the market rather than mass-market.
Personally I still like the "flip" style fold (normal phone size that folds into a smaller square). The lack of durability for the inner screen seems like less of an issue if it's protected inside (while folded). This seems like it really incentivises leaving it unfolded except for pocket use
Where by Apple you mean Samsung.
Apparently, it's the unexpected success of Galaxy Z Fold7 that finally got Apple interested in building a foldable.
Just like they obviously did the research on the Apple VisionPro and that is inevitably going to be the next big computing device, right?
I think the research is exactly what's happening right now (or will once it launches).
Apple killed it because Mini 14s are illegal in Europe. There are tons in the US though.
How many years did you keep your Nokia 3310 when smart phones were released
It's a great move if the M1 is your first Mac and just use their machine to surf the web, write documents and emails.
It makes even more sense for existing Mac and power users to just wait.
> and fwiw I used Homebrew just fine off the bat
That is not true. They needed compatibility hacks + Rosetta and even required re-compiling the software for Homebrew to work correctly with workarounds on GitHub issues.
> "for full stable support without Rosetta" is moving the goalposts because Rosetta made >99% of all workloads "just work" in a completely transparent way
Nope. What I said was an expansion from: "the software was not optimized and did not work correctly for the M1 and you had to wait it to be ready" to "full stable support without Rosetta, instead of workarounds that break on another update." Which is the same thing as expecting, an optimal version of the software.
Again, your evidence is made up numbers, hilariously anecdotal (anecdotes are not evidence) and on a technical site are usually just be ignored and dismissed.
I kept my 5S as long as possible, until my carrier wouldn't even provide cell service to it.
Jobs had products getting people out of their seats and applauding. New products, new industries. As opposed to now where Apple is following the herd and not leading it.
It feels aimless, and Vision Pro ironically is the best representation of Apple's complete lack of vision.
You can only invent the modern smartphone once then everything else is iterative. The iPhone, iPhone Pro, Air and now Duo is a crazy strong lineup. Same for the watches, same for the AirPods.
Vision Pro is super interesting but just not ready for prime time yet, but as a demonstration of what is technically possible it is fascinating. Immersive entertainment is a huge opportunity, watching a gig or a sports game like you are there. If they can repackage and get it down to $500-750 then they could have another hit category that largely doesn’t exist (like Bluetooth headphones pre AirPods - around but no one had nailed it).
VR is the same, you mentioned getting price down, Meta’s is $500. It’s not a tech problem, it’s a vision problem and Apple no longer has the vision needed to make a new industry like VR be successful.
What you’re noticing is consumers being desensitized to tech. It transformed from bulky computers to slick hand-helds. It’s not like Apple made the first product in all those categories, they just made a decent ones that were easy to use.
Comments like this I think are just missing that Apple is actually doing extremely well without Jobs.
Apple these days has completely lost touch with what people actually want.
Did you see how well the base iPhone 17 sold? Macbook Neo?
A $500 light weight version that lifts on and off more like glasses than a headset, would be revolutionary. I know a lot of companies are racing towards this but Apple with their custom silicon and almost limitless reserves of cash, feel like the most likely to get there.
Sure anyone will be very excited to buy it instead of lower end, worse battery & camera iPhone 18 pro
That is insane.
-an iPhone mini fan
For comparison, that's roughly like Ford killing the Bronco Sport, or VW killing the ID.7.
At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.
I say all of this as a fan of the Mini series.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
The iPhone air has a 6.5" display. That's bigger than the base iPhone 17 (6.3") and the iPhone 17e (6.1")
You're probably thinking about the thinness of the phone. iPhone air is 2.4mm thinner than iPhone 17, but I don't think anyone is asking for that, as most people use a case which makes the phone thicker.
If you bought an iPhone Mini or an Air, but that model is gone at T+3 years, that's a lot more likely to result in you looking to Android, than if you bought an iPhone 13 and want to upgrade to an iPhone 16/17.
A huge number of people get smart devices from their employers for free, and $1,200 for a regular iPhone vs. $2,000 for a Duo is a rounding error.
And yes, VW is fighting for survival. The things they are killing are the low volume models specific to the Chinese market (because absolutely nobody in China is buying any VWs) and a lot of the variants and overlaps they've accumulated over the years. They'll continue making less than 100k iD.7s, and will be happy to do so (it's modestly profitable).
But the thinness isn't actually the appeal. The key thing is that it's a lot lighter. (And yes, a case adds weight as well as thickness. But if you start from a lower baseline, you still end up in a lower place.)
All this is true for many other products, specifically cars. Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.
I get it, Apple has much better margins than Ford. And maybe a iPhone 18 Mini would reduce total margin for them. But if they move a couple of million units, it absolutely would make money.
The current Bronco Sport generation was introduced in 2021 with minor changes in the ensuing model years. Ford USA sold 134k Bronco Sport in 2025, of 783k SUVs (17.2%) and 2.1M total USA vehicles (6.4%). the Ford E-series truck with 3.2% Ford Truck sales or 2.0% total vehicle sales may be a better comparison. It also is a design introducted in 2021.
phones are more likely mostly new designs in each model year, but we can wait for the teardowns to see.
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/usa/2025-full-year-usa-for...
Look at the low end iPhone’s slowing getting better screens, TouchID, and then FaceID.
It would have made an even larger splotch of the screen look odd.
So I’m in the market to buy new ones of each.
So I’m now having to decide if I just buy the Duo … instead of a new phone and new iPad.
But seems like a worse phone and worse iPad - than standalone.
(it does look like the best foldable I’ve seen though)
This has been a solved issue in modern foldables already. I live on a beach with Fold 6 and while I'm quite careful not to drop it I never had the sand stuck there for prolonged time. If there are any particles that crunch they do seem to disappear after a few folds which makes sense as metal is harder than sand. The inner screen has a soft protector you can replace at Samsung center for 15$ and 30 minutes of wait making the screen basically new.
The contents of sand tend to be substantially harder than metal.
Honestly it works. I've never been tempted by foldable phones, but this version piques my interest.
In particular being able to do "dual screen" or large screen. Then add the behind screen facetime camera. Suddenly it goes from "eh" to "oh". Small tweaks perhaps but it changes how i view the form factor.
For example, I bet Apple is not splitting the video signal and feeding it from both sides, which means that if your screen "fails funny" you get a dead left panel.
Zero-radius folds are rarely a good idea
But regarding the dead left panel, you will have _no_ panel because if the panel fails, all of the inside screen will be affected, since it's one unit.
My previous thought was to use XReal glasses with my existing iPhone but that’s not realistic in an office environment.
Aside: I'd also love it if it could be plugged into an external display and have a "desktop mode" (like a macos VM) that gets suspended/resumed on connect/disconnect instead of just expanding the "mobile mode" across the new screen. I realize this is probably a dream too far for most companies though, as it doesn't allow them to segment the market as much as requiring people to buy multiple devices.
It took me a while to figure out I had to click "Explore" to get to the specs, so I'm saving you the trouble.
As long as I'm griping about the web site... Apple, when you introduce a phone with a new and different form factor, please just tell me the dimensions straightaway. This one is shorter and wider than most phones. Is it too wide to fit in my pocket? I need the dimensions to answer that question.
I'm still salty these were removed from Samsung folds after the Fold 6, but having a thinner phone is nice too.
That being said, this is the device I always wanted. Something between an iPad and iPhone.
Most people I see out and about are either using face time, or inexplicably speaking in speakerphone and holding the flat, face up, with the bottom of the phone towards to their mouth in a weird awkward way, or they are using headphones, wired or wireless.
The problem is I want to have small phone that can be expanded to have large screen when needed, glad I’ve solved this decade long conundrum!
Does it have extended desktop support for a docking station???
Here is why, and why I personally believe this product might be great.
I will never carry an iPad when I am out and about. If I am going to carry a device of that size, I will bring a laptop. The only use that I personally have for an iPad is laying in my couch or using it as a stationary device for a baby call or something like this.
In this scenario, the bigger screen size is nice.
I often find myself on the go, wanting a larger size screen to deal with random incoming stuff, accountant, customer issues, PRs, and so on. In those cases, it is very handy to have a larger screen. I can manage with my current screen size, but it would definitely be more productive with a larger screen.
I am personally worried about the reliability of the mechanical parts, and I would be really annoyed if the screen started to crease, as I have seen similar devices do before. But if Apple somehow magically fixes that problem, then I would be inclined to buy a product like this for my next phone purchase.
So when I was watching the keynote, I got those vibes of 'this is actually a form factor that I used in the past, if the price is not too wild I might get it'.
Edit: Rate limited so can't reply to the comments. I live in Spain, can't switch to eSIM. I know that the US has 100% integration of eSIM across all providers but outside the US it's not that great. I use eSIM and SIM a lot, have lots of cards and subscriptions. For my main subscription I can't switch to eSIM (yet).
Even mainstream operators in my country have those these days, so you can sign up online without getting to a shop.
Put MacOS on it and then we'll talk
100%
The market for a phone like this is extremely small and the price makes it even smaller.
It kinda sounds like it's a new model of the Apple Pencil coming soon (rather than support coming soon), and older Pencil and Pencil Pros will not work at all. Which, if true, boo.
* https://www.wired.com/story/apple-watch-series-12-apple-watc...
it's a mistake though to demand an iphone to own the watch (can't configure it otherwise)
always held me back from ever buying an apple watch, don't want an iphone or ipad
This has not been true for a while. Google "apple watch family setup". You just need to know someone with an iphone, once, to set it up. You can even set up cellular and use that for all watch internet needs, incl imessage, calls, facetim (audio), and weather & apps
- checking the time (obviously)
- sleep tracking
- high heart rate warnings
- sleep and heart rate trends over time
- reviewing notifications or declining calls without grabbing phone
None of these are "killer apps" but they're conveniences. I like having an accurate source of time that I don't have to pick something up for. I like being able to track my sleep schedule and duration over time. I like to know when my heart rate is high so I can take steps to quiet down. I don't use many of the other features, maybe some sparingly, but I've never really used the Watch for its apps anyway. And I think only the last feature on my list, maybe the last two, needs iPhone.
I've had to go without my Watch for the better part of half a year because it's refurbished and I've been trying to diagnose an Apple Developer Program enrollment issue, and Apple won't tell me which device was previously used so I have to rule out everything I didn't purchase brand new, etc., but I still constantly feel its absence. It's just a convenience but it was a welcome one.
Note that the Watch did previously require an iPhone for initial setup, but it does not anymore.
When I'm at home, I can just use my iPad. When I'm on the road, I don't need to be watching content on a slightly larger screen.
I get that I'm not the target audience, but it's still confusing to me why people like foldable phones.
gonna be expensive but this is a first gen product I could see a ton of use cases for me with.
10 years from now people will claim Apple invented folding smartphones or made them mainstream, just like they claim the same thing now about smartwatches.
They could certainly add features to make them more like general purpose computers, but there's a bit of product development and engineering "tax" they'd have to pay over time to maintain that aspect. Much easier from a product development standpoint to create products that provide a walled-garden experience, especially if that's what most customers want.
Maybe small phones are like sedans, and the bigger and bigger iPhones are the trucks? Take this analogy where you will.
[0](https://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobile-and-tablet-internet-...)
The modern phone I have is a "cheap" Xiaomi POCO F7 Ultra which has incredible performance, only hampered by the USB2 connectivity. If a dock existed for other phones, I would use this all day.
I can't think about a good way to do it with a phone screen, unless you know that you can find a TV set to connect to. But hotel rooms usually place their TV sets very inconveniently and if you stay at a friend's home, their TV sets will be not so well placed too to be used as a monitor. So maybe a costly large foldable as your next phone?
[1]: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-patents-device-that-doc...
Edit to add: the phone itself is intended to be the main processing unit, the “laptop” is just a screen and keyboard.
What I need is a more portable iPad. But that would cannibalize iPhone sales.
With terminal emulators, tailscale, local and remote agents, there's never been so much computing capability accessible from your pocket before.
I think this is the tension. Or maybe we just need to master one handed keyboards.
I've tried every so often, and while I think all the hardware is there, the software wasn't. Perhaps Android has improved on this recently? I know there have been niche attempts in the past, like Samsung DeX or Ubuntu Touch, which may have been more solid. I've never tried out any of those.
Although I can’t wait for the more powerful Motorolas with GOS to release. Maybe that’d be enough to make a phone my sole computing device.
You want what, a terminal that you type on w/an onscreen keyboard?
if they made it a useful computer, they couldnt charge 30% of revenue to their app store customers
Absolutely sales of laptops would continue.
A MacBook is optimized for a larger screen and comes with a better keyboard and trackpad.
I use both my MacBook and iPad all the time, because their hardware form factors are better for different things.
I don't want to read books on my MacBook and I don't want to do development or writing on my iPad.
I briefly tried using my iPad as a Mac through the screen sharing. It's not as useful as you are imagining.
-Installing software without App Store approval filtering
-True multi-tasking and background execution (though this hurts battery)
-Write iOS apps from an iPad
I sincerely hope one day we can free these hardware devices from the shakles of their software and run anything that's possible.
Until such a time iOS devices are strictly off limits until at least a grapheneOS can run iOS at a minimum.
[0] https://ish.app/
I want it more thinner!!
50% more than the Z Fold 8, and still several hundred dollars more than the Z Fold 8 Ultra.
Who is this actually for? It's not for the average consumer that's for sure.
Consumerism is mad.
5s/SE1 is still peak iPhone for me. I pull that thing out of the drawer every now and then and just marvel and the size and weight and how it is barely noticeable in my pocket even compared to my (ginormous in comparison) SE2.
It's not pretty, it doesn't look very functional. The selling point is "a bigger screen", but never once in my life have I looked at my phone and thought "Make it bigger."
In this economy?
Feel like a $2000 computer in the 1980s made a lot more sense, even if damn expensive back then. Certainly would have lasted longer!
https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-foldable...
You can have TikTok and Instagram-Reels opened at the same time... Don't you want that ?!
- A phone that fits in the hand for those who have long desired a smaller iPhone. This isn't me, but I know a lot of people who bemoaned the death of the smaller line of iPhones and many have held onto their old phones longer than they otherwise would have (not a bad thing, just a data point...) - A versatile device that allows switching of modes as required. Great for commutes, travel, etc.
It's not for everyone and I'm normally a Pro Max user so definitely don't fit into the first category, but I'm really tempted on this one
Right. I must revisit the "What It Means For Something to Fit In a Hand" chapter from my UG's Common Sense 101. It's been a decade.. more actually.
I was just answering to gp : the Apple Watch pretty much only make sense if you own an iPhone. Else, you’d better buy any other smartwatch brand which will allow you to do much more than an Apple Watch without an iPhone.
[0] https://mercercapital.com/insights/blogs/auto-dealer-valuati...
[1] https://carbuzz.com/eulogy-for-the-chevrolet-malibu-and-seda...
All that said, I'll take this hobby over the truck hobby. $3k for a pretty good machine is great vs. $80k for the snorkel truck.
Also, IIRC there was reporting that Apple considered doing the compute for Vision Pro on a device at the hip. Instead of what they ended up with which was just a battery.
I could see this coming back around again where a future iPhone is all of the brains or a lot of the brains for AR glasses.
> Warranty void in all countries.
This not true for Librem 5 running PureOS.
And even when they do use it unfolded, whatever they’re consuming has two huge black bars top and bottom. This may change as content creators adapt.
What Huawei and Samsung have shown is that there is little usecase to foldables. And I do not believe Apple can create any usecase not already known.
So I don't know what you're complaining about?
The areas where the iPad beats the MacBook are still (imo) the same as the day it launched: web browsing, watching video, and reading. Workloads that are heavy on the Apple Pencil too, but that’s a fairly narrow slice compared to anything else you might do on a computer.
I don’t see anything in my use case that I’d gain from a MacBook over this setup.
Let’s just ignore the price comparison though lol
I really don't get why people spend so much on flagship phones! I tend to aim for $200 Motos for me and my family, and it feels like it's a 90%+ solution at a tenth of the price. I can still browse the web, text with people, make calls, listen to music, and take pictures. They still last for years, and if they get dropped and the screen cracks, it just means its time to upgrade. What am I missing here?
It sucks. I wish that would change, but that is what made me switch from Android to iPhone after 12 years on Android. At the time, even flagship androids were lucky to get 2 years of OS updates and security fixes. Apparently Google and Samsung are going to support their devices longer, but I'll wait till they have a track record. But ultimately, an iPhone for me does come out cheaper over the lifetime of a device than cycling through cheap androids every 2 years.
So I am not sure about recent track record for Apple.
My 2021 Pixel 6 works well for my mother and is getting updates.
So spending $1800 extra on a nice experience is still better than $30k extra.
I'm not sure the unfolded version will be big enough to truly replace my iPad Pro, though.
many people have a phone as their only device though, so great screens and cameras and everything else are easily rationalized behind the managable cost of carrier plan's indirect loan.
Sidenote, I've not had a single one of my smartphones crack a screen since 2008 when I got my first smartphone, take that for what it's worth.
Apple: There you go.
This is the reason this exist.
But what’s missing is manual in-browser testing, on the go.
This solves that.
Just need to do a manual sanity check in the browser
A dumb one off the top of my head:
When reading a book with both screens open, have the outer display show the cover of the book, and closing and opening the screens together causes a page turn. (Unfortunately also a great way to rapidly wear out the hinge mechanism.)
https://osxdaily.com/2006/12/06/macsaber-turn-your-mac-into-...
I assume the people who would buy something like this have enough money not to care, and also would not care about the second part of my comment, because they want New Thing or use their phones enough for it to be useful.
I guess it might be the case that the only way to make the folding screen thing even remotely work is a very, very expensive manufacturing process. But as is often the case, I don't see how it's worth it?
I want my phones smaller and with Touch ID, not enormous and wrinkly.
Samsung unveiled its first foldable in 2018, what are you talking about?
Is this satire making fun of how Apple often "invents" things that has been on the market for years, or did you mean to write "Apple as usual copied from competitors"?
btw. we power Granola, I work at AssemblyAI
I also like to spectate games on Twitch/Youtube, and corners are often used for important stats.
Is Apple screen enlargement over the years just matching the aging eyes of their core demographics? Close focal vision degrades, hold phone further, bigger phone useful.
Kind of like the stat how burning man is getting older every year cuz its mostly the same GenX cohort going since forever...
https://www.clicks.tech/ca/powerkeyboard
That's a very neat product.
I have to hand it to them, they added some really nice touches to the OS for the new form factor. Seems almost like the best of an iPhone and a iPad Mini.
Still not sure I want something that bulky, and maybe I'll wait a few months to see the reviews and how the hinge and screen fold hold up. But tempted for sure...
I don't know who this is for and can't figure out what problem this solves. It's cool, but it's not $2800 cool (yes, it's $800 more expensive in some markets). For that price is has to do more than fold in half, maybe fold into a swan of something.
This is especially true in the younger generation where many of them don’t own a computer. They do everything on their phones or iPads.
Do I want it? Ehhhh. I hate heavy objects. I stopped buying the Pro line because the weight just kept increasing. So I will probably not particularly enjoy that mass of batteries dragging on the purse strap. But I enjoy reading glasses less and I just don't want an unwieldy bigscreen that I can't hold easily like the iPhone Air.
Isn't that basically in line with the competition? Cheaper, even, than some of the competition?
If I'm going to have to two-hand it, this is perhaps not the worst. Also, it might be more one-handable when closed than regular iPhones.
Is it very expensive? Yes, especially if you don't opt for the base storage (256 is not enough in the age of LLMs). But I've not upgraded in 5 years, so I've got budget to spare.
> I assume the people who would buy something like this have enough money not to care, and also would not care about the second part of my comment, because they want New Thing or use their phones enough for it to be useful.
But what's the monthly price with Apple's upgrade program? I'd bet that's how most people will be buying it (me included, if I decide to get one).
I think it's going to be very interesting to see how well the sales for the Duo do in year two and three. I suspect sales will go up, but wouldn't be shocked if they drop.
In comparison iPhone Duo only offers a bigger screen and even limited functionality when it comes to camera if you compare it with iPhone 18 Pro.
I had a large, relatively well-paid, tech-savvy circle of friends (and many random strangers) who openly envied me but could not justify the price point.
The numbers back this up because iPhone sales didn’t start hockeysticking up until the next version was released, which allowed carriers to further subsidize smartphones with data plans that brought the upfront costs down to $200.
The iPhone was as much a technology revolution as it was a consumer financing one, but it is never discussed as such.
The phone carriers then upsells their more expensive plans.
None of those people have ever messaged me about any other phone event ever
1: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/07/apple-upgrade-launche...
And those who want to boast, can of course buy for the full price. This is a non-zero share of the target market.
You misspelled “you’re overcharged for your mobile subscription and get a phone”.
There's enough buyers in the market.
> iPhone Duo uses Touch ID, which is integrated into the side button. This gives you an easy, secure, and consistent way to authenticate iPhone Duo, whether it’s closed or open.
Probably no way to do FaceID from under a display yet.
/s
So you pay $1368 for the privilege of using the Duo for 2 years.
yeah, insane.
For $2800 I'd rather have a laptop + phone.
And, I don't think I've once missed having the big annoying clunker of a watch.
Like yeah.
This is about a new folding phone not the watches.
(I am glad to hear you like your watch though. Casio are classic).
What I'd love to see is a modern Sidekick. The form factor was basically perfect.
Here’s a flashback: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/
Plenty of arrogant Americans use that term
And Apple have generations of devices that have gotten a full 7 years of support. We still havn't seen a generation of Android do that since Google changed their policy. I sincerely hope it does happen. Competition is better.
But here is a site with some EOL info on Pixel. Pixel 6 support looks like it ends in 3 weeks with a grand total of about 5 years of support.
Compare this with the iPhone 11 that came out in 2019 that will be able to run iOS27 (comes out next week) and the Pixel 6 that came out in 2021.
And the original point was, "why iPhone over cheap android $200." Pixel 6 was a flagship phone with a launch price of $599. You could have gotten an iPhone 13 mini (release in 2021) and for an extra hundred bucks, been supported until at least 2028.
You can look at other examples of controls that are way too close to the edge because they need to work around the bloated corners.
There's definitely something satisfying about a product that's both cheap enough that it could be disposable but well designed enough that you actually want to keep it forever.
I think that Jobs would approve of the Casio F-91W.
and of course they can voice it, it's just boring; the point being there are more than plentiful amounts of folks that can trivially afford it.
What the hell, 500k after tax in california is likely close to a million before taxes. This isn't middling, even in the bay area.
Of course, some of it is just the usual Apple stupidity and ineptness in the UI design (that infected the whole industry): https://www.apple.com/v/iphone-duo/a/images/overview/shared-...
But rounded corners certainly did not help.
And I'll admit that there's chance I'd notice what you're talking about if I saw/used it in person instead of relying on promotional photos.
Honestly - if it wasn't for the incessant nagging me to upgrade, letting me know it's going to upgrade, letting me know it had failed to upgrade, and the never ending useless notification that I kept having to edit/unsubscribe/remove stupid apps that I never installed - I probably wouldn't have switched for a short period of time.
What I would have never predicted is how getting rid of all that noise has just made me so much happier.
Also - didn't realize how much I hate having to charge my watch every 16 hours.
But my entire point was that you cannot compare a digital basic watch to apple's device that it calls a watch. Like its just a different device categorically imo and comparing things like battery etc is just not worth it.
But you can compare similar categories like the example i mention and see how one smart watch matches against the other. Like if we want to buy a good fountain pen but settle on a pencil beacause we don't want to deal with the ink, we cannot pretend the pencil and the pen are equivalent products that have direct comparasions even though they serve the same utility of writing device
Everything else was stuff that the Casio does way better. And - need the phone for the camera - so it's always with me.
It's kind of amazing to have a watch with a 7+ year battery. I spent about 4 years with my Ultra. Might keep it for stuff like hiking where I want to track elevaton and such - but the other 99% of the time I expect the Casio will be my goto.
And yes, given the actual devices, i would say the casio watch is basically a calculator compared to an apple watch which is like a laptop. The fact that you can wear both on your wrists and they both tell time can make them the same utility catgeory, but in terms of device and engineering, it is absolutely a different category of device. Some might even call it a "smart watch" as opposed to a "diigtal watch" to make the difference in categories clearer
purchase fee = device list price – lease payments made – remaining discounts or trade-in credits.
If you're paying $1368 over 24 months, you could pay the remaining $632 after those 24 months and keep it with 0% interest.
Is that leasing or renting in your country?
Is that leasing or renting in your country?
Is the difference between renting and leasing even meaningful? You chose a car rental agency for your example because it costs more per month to rent from a short-term rental agency. What is a lease but a long term loan? What difference does it make that I rent my apartment by signing a document called a "lease agreement"? Am I a renter? Or a leaser?
Renting/leasing is not automatically bad. The terms are what make one a good or a bad deal.
Leasing is a financial construction where you actually own the product / property, with the bank having the option to claim it if you fail to pay.
> a financial construction where you actually own the product / property, with the bank having the option to claim it if you fail to pay.
This is called financing - basically, buying a thing with bank's money which they give you as a loan. For high-value purchases, there are often limitations on what you can do with the object, or requirements (like a requirement to have homeowner insurance for mortgages), but there are usually less restrictions compared to lease since you are the owner.
Renting is you pay $X a month and when the contact ends everyone walks away. You don’t get the thing back, the other party does.
Leasing is close but slightly different. You still pay $X, you still don’t own it and can walk away at the end.
But with a lease you are given a choice to buy the thing at a pre-arranged price when the lease is over. So when you sign the contract you know that at the end you can pay $700 and it’s yours. Or you can still walk away.
It’s far, far more common with cars. The dealership guesses how much the car will be worth and offers you at lease based on that. If the car is worth more at the end of the lease than your buyout price, you can buy the car cheaper then you could, on the open market. If it’s worth less, you can walk away. You didn’t lose as much as you would have if you had gotten a loan, and you could go buy the same car used if you wanted for less.
For something like a phone, I’m not sure it really matters that much. So I don’t know why they decided to do leases.
If it means I don't have to put reading glasses on to use my phone, I'd pay a lot more...
But I think this could be really appealing for a large number of normies who have a phone as their sole computing device.
It does make sense as a one and only device, but the price makes it a little unrealistic, in my mind.
People have been saying “Oh my God, who would pay $600 for a phone“ for 20 years. Clearly there are such people.
A $10,000 car and a $80,000 car are going to be markedly different. Same for a $100,000 house vs a $800,000 house.
This $2,000 phone does not seem 8 times better than my $250 phone.
Well lets adjust the comparison you just made, then.
> A $10,000 car and a $80,000 car are going to be markedly different.
I can buy a Maserati Ghibli for under $10K on eBay and it will be very similar to the $109K Ghibli that Maserati would sell me today.
Is this foldable 4x better than your SE 3? Almost definitely, by every metric, except size if you're into small things.
However, maybe you can't buy a house there. For that you'd have to be a millionaire.
This is usually because my iPhone dings more, and is connected to an always on network connection + phone network, so it's often the point of first-contact with any specific task/response/conversation/work unless I am sitting at my desk at home already.
And while I am someone who does take a laptop and an iPad with them in a backpack at lot of the time, that's not all the time. I'm not walking around the grocery store with a MacBook anything propped up on my cart. I'm not hanging from a strap on a bus or train with a laptop in my hands. And using a laptop on the couch usually makes my wrists hurt.
It's like you're doing it on purpose or something.
When that happens I'll often want to look up recipes for that stuff right there in the store. The web has gone to trash. The mobile web is even worse. Adblockers can only help so much, its just that everyone dumbs everything down for small screens. So its very frustrating trying to process some search results and find a decent recipe for some-such and find the rest of the ingredients I need to buy. This is a low time committment task, I need to do this in a busy grocery store, and not block the part of the shelves I parked myself in front of for too long. I mean, I guess I could go home and use my desktop, but odds are I'll just forget. And no, I'm not gonna ask AI for a recipe.
On a screen that big, using Orion and locking it to "always show me desktop mode", I could more comfortably browse and look up these things than I can on my Pro Max sized phone now. The inner screen has a higher resolution than an iPad Mini.
Another example, and it was one they showed only very briefly in the video: I just want a bigger keyboard damnit. They showed an app taking up the top "half" of the inner screen, a keyboard taking up the lower half, with the phone folded at a 110ish degree angle. It's a Sidekick with a touch keyboard. So any time I have some serious typing to do (Slack message regarding something that requires a prompt response but isn't just a few words, not that hard to imagine other examples), that bigger screen is going to give me a keyboard that is much easier to type on than a Pro Max can, because the keys are going to be sized much larger and will not need to rely on the on-device typing guesstimator as much (and that thing is dumb as hell). God, being able to ssh into something and actually have some room for all of the extra keys that make working in a terminal easier, what a world!
Having a real computer for any of these tasks would of course be the ideal, but as portable as those have gotten, they still don't hold a candle to something that fits in my pocket and has a software stack that reliably lets me interact with it in a meaningful way without having to make room for a keyboard and a trackpad.
> Is the difference between renting and leasing even meaningful?
Where I live, yes. If you lease you are the owner, with the financing company having the ability to seize it when you don't pay. If you rent you are not the owner, but are allowed to use it. Renting is a bit plebeian.
That's why they're $10K.
Meanwhile for about the same price differential, $10K on eBay will get you an Audi RS 5 ... engine ... with 60K on it.
I don't know that the Ghibli makes the point you want to make.
What point do you think I was trying to make? ivraatiems compared what he paid for a used iPhone on eBay to a new iPhone four years newer, and then said this was an absurd price difference because 8x price gets you way more car.
All I did is point out that this is a bullshit comparison because of course you can buy an older, used product way cheaper than a brand new one. I chose the Ghibli because it is one of the more entertaining (and repeatable every year, there are lots of gluttons for punishment out there it seems) examples of fast depreciating cars. To varying degrees this example could use any product, but ivraatiems chose cars so I ran with it.
Yes, but in the middle of the bread aisle?
And I'm not going to let anyone tell me I'm a fucking weirdo for looking things up at the grocery store, I see people doing it all the time. They're all on their fucking phones!
As for the bigger keyboard, I have tried that in iPad mini. It’s horrible. Because the distance between the keys is too far in that case and it actually slows down your typing. I can imagine the same in Duo when you use one half of it as the full keyboard
I literally said I use Orion with the "always use desktop mode". Do you have experience with that on an iPhone? If not, how would you know that it will default to the website optimized for mobile?
The iPad Mini doesn't have the same dimensions or aspect ratio, so its on screen keyboard experience cannot compare. The Mini in portrait orientation is almost an inch wider.
You really just seem like you're looking for issues to take. Don't buy the phone! Leave the people who will alone! We don't have to justify anything to you, and if you're going to ask us why we are, don't sit there and poo-poo every single fucking reason we have.
If someone had that amount of disposable income last year, they might have it to throw at another upgrade this year.
I assumed they wouldn't do it because they were marketing the nano-texture as a specialty thing for professionals and glossy screens were the popular ones, but now here we are.
“Ceramic Shield 2 on the outer display reduces glare and provides 3x better scratch resistance than the previous generation”
Work smarter, not harder
Other than that, looks like there are some nice Duo specific features on iOS. $1999 is also surprising given that news outlets were reporting up to $2500. Plus it's price competitive with other foldables in the market.
Even though I like the form factor I doubt I’d cash out 2k for it, seems like a waste just to spend more time on another screen.
What is the appeal? There are a few screen scenarios that make sense for my life: (1) Multiple displays at desk to work; (2) TV + couch; (3) laptop + lap or surface; (4) phone (anywhere). I'm never in need of a tablet. If I needed that screen real estate, I'd be reaching for my laptop.
Also time to work out the hardware and software issues. Not trying to spend serious money on beta testing like a Vision Pro.
$2000 for an iphone, just insane.
No way I prioritize that kind of cash on something that only runs mobile-tier software.
Also Apple: We've done it the exact way Samsung and Microsoft did it! We even used the same Duo name as Microsoft!
Well yes their product like this is so old its already been discontinued. The Surface Duo targeted the same unfolded layout / passport sized folded device the iPhone Duo is, but opted for different folding methods and screen solutions.
"You're folding it wrong."
It's just too big, and too metal.
The form factor is good. I hope things move this direction.
More broadly, it's interesting that the movie has a beautiful future aesthetic that influenced tech most in the recent years. The muted colors with natural materials mixed with ubiquitous tech that was in the background of a human in a humane world where people mostly walk places. I feel like the AI company aesthetic barrowed a lot from that movie. Right down to their office furniture.
Now we just need to make a phone OS to put something like that on that isn't locked down. Forget the year of desktop linux. I am waiting for the year of phone linux. Android doesn't count.
The Google Nexus 4 was my all time favorite smart phone in terms of overall size. But I suppose it’s unlikely Apple will ever make a phone anywhere close to that size ever again.
The 512 GB version for $2,199 seems like option you’d really want as a minimum, and then you’d need to add AppleCare on top of that. Pricey!
If I’m going to carry around an insanely fragile and expensive device I want to maximise screen area and aspect ratio.
Making the first folding iPhone a two fold format is a very prudent decision.
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-trifold/
I had written off dual screen when the square layouts were the norm, but I think Apple has struck a good balance here between screen size and price+chunkiness+serviceability. I won’t be holding my breath for an iPhone Trio. (Not to be confused with Palm Treo.)
https://www.macworld.com/article/3229342/iphone-price-increa...
The old "Apple is different!" attitude was replaced with a police state.
Do you expect hn being an uncritical apple fanclub?
This is a gorgeous design.
Yes.
>Nothing is "genuinely beautiful".
Not sure.
>You can't just call something beautiful
Yes I can.
>and have everyone agree that it is in fact "beautiful".
Of course not.
The reason it doesn't actively crease is because it's not like a piece of paper you press on to fold: the screen "rounds" itself, and as long as it doesn't go past a breakpoint (which is what the body of the phone prevents), it'll restore.
Thank you
For foldable phones, this might be a good pick to get caught up (5 months old, but minimal crease): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFUB_jL_XcM
iPhone 17 pro glass is insanely strong
Which you commonly have in your pocket? I have a GPD pocket 4 and love me some portable laptops, but I do sorta hope we get somewhere with foldables to where I'm happy just breaking out an arc mouse and small keyboard and treating that as the computer.
We're obviously not, and i'm probably not anywhere near willing to shell out the cash for this, but "the tool you have" and all that.
Tmux does not work that well on a tiny screen, and I use it a lot.
It is increasingly common for people to have no laptop or any computing device other than their smartphone, smartwatch, and/or game console. I know very few people who have a non-work computer anymore.
[0] At work she uses hospital provided Windows PC. Used only for patient records, nothing else.
Apple sold something like 60M ipads in 2025. Perhaps you are not the target audience
Twice the screen size in your pocket without having to get special pants.
I find the form factor repulsive though, doesn't fit comfortably in a pocket and seems pretty thick. Screen durability is described as "we have premium material" and an "scratch resistant" coating, but no mention of free screen replacements like samsung is doing ; so I assume you'll have to shelve off half the price of the device every year for a new screen. I think this might not be a great device.
So I guess I agree with you
In a lot of ways the iphone has always been the Achilles Heel of the ultra wealthy, no matter how many billions you had, you could never do fancier than a 1500 buck iphone. Apple IMO is just trying to capitalize on this phenomenon and capture the pretentious luxury market. Anecdotally the galaxy fold did really well with the obnoxiously rich circles in my country, people who previously all had iphones. So they kinda have to do it as well now.
There's always high-end commercial modders like Caviar [0], who help customers flex both their wealth and their extremely bad taste...
Yes, that aligns with Apple offering their ridiculous golden watch faces and bands of $1000s for their Watch - it's all just about projecting wealth and 'success' (i.e. in these days of capitalism: mostly exploiting others and/or making them depended).
Thanks, I'd rather pull my fingernails.
I want a screen that my thumb can reach from top to bottom without stretching or doing weird half-screen swipes to get at.
Also weird that they've gone back to touch ID instead of face ID to open/unlock.
But I'll definitely be looking at it.
I took my passport in my hand yesterday to see how it feels. Yikes, it feels even harder to control the whole screen with your thumb.
I on the other hand hope they kill the slim iPhone and/or bring back the Plus cause the 16 Plus was a solid deal.
This is not like the iPhone mini, where they were competing with both lower end phone companies, and their own older refurb models. This one's all about ostentation.
But seems I’m either in a real minority with regards to phone size preference, or at least the manufacturers believe I am.
There's a few small traditional phones from companies like Unihertz but they don't have the same support or power.
Such a shame because I hate the bigger size phones and I want a headphone jack!
It’s easy in our industry to burn out doing commercial work with no soul. But it’s not the only kind of work out there.
It's a shame you didn't come to this conclusion 10 years ago!
Switch the work mindset off, turn your nose up at technology and go touch grass. I wouldn’t be recommending if it didn’t work for me.
If nothing else it helps reframe your perspective on the world which technology companies as of late have been trying to distort to enrich the dozen or so people at the helm to their own benefit..
A device that fits in his pocket and that he can still hold in one hand when he's using it as a phone, but that has enough screen real estate to run apps in large-print mode without constantly breaking UI designs, would meaningfully improve his life.
If people would at least use the power they buy... :|
Fact is, having a better pocket computer (that is your only pocket computer I might add) is probably going to have a lot of value for people.
siri is the great exception here. jesus christ what a piece of shit
People who do this a lot probably just use a DV adapter (maybe it just works with USB-C, but I haven't tried it) for native apps, or casting for streaming video.
You could think this a bit further still, and have all kinds of devices offer an interface to nearby endpoints with a display or controls, establishing connectivity automatically.
Edit: I don’t know of anyone 75 still coding outside of retired professors here and there. I am not trying to be an ageist. I just don’t think I will be physically capable when I am 75.
I am 65 and still enjoy software development (not coding in particular) but decomposing business idea into software architecture and functionality. Decomposing is the part I really enjoy, the rest is a necessity but with AI that rest takes way less of my time than it used to.
I do not work for someone though. I develop products for clients or for my own business, was doing it all my life and was doing it from my own office for last 26 years. Not overworked either. Have enough time to enjoy life. Al in all very happy
And really, poor sales are no excuse. How many macbook skus do they have that barely move when you go through all the permutations of config? I don't want to work it out but I'd guess there are something like 24 skus of macbook pro they are barely selling in comparison to iphone sales. What's another model iphone in 3 storage tiers?
For context, Apple sold 6 million minis, most Android manufacturers (other than Samsung and Google) can only dream of that volume.
Apple can do it, they just choose not to. It’s not like AVP is a roaring sales success.
I doubt they lost money on it. I’m guessing they just “didn’t make enough“ and decided it would be more profitable to spend that money elsewhere.
I will say as a software developer it was rough getting things working on that tiny screen.
But I know people loved it. I have family members who did. And I totally get it. But it just doesn’t seem to be a big enough part of the market for any of the big players to care at all.
I spent a few hours researching the other night on what replacement phone I'd buy, and.... the answer was a refurbished 13 mini.
I believe Samsung has a new one with a similar form factor too, though I haven't looked into it.
When I was 12-13 I started taking a steroidal inhaler which inhibited my growth, so my hands are literally the same size as when I was 13. (maybe slightly wider).
As such I have about the same finger length as the average woman, and when I used the iPhone 4S and 5S I had no problems, I was not able to comfortably use the 6 with one hand, and it came with that ugly camera bump, so I returned it and tried to go Samsung. (it was big, but the rounded edges helped a fair bit) - the software sucked.
I bit the bullet and went back to my 5S, and when the SE (2nd gen - shaped like the iPhone 5 but with beefed internals) rolled out it was a day 1 purchase for me.
Ever since then I've been looking for a phone -- the iPhone "Mini" was as large as the 6 which was too large (I did buy one though) -- I eventually bought an iPhone 15 pro, but honestly, I hate it. It is the heaviest thing I carry daily and it doesn't do anything more than my 5 did that i care about, and I can't comfortably operate it. I start really disliking mobile devices because of it- and the software is getting worse year on year too.
I'm getting serious fatigue from this, but the world has not only caught up to a mobile world, now many things actively expect/require you to have a modern smart phone, especially in Sweden.
For FaceID they would need to include that hardware twice, also under the display in the inner screen.
Which has been my take on why there are no more small phones. Manufacturers noted that bigger phone equals more engagement. I am still on my 2022 iPhone SE for this reason.
> I’d love a phone that was roughly normal iphone sized when unfolded but was a flip phone à la Motorola razrs in years gone by.
So the Razr does seem pretty comparable to what they were requesting.
Man, I hate my Hanes pajama shorts right now. The pockets are way too shallow. Probably even for the iPhone Mini. My phone falls out all the time. And I’m too lazy/cheap to buy new shorts, because they’re good shorts otherwise.
Whoever designed them definitely did not get this memo.
Or is it more likely that software companies are making a tradeoff based on typical consumer hardware and would rather prioritize making $$$ over optimizing their software?
I ended up moving to New Zealand and working for a small civil engineering firm that has developers to write internal tools that are used by the engineering team to process their data. The technology I'm working with is a lot more dated, the development processes aren't sophisticated (there are 0 meetings and no attempt at project management) and I took a real pay cut, but I genuinely feel that the software I'm working with is beneficial and has a net positive impact on the world, no matter how small. There is also no on call and I work exactly 37.5 hours a week, on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.
on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.
Not sure if I parsed it right, what did you mean? I am a Florida man, by choice but we'll see :)
People take a lot more vacation and leave, the office shuts entirely for 2 weeks around Christmas, and deliverable deadlines are more flexible.
Where do we sign up?
This statement isn't even factually correct. If you look at some place like Hong Kong and LA, you'll find a lot of similarities in demographics.
Asians might get the fame today with movies like "Crazy Rich Asians" but Americans have long been seen as the typical "flaunting wealth" conspicuous comsuptiom people by Europeans for example. In 2026 even the President has golden toilets and golden everything to flaunt his wealth.
Now our spending is much higher but the growth of our investments over the last 10 years has been incredible and outpaced that by a large margin.
For a while I thought some startup stock I had was going to fund a lavish retirement but then AI largely destroyed the value of those shares so we're just planning on the boring index funds.
Your brother in law did not merely save and not over spend, he built a business and sold it for a large payout.
We've Goodharted the entire premise of the profit-seeking corporation and now openly say that Goodharting it is actually the point. Maybe it should be called Meta-goodharting or something.
Edit: Since large numbers of 1) historically illiterate and 2) "ideas don't matter" type people tend to congregate on HN, it's worth saying explicitly that the takeover of shareholder primacy is empirically visible in all sorts of corporate behaviors.
The problem is not wealth. The problem is not producing massive value and capturing a portion of it.
The problem is thinking that the system-level goal of capitalism is to extract wealth rather than to produce it and distribute it. Of the men you listed, only Vanderbilt supports your argument.
Isn't the distribution of shares among the population instead of just a few private investors a good thing? Democratizing in a sense, everybody can participate? (If only wealth was distributed more evenly. But that's a different problem it seems.)
He did an AMA here recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477135
Shareholder primacy took off after Milton Friedman advocated for it 1962. The philosophy that it supplanted (in the US) was "stakeholder capitalism" where businesses explicitly sought to be positive contributors to a much more comprehensive set of stakeholders: their shareholders, their managers, their employees, their customers, their suppliers, and their communities (non-exhaustive).
The central conceit of capitalism is that you can co-opt the individual's greed and, properly constrained by laws and guided by markets, you can reward them for doing things of value for their community.
The question then is what philosophy do you build around that central greed-of-the-individual. Do you temper it with expectations of taking care of people other than oneself? Or do you fan it and unbridle it by saying, "actually, greed isn't the evil that we must co-opt to pro-social ends, greed is actually the pro-social end itself?"
It turns out that if you do the latter, business managers, shareholders, and regulators can collude to create extremely positive outcomes for each other at the expense of other stakeholders. You can save money by dumping your waste product into rivers, you can arbitrage labor away to infinitely far away lands, you can buy politicians, etc. etc.
How might regulators behave differently in a world where people believe a corporation ought to take care of its entire community, versus a world where the literal only purpose of a corporation is to enrich its shareholders? Quite different, probably!
Then all of this stacks on top of the natural "capital flows to capital" dynamic in capitalism which I'd argue is insufficiently mitigated, and you just get this ridiculous feedback loop that piles more resources and positive outcomes into a narrower set of people, while offloading more negative outcomes onto everyone else.
Obviously opting into a different business philosophy doesn't preclude negative outcomes, but I think that more budding business leaders could, should, and would essentially have their careers strangled earlier on if they exhibited antisocial traits if we had a business culture that didn't pretend like this was literally an asset.
Re your second question:
Assuming that shareholder primacy is the only philosophy we could pick from, then yes a market with many public shareholders is better than the alternative. But 1) not everyone is invested in public markets, 2) not all companies are available to purchase in public markets, 3) public markets are demonstrably not good at solving certain types of problems – especially problems that occur over extended time horizons or are easy to externalize off the balance sheet, and most importantly 4) costs-benefits are not zero-sum. You can't generally undo the harms of Company A by investing in its competitor Company B. It would be best if both companies' management felt they had an obligation not to harm their communities even if it could further enrich their shareholders to do so. It would be even better if investors in general felt both companies should have an obligation to take care of their communities or employees, and so companies lived in fear of divestment if they chose to violate their communities.
But in a culture that has opted into shareholder primacy, all feedback signals in this direction are removed. Regulators, investors, shareholders, employees, and the general public all pretty much believe that maximally externalizing harms and maximally capturing benefits is actually literally the way it's supposed to be.
Has HN really fallen this low?
>Has HN really fallen this low?
With the ad-hominem rude rhetorical remarks you mean?
I said nothing of investments and growth.
Ah the fallacy of thinking a collection of individuals as being a homogeneity.
What you have is a "guess".
Maybe one data point is that this forum is open to all, without any gatekeeping based on salary?
If I was the receiver of such a loan, am I just going to give myself a huge salary, or what it is that you do, here?
Its like buying a porsch and driving it always at 100km only.
So yes, a toyota hybrid and a chevrolet hybrid should be exactly the same, but they are not, the price difference reflects it, as does the number of twenty year old toyota hybrids still on the road.
In fact iPads start at $429
And there isn't really any competitive tablet with Android in that size. I've only seen cheaper tablets with lower specs.
Apple is still the indisputable leader when it comes to hardware though. Great SoC, great cameras, great build quality.
Too bad it doesn't have GrapheneOS :).
(I hope so, would be embarrassing to say last years iphone was faster but used more power, so ....)
Stakeholder Capitalism sounds like a much longer term success vector for most companies.
AFAIK the go-to book on this history is "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" about Jack Welch. I haven't read it though so can't sign my name to it!
A few other threads that might be worth pulling on:
* Dee Hock, founder of Visa, advocated for stuff in this realm. Worth reading some of his writing.
* W Edwards Deming, oddly enough an American who is one of the father's of Japan's incredible manufacturing philosophy, believed in this more expansive idea of wholeness in industry ("Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge" is good)
* Progress & Poverty (the famous Land Value Tax book) oddly enough is what really made capitalism itself legible enough to me to realize the positive-sum nature of what well-designed capitalism can do
* Costco is probably the most obvious success case of a stakeholder-capitalist company succeeding in an ultra competitive market, even while being publicly traded. I'm sure there are phenomenal books on Costco but the Acquired podcast's episode is a fantastic primer.
* "How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis is a snapshot of the precursor conditions that led to stakeholder capitalism. Basically industrialization threw huge numbers of people into conditions even more destitute than the perpetual battle with starvation that predated industrialization. Jacob Riis documented just how horrific this was and contributed to a wave of social, political, and philosophical reforms that culminated in the advent of stakeholder capitalism.
But Capitalism isn't synonymous with the free market, or any other market configuration, and it's totally possible for the people who control the means of production and distribution to... not produce or distribute. In fact, that may be advantageous in their efforts to secure more capital.
Ultimately, "they" really always have been greedy villains. Shareholder supremacy just made it worse.
The biggest problem with my phone is modern software bloat. I only have the 64gb model. Modern software - especially iOS itself - has gotten ginormous. Every time a patch comes out I’ve gotta delete a bunch of stuff in order to update. And running unpatched software seems pretty dangerous right about now.
I had a Galaxy S3 from 2012 to 2024, then got a hand me down Galaxy S9 for free.
I don't like that I can't remove the battery, but it's got a SD card so I don't have to worry about storage ever and a headphone jack, so I don't have to worry about my headphones running out of batteries.
https://photos.reportinglive.com/p/2026-09-09/f-bf86c6f5adb3...
Notably, the inner screen has a nano‑texture finish (which Apple normally upcharges significantly for), which implies it is glass.
I haven't looked, but am guessing the probably exists on other Apple specs pages.
The dimensions are also close.
From a visual aesthetics perspective, I prefer the square edges of the Samsung Fold 8.
Eager to check out the reviews of the software capabilities of the iPhone Duo.
And I'm not sure about the inner screen's selfie camera. The under-screen camera has failed in previous devices, especially for zoom calls, it was abysmal.
Excited for the nano texture displays though. For far too long, Samsung had beaten Apple with non-reflective displays.
My biggest worry is the lack of Face ID. I love Face ID so much. I know I can do the Apple Watch unlock, but I don’t want to. I just want my phone to immediately look unlocked to me. and Face ID did that the vast majority of the time.
So I’m very curious to hear what the hands-on impressions from people are. Is the screen good? Can you notice or feel the crease? Is there anything else wrong? Is not having Face ID as annoying as I suspect?
At least there’s something really interesting this year. It’s more than just faster and better cameras, which is nice. And having actual aperture blades on the pro is great.
But this is more interesting.
Did they mention MagSafe?
I'm not sure if they mentioned MagSafe for the iPhone Duo.
That could be a deal breaker.
Not around here it isn't. The iPhone Duo starts at $2999 for the base storage. The Fold 8 is $2399 and even the Fold 8 Ultra is $2699. This only confirms that Apple has been steadily pricing themselves outside what I'm willing to spend. Can I afford it? Yes. Will I get $3k of value from it? No. This one is not for me at this price.
It makes sense to have one screen for an as-large-as-possible uninterrupted display, and another for maximum utility.
I like that Samsung doesn't cut as much corner off as Apple, but ideally I'd like to find a manufacturer that doesn't cut corners at all. Even though I'm not likely to buy another iPhone product, I am excited that Apple doesn't cut holes in their interior display, because that'll probably get other manufacturers to do the same.
A camera held at arms length will have pretty much the same view of your face regardless of whether it has a wide-angle lens. A wide-angle lens just means the image will include more stuff around the edges, but only if the image/video isn't being automatically cropped to frame your face. The view the camera has of your face isn't more or less flattering unless the distance from camera to face also changes.
The Fold8 is $1,899.99 (street price significantly lower as usual), the Duo is $1999.
With Samsung, they're going to heavily discount it over the holiday season.
With Apple, the device is actually going to retain its value in the second hand market.
So there's this value argument that can swing both ways.
There's a perfectly good use case of using this device unfolded with their kickstand powered folio case and a portable keyboard — While getting some zoom calls and productivity / work done.
It's too small to replace my ipad, too big to replace my phone. Seems too fragile for kids, plus they don't need that. Maybe it's good for the elderly?
I'm actually hoping that this will force Samsung to solve their silly lockscreen choices, and the fact that it needs to be "configured" to be useful, because it's separate (Multilock - I'm talking to you). Honestly, I would happily take even bigger. The extra real estate when you want it is great. But it needs to hit tablet(ish) sizes. We're just in early days.
It's the horrible form factor.
I listed the 3 ways to make a folding phone (with examples) in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636355
If they had chose either of the other two folding formats, and reduced the amount of screen they cut off in the corners, they probably would have had gold on their hands and shifted the market towards foldables.
Instead, they chose the bad one.
I don't mind folding. I think it's cool, and a nice way to get a useful space. But I have big hands, and I can't use my iphone 17 now without two hands. This is even wider before unfolding.
Who wants bigger phones? Who is like, "damn I wish I had a tablet that I could fold up and still barely fit in my pocket"?
I want smaller phones. The width of the iPhone 4 was nearly perfect imo. If they would take modern display technology with approximately that width and expand it to 16:9, I think it would kill, even if it were relatively underpowered compared to the modern top of the line.
But I'd say it's the exception. In general it's better to wait for later generation.
What I actually need might be less of an iPhone and more of a nano than a duo. Something small and portable that doesn't make me spend every spare second on the phone.
They're basically selling you a phone without 1 camera, face id, probably shitty battery to make margins enough to justify the risk. It's placed as duo because there would be not much "ultra" about it. Zf8 is def worse than my fold 8 ultra for productivity and Apple is trying to see if they can make people buy it by selling you the nerfed version first while making you think the crease it's the point. Same for Samsung, but they can afford to just "cover the position".
For reference:
https://media.wired.com/photos/593252a1edfced5820d0fa07/3:2/...
They spent their time practicing to recite, instead of talk, to people.
So hard to sit through.
I had assumed that was a genuine, if not inspiring, reflection of Cook's controlled non-spontaneous personality. Relative to Steve's emotionally-rich casual-coded excited-to-share delivery.
They’ve been doing Touch ID instead of faceID with some of their products a few times, I think some of the iPad models? but unfortunately touchID has like a 20% success rate with my fingers. FaceID works 100% of the time for me. I’ve never had good luck with any fingerprint scanners. I hope they can someday solve the issues with FaceID under the screen.
I wasn’t going to buy this product anyway. My current phone works and I have zero reason to upgrade. But if I was in the market, no facial recognition is honestly a dealbreaker.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple release an iPhone Duo Max later.
The cellular Apple Watch would be a great cell phone if all you want is to use your phone as a phone + iPod. But it’s hamstrung by its software and being forced to be anchored to an iPhone to be activated just makes it unsuitable as a primary device. We’d probably all be healthier as a society if we didn’t have the black rectangle of doom in our pockets all the time.
I’d love a cellular Apple Watch that’s elongated enough to have a headphone jack (lol) and all day battery life. It’d be fine even if it was meant to stay in my pocket instead of on the wrist.
I for one would love to have my phone turn into a tablet while I'm charging my car. Saves me from having to bring the iPad separately, which can't fit in my pocket. Would eliminate a step from that routine.
Also would love to always have that capability on me in the case where I couldn't have foreseen a need for the bigger screen. Being randomly out with friends and able to spontaneously just show them something in a way they can actually see would be nice.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
https://makerworld.com/en/models/1022751-watch-phone#profile...
The first Apple Watches came in 38mm and 42mm sizes. That "large" Apple Watch is the size of the current "small" Apple Watch (42mm).
Until then, off to eBay we go. There are more than enough sitting around completely unused. You aren't missing out on much with 5 iPhone generations these days.
Intrigued by the Duo though
If there was a 15+ mini, I would’ve upgraded a long time ago.
The whole advantage of having any screen at all when folded is something quick to access and *one handable*. Just looking at the Duo, it appears too wide for that by a large amount.
If I’m forced to two hand the thing I’ll just get a phablet: no folding mechanism, no unfolding step before using properly, no gigantic price hike (guessing).
Because the common user for some strange reason has come to prefer phablets to mobile phones.
> But I have big hands, and I can't use my iphone 17 now without two hands.
I've never been able to use a smart phone with one hand, even an original iphone. So this is probably a really niche complaint that you and Shaq have.
And a lot of people who are not prefer smaller ones.
>I've never been able to use a smart phone with one hand, even an original iphone. So this is probably a really niche complaint that you and Shaq have.
Not in the slightest. I've got a Galaxy A52, a large-ish phone for its time, and I can use it quite easily with one hand. I can't readily think of the small-hands equivalent of Shaq to compose a snarky "it's you" retort, and I'm sure it's not just you, but plenty people around you, with relatively normal hands, can use their phone with one hand.
I developed a hypothesis when the phablets first started showing up and still feel it holds. There are two main clusters of users:
1) People who use their phone "on the go", specifically walking around and that sort of thing. Like I'm walking down the sidewalk and pull it out to check a message or see directions.
2) People who use their phone while stationary. Sitting on the couch, on the subway, on an airplane, that sort of thing.
People in group 1 generally lean towards smaller phones as the single handed usage comes in handy. You're not trying to surf the web doing this, so you don't need full usage, but you need to be able to hold it in your hand.
The people who are more stationary users don't have this restriction and they're more likely to want the full functionality when they're using it.
The original iPhone is tiny. Are you misremembering?
Who wants smaller phones: Tens of thousands in lower end market.
It’s frustrating when you have an uncommon desire for a mass market product, I get it. But the answer to “why do they” is pretty obvious if you can understand that you’re not representative.
I was an iPhone 13 mini user for the last few years. I would buy a refurbished one off Amazon whenever my current one broke. I really prefer the smaller screen size.
Recently, I broke my phone again and my wife happened to have a larger iPhone laying around unused (through some accident of e-commerce). I felt weird buying a new phone when we had a perfectly good one laying around, so I decided to give it a shot.
I don't watch any video on my phone and most of my screentime is Kindle and Safari. My screentime is only like 2-3hrs per day. And yet, I still found myself chronically running out of batteries on the 13 mini. I actually now would prefer to keep my new annoyingly large 16e just to not have the battery anxiety.
(A hidden assumption in the above is that larger screens make more room for battery.)
I don’t plan to update it beyond iOS 18 though, and the Lightning port is becoming more and more of a pain over time.
That is it. Nothing else.
Even Samsung offers their 'smaller than a normal phone unfolds to a normal phone' as secondary to the flagship fold. The Flip, to me, is almost marketed as a kid's phone for your teenager.
The Duo’s folded size has the same screen size as the iPhone mini, so they did go on the smaller size, rather than trying to unfold a Pro Max. It remains to be seen how the aspect ratio impacts one-handed use.
I’d take a small foldable over a large slab.
Most people now days put their phones in protective cases, so the sharp edges don’t matter too much. And if anything, it makes the cases easier to design and smaller/thinner.
I went out of my way to make sure I found a "new" iPhone 13 mini for my corporate BYOD (needed for on-call, and I hate the cert they push so there's no way I'd use my personal phone...)
The only corporate phones they offered were HUGE, being required to carry 2 phones is enough of an annoyance already, but two full-sized phones is a nightmare!
Because every time, they want it to be the next big thing.
Personally, I quite like the size of the standard iPhones, fits in my pocket, can use it one handed well enough, and the display is big enough to comfortably view content. I have quite small hands though and I can see how someone bigger than me would like the size of the Pro Max line.
Also this size clearly works, because basically all phones now are this exact same size give or take a few mm.
it is kinda annoying, but apparently the consensus of modern design includes both lots of useless horizontal margins (lots of them just for the sake of visible rounded corners) and lots of vertical space taken by ads (iPhone 17 is actually 19.5:9, not 16:9, so ads take less vertical space on such a screen)...
and after a few months of using a larger screen I learned how to use it with one hand so it is possible - I rest my phone on 4 fingers and use thumb to interact, I only use two hands when typing (well two thumbs, but whatever)... but I still agree that the bigger the phone the more I'm worried it will fall down from my hand when operating it with one hand... the Max versions of iPhone do seem too large for me...
Others wrote complicated or bs jokes, here is my SIMPLE tip:
It has to change otherwise people would not buy new. Size can not change randomly so it has 2 ways: decreasing and later it becomes an iwatch, and tablet becomes a phone: this is stupid because harder to increase price.
So increase it is. If you do not like it, use a watch+earpiece as a phone.
Are you a woman by any chance? I am currently typing this one handed on an iPhone 17 pro (not the pro max) and don’t consider my hands to be particularly large, for a man, but my wife has to two hand her android which is roughly the same size
I have an S24 ultra and I had an even bigger Sony xperia a while back. I have an old iPhone SE ( the one in the form factor of the iPhone 4) and find it absolutely unusable. Typing is a joke.
Some want a flagship model, some want a mid range, some entry level... all in small form factors and they won't compromise in order to settle for the one small model that's available.
I was listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast last week and Marco said that the iPhone Air has lower penetration, after 1 year, than EACH of the 12 mini and 13 mini _currently_ have. Among a tech audience.
We just had to replace a family 13 mini and it sucks to have to go with a huge modern phone. Personally, I'd also prefer a mini if it had the best cameras.
In 2020, the iPhone SE sold over 24 million units.
In 2022, sales of iPhone mini 13, iPhone mini 12, and iPhone SE made up 12% of total iPhone sales.
Thats despite intentionally nerfing every one of those models.
If you look at comparable phones, the iPhone 7 and 8 (4.7") outsold the iPhone 7 Plus and 8 Plus (5.5") by significant margins.
Nobody wants large phones.
I’m leaning towards getting an old iPhone mini - but maybe someone knows a better alternative?
But instead we got the largest screen before unfolding…
If we go by history, consumers. And when Apple last offered a smaller phone, consumers did not go for it.
I'd love a tiny phone. I just can't see it anymore.
Wait until you get old enough to have to put readers on to use your devices like most older people do. And while I am yelling at the kids on my lawn, let me add every UI/UX person at apple - the idiotic and unnecessary choices they make for the sake of "cool design" infuriate me on a daily basis.
It's a new thing.
Not a phone. Not a laptop. Not an iPad.
It's an agent terminal.
Manufacturers want phones to be thin so the only way to fit in the battery life is for the whole phone to be larger. In case you didn't notice it's really really difficult to find a side on photo of the iPhone Duo closed. They don't want to show the thickness.
It has a smaller display with a crease[1] and has less battery than a tablet. The screen is even smaller than an iPad mini. IMO that form factor only really works for like a Kindle.
And the screen has a matte finish which is only going to reduce contrast.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1wbx1wo/there_is_a_cr...
So, ymmv.
the phone-ness is exactly the same, but i dont think anyone actually needs a full tablet, but an unfolded screen is just right for say, reading a diff on the bus.
I was much more impressed by the phone->tablet fold than i was expecting to be.
Certainly not at $2000.
My current iPhone I can hold and use with one thumb - what makes this better than that?
It's so much cooler to me to see the people closer to the work talking about it rather than just Steve Jobs, as amazing as he was to watch. I'll take slightly stilted any day of the week as a tradeoff.
Ternus did introduce a new rhetorical thing, though. He framed some of the guiding principles during the opening and throughout as ideas originating from himself, not Apple. Cook rarely said "I" in relation to a claim, other than "I'm so proud of" X, Y, Z. That's a bit more product guy, a bit more Opinionated. I am hoping for more of that.
There’s a reason why acting as a profession exists.
I do think there's a general high-end corporate tendency these days to over-rehearse for big stages. I could name some CEOs who were doing it years ago. And I could name some CEOs who were terrible presenters but were very successful at least for a time.
Jobs was a great actor in that he did not pretend to be excited. Whatever coaching is being given here is exactly in the opposite direction of acting.
I think everyone knows how many hours they practiced and the depth of talent they could draw from. The inhuman consistency demonstrates a deliberate choice, that undermines their own message.
Care about impact wasn't just a Steve quirk, it was the reason keynotes were worth having.
Try saying "And one more thing..." in recent-Apple voice, without laughing or crying.
The only thing I can see is that it generates some clips for the presenters to share on their LinkedIn pages. I assume there is prestige in being selected as a presenter, and the rest of the show serves its purpose simply by existing.
But, he has been part of Apple for too long, and probably has internalized that style.
Hope he brings good change though...
Example 1,494,298 of “most people aren’t Steve Jobs.” Can’t believe we are still doing this comparison. In a few weeks it will be 15 years old.
The right response to an inspiring founder that cannot be replicated, isn't to go for uninspiring.
Sort of. We don't know what Ternus can do. We know this event was a reflection of Cook, but that is all we know.
Like no one is above reproach and def everyone is open to criticism, it to open a thread with 1200 comments and see this as the first comment was super annoying
So much stuff to discuss and we are focusing on some presenters tone? jfc
I wish there was a way to just put all criticism in a single thread and leave other thread trees for technology topics. Of course my first thought is a technology answer to a human problem.
That said, I simply couldn't sit through this presentation and did find it insufferable; and I've been waiting for a foldable iPhone for a long time. Having to close the presentation out of frustration tainted my purchasing decision.
That was solved over time anyway as macOS improved and more developers ported their apps over
You don't have to design UI around the fold, it's seamless in regular use.
It's just a tablet.
So if you scored a 13 mini and a fresh battery you’d probably be overjoyed from that alone
I was a mini holdout forever but now it’s hard to imagine giving up the Air’s display
But good actors trained more classically can be just as convincing by pretending.
One is not better than the other, these are just different approaches, both capable of delivering excellent or terrible results, depending on your skills and practice. Being excited doesn't mean you look excited to an audience and vice versa.
Like that's the very point of foldables, otherwise they would be a tablet..
I still enjoy Marc Benioff presentations. He's very engaging to watch, though not nearly as good as Jobs in terms of storytelling. I feel Jobs honed the craft more though.
I found it interesting that the intro of the Duo talked about how it had 90% of the screen of the iPhone 18, as a way to talk up how big it is. They didn’t do this for the iPhone mini, and I think it’s why it failed. The iPhone mini screen was only .1” smaller than the 8 Plus, in a form factor that was smaller than the normal 8. I think selling it like that, as the base level iPhone (without the mini label) would have made it a success… but I’m still bitter they killed it off.
what products _did_ have big leaps from v1 to v2?
MacBook Air -> MacBook Air 2: unibody aluminum construction replaced plastic, ssd option introduced.
iPad -> iPad 2: cut thickness and weight by 30 %. A4 -> A5 doubled performance. Dramatically better screen. Introduced the magnetic case ecosystem.
iBook G3 -> G3 dual usb: from colorful clamshell/toilet seat design to sleek laptop. 30 % lighter, half the volume, twice as durable, 2-3x the performance.
And… Apple I -> Apple II? Apple I was a motherboard, the II was a complete computer.
The first thing I had to teach was files folders and desktops. For many of them, Chrome was synonymous with computer.
I didn’t expect anyone to know DOS like I did at that age, but was a little shocked that “Save your file to the desktop” was gibberish to them
My use case is that I have terminals on various servers that I'd like to access when I'm travelling, and I'm often just doing short trips without my laptop. It's often inconvenient to schlep a bag with me just so I can use it on the train, so it's nice to be able to bring a phone that has enough screen for the terminal to not be tiny.
I was timed at 140+ wpm in high school and online tests / etc have hit close to 200 wpm on a Qwerty. So I CAN touch-type and do it well - and keyboard + mouse is my goto jam. My favorite phone (alas, discontinued way too soon) was the Photon Q (work gave us phones way back) with slide-out physical keyboard.
I "use" an S21, but even just entering my 4-digit pin is awkward with my left thumb - is there some other way to hold it? I can't even imagine trying it with my right.. My thumbs just cramp up..
Apple made smaller phones, but they don't sell. They don't sell when they are nice phones, but smaller, and they don't sell when they are cheap phones and smaller.
Tech people are like car people in that they don't really appreciate that their preferences are niche. Wanting a smaller phone is akin to wanting a smaller car
> with relatively normal hands, can use their phone with one hand.
According to the US Army, the average length of the male thumb: 2.75 in; for women it's 2.49. So we can assume the actual population averages are probably a bit lower.
That means the average iphone is larger than the average male thumb, by a reasonable amount, and it has been for quite a number of generations.
Personally, my thumb is as wide as my iphone, but practically, the way I have to hold it one-handed means that I can only reach half of the screen (technically, the bottom quadrant, so 25% of the overall screen area). I'd need another 1" or so to reach the entire width of the screen with a single hand, and idk 2"+ to navigate the entire screen one handed.
The disconnect probably comes from what it means to "use" a phone one-handed. I mean to be able to hold it in one hand and touch anywhere on the screen and perform any action. Which limits phone size to around 2.25"x4.50", or so to account for a average hand to hit 95% of surface area while holding it. You might mean, just be able to type, or just be able to scroll, which does change things.
They funny thing is that the sales numbers were only terrible compared to other iPhones. IIRC it was something like 3% of the iPhone market at the time of discontinuation. Not a big seller for Apple, certainly, but there were times when the Mini made the top ten list for smartphones in general.
While you, personally, might prefer smaller phones, and that's a perfectly valid preference, you are very much in the minority.
I mean yeah if I had to choose purely for entertainment value, I’d watch Steve all day. But I think it can also be true that seeing the people closer to the metal is very cool too. And I frankly prefer it to seeing Apple as only one person.
There was a Jobs story about how he was bothering the engineer who was working on the calculator so much about the layout that the engineer just made a layout engine Jobs could play with, so he could design it himself.
I do consider that fundamentally different from the people lower in the hierarchy though. That’s what I value about the Cook era keynotes: seeing Apple as not just a single person.
Even better idea: Get a Casio FX-91 [1]. You'll get used to its shape pretty quick - like the 100 Million other humans who already have. Good chance it will still be produced 30 years from now, too, so if you lose it or break it you can get a new one. Costs a tenth of an Apple watch.
Can’t imagine Apple ever doing this, though, because a round display is pretty terrible for displaying the sort of content and UI elements that iPhone/Apple Watch users are used to. Much of the UI and all existing apps would need to be completely redesigned.
iPad mini battery life ~10-15 hours, iPhone duo 30+ hours so no...
Matte finishes are great for viewing outdoors too...
That said, it's also the case that casually recovering from tech glitches is pretty key.
Apple's whole thing is that they don't do niches. Support a select few versions of select few products very very well is the whole MO
Apple can absolutely do niche products. Just not this one I guess.
The Mac Mini is an entry level product I see quite lot of people pick up. How is it niche?
Phones got big.
They are thinking that VR headsets will not be niche products in the future
The apple watch was very niche when it came out as well, but their intention was absolutely to make a major product line
I'm sure they made money. But that's not the right question to ask, in my opinion. The right question is did they make as much or more than their internal rate of return (IRR)? Perhaps the smaller iPhones (I had one) do not so they cut the product line. Or maybe they over-purchased some components and figured they could make a phone or two out of them.
Or a smaller phone that is more expensive to produce. In which case, it won’t sell well regardless.
It’s easy to see how we got to this point of large phones, but it is not very clear how someone like Apple can make a significantly smaller phone and keep customers happy.
As you mentioned, other vendors probably will have better luck.
A large watch face has always been a style people into watches go for. It's not just a digital smartwatch trend.
In fact, fashionable youths these days are wearing those vintage Casios which come in at 35mm to 39mm.
Comparing anyone at keynotes to Steve is challenging. He really was among the best at presentation.
But find a voice that works for whoever is presenting, or get different presenters.
The visuals and videos were excellent. The product was cool.
That's much much easier said than done. Sometimes the very rehearsed voice is as good as you're going to get, without the person being a professional lecturer.
> or get different presenters
It seems as though Apple is prioritizing having actual team leaders speaking about the products instead of just having hired actors do it. I'm perfectly happy with this.
But, yes, Apple has made the deliberate choice to have presenters who rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse. But many are not natural actors and will never be. You can mix things up a bit on a stage. But Apple does want a smooth production and puts a lot of money and effort into it.
Volume constraints are bad enough for "normal" models. "Minis" have it way worse.
The iPhone 6 was a decade ago and was smaller in all dimensions than an iPhone 17 and had a perfectly acceptable battery life. Since then, they have removed headphone jacks and buttons, batteries have gotten more power dense, chips have gotten more efficient, etc.
All of the excuses people are coming up with in these comments are just that: excuses. Look at the sibling comment by musictubes, for example. Citing these ethereal "critics" and "most people" when in reality Walt Mossberg was the only critic whose opinion mattered.
Occam's Razor: The Innovator's Dilemma. It's a rotting, bloated megacorp with too much to lose, that doesn't take risks, and can't change direction. The direction it's in is "bigger phones", for whatever reason. So we're gonna keep getting bigger phones. It's that simple.
Smaller phones can’t fit as much stuff in them as larger phones. Shrink the phone and something has to give. People in the aggregate do not want to make those compromises unless the price is noticeably less. But then it can’t have any of the premium features that are expected from Apple. Small phones are compromises that don’t pay off for Apple.
But right now it's in a space where you're paying extra for the fact that it's a foldable, but it feels....budget in its specs? Like...how does that work?
> Nobody wants large phones.
Be serious. 88% of buyers chose something they don’t want? Apple is saying, “actually we hate money, so we’re not going to make a model that people want to buy”?
Why is it so hard for people to accept that maybe their preference isn’t the common one?
The market, in both Android and iOS land has dictated larger phones are more favored. This is abundantly clear with the advent of "foldable" phone sector. On paper foldable phones make no sense, they are less resistant, more expensive and use a plastic screen, yet the market is growing year on year.
I totally respect someone's opinion on a small or large phone, but even the largest iPhone is fairly easy to hold and operate using one hand. I don't have big hands.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/biometrics-vs-passcodes-what-l...
Similarly, Apple doesn't make a small phone because either: 1) It's too niche to be profitable. 2) It could be profitable but those resources are better spent on more popular products. 3) They don't know what they're doing or they hate money or something.
And other smartphone companies make foldable phones and not small phones because: 1) Foldables are profitable and small phones aren't. 2) That's not yet true but it's where the market is heading. 3) They all don't know what they're doing or hate money or something.
You're arguing for 3?
In any case, with Apple the commentary is always the same, if they release a small phone next year people will be saying „Apple knows exactly what they are doing, that’s exactly what the market wants“, if they don’t it’s also a sign they know exactly what they are doing. Anyone expressing their dissatisfaction with the direction of a product line „is in a bubble and doesn’t know what others want so should be ignored“. That has been the case since decades now.
But I think some people can't do it but that might have been me early on. I was at an event (though not at the talk) when apparently an exec at a large tech company had to deliver a talk at more or less the last minute because someone had to back out because of some emergency. They apparently panicked and pretty much walked off stage.
I know I wasn't paid those kind of bucks. But I like to think, at worst, I could improvise on the general topic. Doubtless wouldn't win awards but I wouldn't meltdown.
Also, if you've prepared a presentation and the system isn't working, you should be able to do a reset without visuals and just do it. May not be the plan but that's what we should be ready for. (I've also had 3am calls in Japan to fill in for someone with some presentation because the presenter turned out to be at some other event.)
It's a stationary computer that requires a standalone monitor, keyboard and mouse/touchpad. People just buy a laptop instead, a dedicated "computer" space at home is increasingly a thing of the past. And especially now if you can get the Neo for very similar money I have no idea why you'd buy the mini if your entire computer use is Facebook and maybe some word editing from time to time.
FWIW, I bought one knowing this, and have zero regrets. Amazing hardware, it's the best personal display on the market. I use it for the majority of my movie watching.
The best presenters are those who have the natural affinity (or enough practice) to do method 2 really well. What we get from Apple (and most other professional-level speakers who aren't willing to take risks) is method 3C.
As was clearly, painstaking explained to you already, using easy-to-understand language, the 4.7" iPhones outsold the 5.5" iPhones. And today 6.1" iPhones outsell the 6.7" iPhones. Every single time, without fail, smaller iPhones have outsold and continue to outsell larger iPhones of similar capability. This is an objective and indisputable fact.
The battery was the single largest module by a long shot in an iPhone 6, and now you can get the same capacity in a much smaller volume. We’ve also lost other bulky items like the home button and headphone jack.
The camera on the current gen has its own expanded volume area of the case, so I don’t buy that they couldn’t just use the same hump they use on literally all of their phones. Sure Face ID is new, but I’ve seen the size of that module, and it is only slightly larger than the selfie camera from back then that it replaced.
The iPhone 17 is 149.6 x 71.5 x 8 mm
So no, the note 3 is bigger than the iPhone 17
But, and this is probably what you meant, the iPhone 17 has a bigger screen. That's because recent phones got rid of the bezels, so they can fit more screen in the same body. That's why they have taller aspect ratios.
This is patently false. It is widely known to be patently false. I cannot understand why you would confidently assert something commonly known to be patently false.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-iphone-16-still-lead...
Every single generation, without fail, larger phones are outsold by smaller phones of comparable performance and features.
This discussion isn't about people preferring the Pro to the Pro Max. That would be a pretty uninteresting discussion: they make both, buy the one you want. End of story. People are complaining because they want something that's not on offer anymore: something around the size of an iPhone 4 or SE. And, we are told, lots of people want it, but for some reason all of the smartphone manufacturers have banded together to refuse to make such a thing, because... well, the reason is never explained. But it's definitely a conspiracy, and not because people don't actually buy them in sufficient quantity.
"iPhone 16 still leads the smartphone pack" has nothing to do with that. That's a phone that is, according to the complainers, still too big. This is a 6.1" screen. That's vast compared to the 3.5" screen of an iPhone 4, and substantially larger than the 5.4" display of an iPhone 13 mini that many commenters here express a longing for.
If you're arguing that people prefer the smaller of Apple's two large phones, you're in the wrong place. If you're arguing that people prefer phones smaller than what Apple currently makes, you're using the wrong argument. Either way, you're way off track here, and your attitude towards it is highly uncalled for.
Instead, they just hand you some poorly documented loose parts in a box and tell you, “good luck” and you’re on your own to fill the gaps. Compose is a little better about giving the tools you need than the preceding Android Framework, but it’s still much more “assembly required” and “batteries not included” than the UIKit+SwiftUI world is.
Many iOS apps built using system components will behave 90%+ correctly on the Duo by just compiling against the iOS 27.1 SDK because there are well supported methods of doing things that Apple can leverage to reduce dev work. In contrast, on Android there's 10 ways of doing anything none of which get full-throated support (on top of all the other ways devs invent), and so any time it gains support for a new form factor almost nothing is automatic and it all falls on the devs’ shoulders.
I'm not sure what kinds of tools do you expect. You do have to make layouts for different screen sizes, no real way around that. You'd usually want two breakpoints, so you have phones, small tablets (and foldable inner screens), and large tablets.
WindowSizeClasses, Postures, Navigation3, ListDetailScaffolds, the list goes on. Android & Compose is pretty much flawless when it comes to develop for it, it's thoroughly documented and works well.
Layouts will not magically be not dog shit on iOS because Apple put out another version of SwiftUI that you can't use in prod because nobody has the update. 90% of the apps will be stretched. Horizontally. The reality of it is, it's pretty much never worth it to make layouts that are specialised for foldables/tablets.
Also, it's pretty fucking funny to be worshipping Apple like that when they have a single device to support, and then complain about Android that literally had to pave the way and today works on phones that can unfold three times, phones like the galaxy Z Flip that have instead half screens, etc. Apple will tell you they can't back port dynamic islands on last year's release, while latest Compose is happily running on devices from 10 years ago.
I was an Android developer 15+ years ago, and this is exactly what made me move away into backend.
Interesting that it's still like that after so much time!
Google is fundamentally a spy company, not a product company
Maybe the folding phone form factor will inspire some better UI/UX for apps.
I think they need to aggressively court developers, just give a buttload of advertising credit to nice apps that predate AI slop if they add compatibility, what does it cost Apple to "give" you $10k or $20k credit in their own ad system...
But the rumours also say they are going to squeeze the App Store for higher margins so maybe it is too late.
This is a quote from John Carmack and should sit over every developers monitor. At the same time, OS designers should be doing everything in their power to reduce the number of states a developer has to think about.
'You may only play audio if such and such conditions are met. However these are different based on browser and platform. Good luck making a solution fitting all these.'
'The browser might lie about what's the available screen estate is, but only sometimes'
'There is a perfect API for what you wanna do, however it's not in Safari'
And a testament on how obscure and arcane knowledge is on doing things right is that I thought there would be some npm packages that do these things for me, but no - you have to hunt around for solutions and fix things yourself.
And LLMs are completely useless and confidently wrong mostly about everything involving this.
If anyting, Apple stands to gain from what was already developed for Android.
Like https://developer.android.com/phones-tablets-foldables
Which targets iOS also: https://kotlinlang.org/compose-multiplatform
For Apple foldables yes. Not Android.
I see what you did there :)
:)
"There are dozens of us!" (not me though, I wouldn't buy a Pixel foldable)
- They actually might have nailed the hinge and crease problems.
- I've been excited for this release ever since the rumor of the iPhone Air being a prototype of sorts for this came out. Two iPhone Airs fit very comfortably in my hip pack (though I only ever have one at a time).
And even with mobile dictation/notetakers, there's something that screams respect when someone writes actual notes down by hand.
Big big deal indeed, thanks for sharing.
Maybe not $2k fun + inherent risk with buying the first generation of an Apple product particularly after the Apple Vision Pro, but still.
I don’t care for the 18 Pro colors, I still love my orange 17 Pro, and I’m not sold on the Duo (functionality or price).
I might still end up with a Duo but I’m very much on the fence. I’ll tell myself it’s for development/testing reasons, or just to play with the newest offering but I’m just not sure. I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did. Yes, it’s very different from the AVP and SwiftUI will almost certainly make this process easier but I’m still not sure.
When I saw that this new phone is 1:1.4, I instantly appreciated why it is that way. Metric paper wins again!
On the note on this year's keynote. I can't be the only one who feels the whole vibe of the keynote changed. This isn't Tim Cook style keynote and John Ternus wasted no time to try and changed a few things already. I can't wait for John to further shake things up at Apple. But everything so far, all the small minor details suggest they are in the right direction.
1. After a while, I think dust would inevitably get in the hinges and wouldn't fold flat. I've seen demos in stores of newer gen Samsung foldable phones and it looks like those wouldn't fold flat
2. The inner screen protector eventually lifted off the screen, causing catastrophic damage, and requiring repair (under warranty thankfully)
3. The aspect ratios were weird. I ended up using native app sizes, making the extra space kind of a waste
One thing I did like about the Samsung foldables was that when they were folded and using the front screen, I finally had a phone that fit my smaller hands! It was nice being able to use my thumb to reach the other side of the screen. Will be interesting to see how this works out because it looks decidedly wider.
For your first point, the iPhone duo is rated IP 68 Dust and Water protection. Literally none of Samsung's book foldables so far have achieved this IP rating.
Just didn’t feel it was an Appleish product.
Maybe that means I want one on a technicality. I suppose the big fold out screen would be useful at time if the device isn't too chunky...
The iPhone Duo is designed with this in mind. The aspect ratio any way you view it, folded or open, is preserved. Apple design knows a thing or two.
You can also see where they are going. In a couple of years, assuming it sells well there will be a Pro model with a 3x fold and better camera system. I'm guessing to make in thinner they will have to drop USB-C and come up with a flat charging/data connector. The EU won't like that.
The final interesting thing is this is the first Apple product that I can think of since the iPod era that they've released a product that will cannibalize another Apple product. If you were looking at getting a high end iPad Mini this replaces both phone and tablet.
There's been a proven market for years already, but it's been less obvious in Western markets. In East Asian markets, foldables have had a very sizable market presence, especially in China.
There's other trends that are less obvious to US and western markets, such as phone crossbody straps (which are also very big in East Asia).
(I want one... find phone screens too small, but don't want to carry a phone and a tablet - yes, I know there have been other offerings in the Android ecosystem, but I am not in that realm)
Of course, the memes are already out about how large a hand you will need to use one of these... Harkens back to the "you're holding it wrong" antenna-gate controversy...
But at a $2K starting price, plus likely another $200 for the storage size they really expect people to purchase, in this economy, it is so far outside of my price range it is dead to me.
Which is to say: Cool tech, but I've already dismissed it as something I want evaluate for my next phone just based on price alone.
That's maybe the real death-nail for folding phones: Price hasn't yet shifted to allow them to be mass market rather than enthusiast phones.
If I wouldn't at the moment focus on developing iOS apps, the Z Fold 8 would be very tempting.
Idk why I’d need a lot of storage on the phone. Photos/videos get backed up elsewhere. The only thing that eats storage like that is downloading a lot of offline movies, or taking lots of videos. But this doesn’t have the same camera chops as the iPhone pro.
Something this expensive should not be that fragile year after year.
Have you seen the video in question from two weeks ago?
> GOOGLE MADE A MISTAKE
But without that, I don't see the use for myself. Though I also rock a 13" iPad Pro so even with that it would be a hard sell to replace both.
I still am not sold on the entire idea of a foldable, there is some interesting things here and I will be interested to see how they position it over the next few generations.
The folding part is the thing the tech journalists say; done right, it shouldn't matter whether it's foldable or not.
Bigger screen, pencil support, nano-glass, etc. The foldable part is obvious, why say it?
Not that that's a bad thing. I absolutely loved the Surface Duo, it was my favorite phone until it stopped working correctly, and I hope other Android manufacturers take note of this, not just Samsung. It's just wild to see how similar this new Duo is to the original Duo.
I cant do any work on a phone or tablet (emails dont count). Laptops are fine, of course. Comparing to laptops just makes too little sense. The thing is over 1cm tick when folded - making it extra difficult to put in any front pocket (or I will have get skinnier hips)
I tend to agree with you.
I suspect the crossover area of the Venn diagram between people who spend what a foldable costs on a phone and people who have no other computing device is extremely small.
Who wants bigger phones? Who is like, "damn I wish I had a tablet that I could fold up and still barely fit in my pocket"?
I want smaller phones. The width of the iPhone 4 was nearly perfect imo. If they would take modern display technology with approximately that width and expand it to 16:9, I think it would kill, even if it were relatively underpowered compared to the modern top of the line.
This lead them to use a garbage CPU and support it for something like 2 years.
Apple has the balls to keep updating the vision pro even after it flopped and it will probably get 7 years.
I will say it was a pain in the ass to open and answer calls though when you were busy doing things.
Now you can (sort of) have both in one device. Reading the rumours, I was completely disinterested. Now I’m actually tempting to ditch the iPad Pro and iPhone Pro and have a Duo replace both. I’m excited to have a go with one in the Apple Store.
Shame it’s so damn expensive!
The iPad (Mini) is something I use more deliberately, like twice per day to read the newspaper and to watch some video.
For me the Duo seems like you're suffering a lot for the first use case, just to make the second use case possible.
I think I'll stick with separate devices.
If another company could release something like the Duo that seamlessly switches between phone, tablet, and desktop experience and make it Apple quality then Apple are in trouble. The technology is all there since the days of Ubuntu Touch.
Sadly I don't think there is a company in a position to build such a device that could compete.
I personally would like to see the phones behave like iPads when connected to screens and mice and such. I don’t need it to pretend to be a full Mac.
But we all know they’re on the same OS at this point. iOS and iPadOS are completely identical, and this only makes it more obvious.
It's a software problem. The OS has to switch seamlessly between the iPhone experience and a macOS experience where a full desktop/terminal/install anything is available. Merging the two is not an easy task considering how different the use cases are for both the OSes. Samsung DEX is also not great, it allows some basic stuff but is not going to replace your Macbook.
I think though that we are very close, perhaps < 5 years. Would be amazing to connect this thing to a Studio Display, keyboard and mouse and just act like it's a Mac Mini.
Will this fit in a woman's hand?
Yes, those are the loose parts. They still have to be assembled correctly for everything to work as expected and every app does it a bit differently (there is effectively no endorsed "correct" way to assemble them). This means that Google cannot extend them with new functionality later without breaking some if not most usages of those parts in the future.
Compare that to UITabController in UIKit, which has been present since very early on and got extended recently. If the dev adopts iOS 18 revisions, configuring that single view controller gets you more or less correct presentation and navigation across all sizes and orientations of normal iPhone, iPad, desktop, and now iPhone Duo and implementation is close to identical between apps.
> …and then complain about Android that literally had to pave the way and today works on phones that can unfold three times, phones like the galaxy Z Flip that have instead half screens, etc.
That's fair, but users can't reasonably expect any kind of meaningful adoption of new oddball form factors like that until the platform vendor (Google) rolls out standardized APIs to streamline the process (which Google has partially done, but won't commit to a unified solution for).
> Apple will tell you they can't back port dynamic islands on last year's release, while latest Compose is happily running on devices from 10 years ago.
That is an advantage, but iOS users tend to stay much more up to date so it's something of a moot point. The userbase of versions just three major releases behind is typically below 5% and anything older is fractional at best, so unless you're a Google-scale giant you're probably fine only supporting the newest 2-3 versions of iOS. That's pretty nice since I don't need to keep a drawer full of prehistoric phones running ancient versions of Android to test adequately (so I don't find out about some weird behavior that only occurs under Android 11 in prod)…
For example, with his bending test. You would define a standard loading method (e.g. 3 point or 4 point with specific spacing), and then apply a realistic load a phone may experience plus some safety factor with a specific loading/unloading profile (say a phone is sat on and experiences 100lbf you might test to 125lbf). Once released you inspect the phone for damage, deformation, and test functionality.
Testing products properly is HARD. Companies have entire groups of people who that is their entire job and if they do it wrong it can costs millions in returned product. At the same time, if the test is too harsh, the customer is paying extra for a product that is over-designed for conditions the product will never experience.
Google seems extremely reticent to have anything resembling strong opinions in Android’s API design and so there are still many corners in which well-supported, fully fleshed out “correct” options are absent.
I'm sure most of us on HN use them for leisure, but for most people a computer is a device for work, not for play.
And I agree that work is probably not the main use case for this for most people. It's really just a convenient way to have a tablet with you at all times. There are certainly times I wish my phone had a bigger screen.
In theory the client can do literally anything (for example, someone could be using an ancient version or have some features voluntarily disabled) and you have to decide which things you're going to handle
Its the reality distortion field. (this term comes from the register)
The original iphone was full of tradeoffs that made it not a great phone at launch. It had no apps, it had no copy paste, it had no 3g, it had no flash.
The browser was good (apart from the lack of flash) and the touch screen was good. The big reason why it became a behemoth is that it had great music support, and it was fashionable.
The apps, and the thing that actually drove it to monster success only really happened because the public gave them the benefit of the doubt (and developers changed their products to fit)
I think this will be a hit, but the $2k is a bit much for me to even consider getting one. Obviously they'll likely drop that price over time.
$2k is a lot to ask, but it answers the market 100% on “I’d like a Samsung Fold 8, but as an iPhone”.
Samsung has already worked out the major kinks for folding displays, over dozens of products used by multiple phone manufacturers including themselves, and Android has worked out how to handle the various use cases between the outer screen and inner screen, when closed, open, or partially open, so Apple can pull from the current state of the art and launch with a more fully developed product, as they usually did before the Apple Vision Pro.
It was not an early entry into the field. Many well established devices already existed. It was an uncharacteristic entrance into a niche.
Which is exactly what foldable phones are. 1.6% of phone sales in 2025 were foldable.
Maybe they will take off. But the odds are this will be discontinued.
I wish they would stop changing speakers every other sentence though. I swear drone cameras were the worst thing to happen to video, I'm gettin seasick over here!
I don't get this complaint. People talk with their hands, it'd look more fake if they just stood there all stiff and wooden.
AR/VR market on the other hand is still way more niche than practical uses on a day to day.
Pretty sure that developer interest is not to be a problem. The Duo will sell more units in a month (or less) than every AVP ever sold.
Apple told developers in June at WWDC to not assume fixed screen sizes. Well-written apps will work on any screen size thanks to Apple's APIs.
Some apps will need to be tweaked to take advantage of some Duo features no doubt, but I suspect that's not going to be a deal breaker.
I may be swayed by a second gen Air in the spring, as I would like a lighter phone that feels less of an imposition in my pocket and my life in general. But it almost certainly won’t have the zoom camera, which has unexpectedly become one of my favourite and most used features of the 17 Pro. Why the two-camera phones all come with the ultrawide instead of the telephoto is baffling to me. Perhaps I’m an anomaly, but I never use the ultrawide lens.
except for those monthly payments you never get to stop making, yeah it's free.
Honest question: why? Why every year?
I could tell you it's because I always wanted to have the best camera, best battery life, etc and those are true too but the bottom line was: it was fun and I could afford it.
I've always known it wasn't the smartest financial decision but no one acts 100% financially "smart" and joy is something you can't measure the value of quite so easily, I got a lot of joy out of having the newest phone. Not as a "look at me, I have the newest phone", I never would shove it someone's face or even call attention to it, buying the new phone was for me, not for anyone else or some kind of "status".
It's a toy and I decided that it was worth the "waste" due to the excitement/joy I got from it.
Apple can force iOS devs to do whatever they want. It may be basic support, but Apple devs will do whatever Apple tells them to do.
The main reason I'd want a bigger display is for more immersive content like videos, which are typically 16:9. On a Pixel Fold, you have all the added complexity of the fold to make the videos you watch on the train 1cm taller.
The iPhone Duo unfolds to be the same height as the iPhone Pro Max. Sounds like it has the exact same problem - a bunch of added complexity without a practical use for it.
-----
> Touch ID is integrated into the side button
Another major flaw with the foldable form factor - it's hard to distinguish holding the device e.g. to pocket it and holding the device to use it. My foldable does the smartphone equivalent of butt-dialing way more often than any phone I've had before because it likes to unlock itself when I'm putting it in my pocket
So your same video on the fold will be about an inch wider because it has the space to expand into in the other direction.
For media consumption on the go, I use AR glasses. They are considerably cheaper than the upgrade from an 18Pro to a Duo, and give you an absolutely giant screen.
I have a Z Fold 8 in the same passport form factor and it has slightly rounded corners on both the front and interior screen that are symmetrical along both axes. The usable space on the front screen is greater without those edges as it's just a ... normal phone screen?
Am I missing something?
I don't think that was subtle shade...
That being said, short-and-wide foldables have been done before, they just never stuck around. Google should've stuck with it on their Pixel Fold, same for Oppo with the Find N.
Shame that the short-and-wide foldables took this long to become more mainstream, since to me it's been the obvious form factor ever since I tried the older Galaxy Folds.
Like only allow A* paper for government forms or something that would force everyone to switch their paper handling infrastructure to A*.
Like first reply he literally says
> There is sorta one at some slight angles but basically no crease
And someone replied with a picture of it showing the crease.
It's probably fine and you don't notice it during use, but it's not some magic creaseless breakthrough.
It apparantly is a magic creaseless breakthrough... I'm eyeing one, and might put it on the Christmas wishlist...
With Z8 Fold Ultra, the crease is much more subtle and flat enough that I sometimes don't feel it while sliding my finger over it. Doesn't show signs of worsening over a month of rather intensive use (average 27 folds per day, yes there's an app that counts it, and it's underreporting because it took me two weeks to remember and exempt it from background activity limits and battery use optimizations...).
Point being, crease has stopped being an issue for actual use experience at least a generation or two of foldables ago. It's only something you worry about before purchase.
That said..I believe I’ve also seen some Chinese models ready claim this.
That said, I'm much more intrigued than I expected to be, to the point that I found myself thinking "maybe ...". Kudos to the team. The fold/unfold transitions are really slick, and I like what they've done with the extra side space.
The solution, of course, is the idea of leverage. 12 easy installments, or just lease it bro which apparently we’re doing now..for cell phones. But this solution isn’t sustainable. I’d have rather Apple not brought it to market it at all.
A real vibe shift might not even be possible if they don't bring back in-person live presentations. Can't believe they flew all these people in to play them a video. Though seeing how John Ternus' hands were shaking during his demo with ishowspeed, I don't know if they have it in them to go back to live presentations.
And what was the surprise in "surprise and shine" anyway? The name of it?
But yes the format of the Apple Event was formulaic and way too scripted/produced. Sure there's a place for some scripted content but losing the live unscripted element makes it like a corporate event from Microsoft or IBM. In fact those guys probably do more live unscripted stuff nowadays.
The iPhone Duo is a nice change from formulaic iPhone designs but it's long overdue and is at best a sideways step not a forward step by an Apple that seems increasingly out of touch and driven by cloud service KPI-targets over all other metrics. I wonder how long it will be before the customer revolt manifests, not because I dislike Apple (I loved their products for years) but because I believe that their current business focus leads them to erode trust and play it safe which ultimately alienates the very demographics that made Apple cool and then persuaded all those wanting to emulate that demographic to join the Apple bandwagon. Many of those power users are increasingly moving to Linux or using Mac/Apple ecosystems tactically. It won't be many release cycles for Apple to become the new Microsoft - something you have to use for certain tasks in certain industries but increasingly something you would choose to avoid.
It turned out fine and now he’s one of more charming presenters.
Apple can't afford to have demo problems or presentation glitches anymore. Hence the system that they have now.
Apple’s post-COVID keynotes have been like watching plastic people try to out virtue signal one another as they do their best Zuckerberg imitations. Nervousness and humanity anytime, please.
But I miss the Steve jobs presentations the most. I was watching one of his old presentations the other day from when he was in his 20s - he’s just so engaged and present and speaks from the heart compared to the polished media trained drivel of modern ceos
People’s life savings are at stake.
We laughed out loud when they claimed "the controls on the side let you celebrate your pictures on your lockscreen more"
Yea it's nice we can put whatever picture on a phone's lockscreen. It really is. Every phone does that.
Not once have I CELEBRATED my picture tho.
Open a bottle of champagne anyone?
I think it's a cultural thing to promote everything as absolutely amazing and astounding. Just being "good" is never enough, and it's wearying.
Over the top European celebration that doesn't translate to the rest of the world. Especially countries in the Middle East that don't drink.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1wbx1wo/there_is_a_cr...
I can’t see it being comfortable to hold and type on at all.
I predict the form factor will be gone within two years.
For an Android user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting two phones, attaching them with a small hinge or case, and using an app to synchronise content between the displays. From a laptop or tablet, the same applications and files could be accessed through existing cloud services
My iPad from 2018 still has a full width keyboard so I have to hunt and peck which is annoying. I would hope that apple designs this better for the iPhone duo.
I predict you will be wrong.
We all hate the over acted, over produced keynote format of today
Basically Apple does what Chinese has done so far, 3d print a buffer to ease the crease. Oppo find n5, afaict, is the first one to do that.
Put down the kool aid mate.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1wc3ei0/...
Apple distortion field or something?
Since we can't mention Apple marketing making comments on hacker news, let's say they are on Reddit. :D
To each their own. Personally, I find it horrendous. It’s by far the ugliest iPhone i’ve seen, possibly the ugliest Apple device ever. But then again, paraphrasing The Dude¹ “that’s just like, uh, my opinion, man”. The last time I liked an iPhone (I still use them) was the original SE. I loathe the camera bump; I’d gladly take a worse camera (and cheaper phone) to not have that.
I could not disagree more.
There are 3 ways to fold a phone:
1) The trifold: A phone that folds out into a tablet. (e.g. https://consumer.huawei.com/my/phones/mate-xt-ultimate-desig...)
2) The clam shell: a phone that folds down into a more compact form. (e.g. https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/samsung-galaxy-z-flip8-5g...)
3) The book: an awkwardly squashed phone that folds out into two awkwardly squashed phones taped together. (e.g. https://news.microsoft.com/surfaceduo/)
The trifold fits in your pocket.
The clamshell fits in small pockets (making it popular for women).
The book in a pocket is just uncomfortable (assuming it fits in at all).
They looked at all the folding phone formats and went with the worst possible one: the one that you can't fit in your pocket comfortably.
Further more, they looked at the worst book fold and decided to associate themselves with it by stealing its name, The S̶u̶r̶f̶a̶c̶e̶ Apple Duo: https://news.microsoft.com/surfaceduo/
--------------------
Apple releasing this is exactly what it looks like when there's no one helming the wheel.
I think I'd prefer it over having a phone with screens on two sides (and the cost of having two screens over one that's partially used sometimes and fully used at others).
Is there a way to do it differently without making it look strange? Perhaps using a different kind of hinge so that the primary screen slides out to a side?
1) mine folds a few degree short of flat. Not sure if it gotten worse over the years but never noticed not folding flat cause any less enjoyment of the large screen.
2. My screen protector started peeling near the top on the crease close to the 2 year mark. It's growing. Haven't decided what to do about it yet but I'm not against just ripping it and going naked on the inside.
3. 50/50 if an app looks good or not in wide. My usual use case that works great on full screen is web browsing, reading docs/ebooks, zoom calls when someone is sharing code/docs that's normally too hard to read on regular devices, youtube doom scrolling videos with comment/ai summary on 1 view. For those experiences that account for 90% of my reason to unfold it works great.
Ternus opened the Duo segment of the presentation talking about aspect ratio. Having the "right" aspect ratio drove the design for this more than anything else. It's something Apple really cares about (c.f. iPads and MacBooks)
Because one is used predominantly vertically, and the other horizontally.
As long as there's this landscape vs portrait difference, how does the aspect ratio similarity actually help?
d = 7.58in = 192.532mm [1]
d^2 = w^2+h^2
Unfolded:
h = d/sqrt(3) = ~111.1584mm
w = h*sqrt(2) = ~157.2017mm
Closest ISO 216 size: A6 (105x148)
Folded:
D = 5.36in = 136.114mm [1]
H = D/sqrt(3) = ~78.5855mm
W = H*sqrt(2) = ~111.1366mm
Closest ISO 216 size: A7 (74x105)
I don’t think I saw a “us letter” sized piece of paper until I was an adult.
Apparently the reagan admin is responsible for making this our official government document size, and no one knows exactly why this size was chosen.
This is such a non issue given that iOS developers already have so many resolutions to test.
Of course it does. They show the most basic example right on the page, which is that you can side-by-side full screen apps.
We still use QWERTY keyboards even though our highly futuristic typewriters don't jam anymore. We type commands on tty teleTypeWriter, we save files with buttons using a floppy disk icon, etc etc.
It is funny to calculate it from proportions of A3 and A4 formats.
Like Celsius - sounds great on paper, not any better (and in some ways, worse) in day to day weather/temperature.
One of the few exceptions I find is metric paper sizes. It's such a beautiful way of designing the sizes that is not only perfect on paper (pun proudly intended), is also totally practical in real life.
In a completely clean room environment where a designer had never seen a folding phone, but had all the context of the iPhone and everything Apple had done, they would develop almost exactly the same design and features.
Designers have also been exploring the concept of foldable devices for literal decades, well before any reached the market. I have an industrial design and technology degree, we did a project in 2005 where we explored the designs around this, looking at the UI, the physical interaction, everything. My design had a similar aspect ratio and size, as I am sure half the student did my year and every other year they ran the project. (the iPhone Duo is about thousand times better than my design though!)
Thats not to say the Microsoft designers didn't do an incredible job, they did, but they were building on decades of design ideation from those that had experimented before them.
This feature is also standard in existing folding phones. It's a pretty obvious feature tbh.
Remember... the Duo was supposed to be a cursed Windows 10-esque device. They brought on Movial to do a pivot to Android, then bought out the porting team in early 2024 to keep working on what they should have released in preparation for the Duo 2 (which is what they actually NEEDED to sell as an Android device at the time, but flopped in doing so).
I returned mine in late 2023. It wasn't the best experience and I was missing out on things like NFC dearly.
The curse of doing anything interesting with Android.
While the Duo is more subtle for some changes, it might show us the "new" Apple where the innovation comes from fine-tuning and getting a mature product to the market.
At least from their presentation, it looks like they sat on the fence and looked at pretty much any good or bad thing that happened during the past years.
Seeing some reviews on the Samsung Fold for example, mentioned the speakers feeling weird as the audio orientation is fixed to the speakers location. Those little details make a difference.
I really hope modern Apple would go back to the details and nuances.
That's actually the old Apple. Before the iPhone (and after Jobs' return) it was their standard operation procedure: the iMac was a refined workstation, the AirPort was a refined WiFi router, the Time Machine was a refined NAS, the iPod was a refined MP3 player...
Even after the iPad, they mostly cranked out middling stuff like the airPods, all the way to the Vision. They would take whatever good idea was floating around the hardware market, give it a careful polish, and sell it at twice the price. And there is nothing wrong with that - constantly chasing revolutions is risky (see the Vision).
They are good design choices, which is different.
Me. I get why people like small phones. But, I've have the iPhone Jumbo Huge edition for a long time now. I use my phone as a pocket tablet 10X more than as a phone.
Looking at the Duo specs https://www.apple.com/iphone-duo/specs/ vs my current 12 Max Pro specs https://support.apple.com/en-us/111874 it looks like the differences I care about are
1) 1878 pixels over 4.64" vs. 1284 over 3.07" 2) Default camera mode is 48 MP vs 12. Other modes are surprisingly similar. 3) A much faster CPU
I'm sure there are 1,000 more small differences. But, my 12 Jumbo Huge from late 2020 still runs great. If I were to upgrade, I'd get the Duo. We'll see how much longer I keep waiting, I guess.
if there was ever an iphone that was the size of the iphone 5 it would literally be over for me id pay 2000 dollars for it i dont care. there's literally no other options for small phones that don't suck right now i have looked exhaustively. the 13 mini is still the small phone king it's the best damn phone in the milky way.
I have bad eyesight. I've worn bifocals since I was 16, and I'm twice that age now. I literally used to carry around a 7" tablet in my pocket in college because I didn't have a smartphone yet. I want to be able to make things big so I can read them easily and not have to scroll constantly.
When I go for walks I only bring my smart watch. If I break an ankle or someone has an emergency we can talk. But I can't pull up a bench and doomscroll for an hour.
It almost feels like they make smartphones not to be handy tools for the digital age (who am I kidding), but for ultimate content consumption.
Maybe they only sell to 5% of users but they sell and at top prices, meaning more possible profit.
And you can’t grow the iPhone at the current sizes. Everyone who once wants at one of those sizes already has one. You either have to convince them to upgrade or switch, and those are both hard.
However, if you give them a choice of something they haven’t had before, it’s way easier. Get the people who wanted to fold and went to android and would like to come back. Get the people who have a max and want something bigger. Get the people with an iPhone 13 who are simply curious enough to do the upgrade, but otherwise would’ve stood still.
Gotta sell.
It also needs a kill switch. (Non parents will judge I am sure)
The device with good parental controls will be the go to for many parents regardless of practically anything else.
Lots of companies make terrible websites, but has been true since long before mobile phones existed.
I don’t know what I’ll do when this phone becomes obsolete. Get surgery for bigger hands?
It seems mad to me that it wasn’t more popular. Though a lot of things that are popular seem mad to me too.
Apple produces a "small" phone (S or Mini series) only every few years because that's enough to saturate that market.
But these days I pretty much need to buy different pants so the goddamned phone fits without dislocating my hip.
It's not a 2000 buck problem though.
I'd like to carry my iPad and tether it to my watch instead of my phone, and just have those two and the headphones as my Personal Area Network. Nobody is even doing an all-in-one device anymore, but we keep pretending like that's the world we live in.
Folded, I get, I want it to be a "regular size", but the only reason I don't like big devices is because they are clumsy to store in my pocket and use/grab one handed. If I can use it BOTH ways, now I have a choice. One handed for quick usage, and two handed for extended sessions. For $2K, yeah, I'm going to want a full fledged computer in my pocket.
If you look at phone sales Pro Max out-sells the regular Pro
Regular people like big phones
Oh well :)
I literally just got 7 pairs of pants tailored with bigger pockets so they could hold my freaking phone without it falling out all the time. I would love a smaller more petite phone.
Me! Sounds great. Ideally a full fold up laptops or some sort of HUD, but I'll take a pocket folding tablet for now.
There's also plenty of small Android phones.
I'm getting this thing.
Changes in eyesight change your priorities.
That's a mix, people like phones of all sizes.
> Who is like, "damn I wish I had a tablet that I could fold up and still barely fit in my pocket"?
But this question is silly. When your reference point switches from people buying phones to people buying tablets, there's a huge demand for tablets that are more portable.
Everyone who buys larger phones instead of the iPhone Mini. The market decided that.
You want a Zanco phone. They are tiny. Apparently designed to be small enough for prisoners to keep in their orifices.
Maybe the answer lies in only wearing an Ultra watch if it becomes powerful enough and can function independently of a phone.
Daily life is ok with it but most of the issues come from banking and governmental apps.
I wish society was not as keen on making everything go through smartphones nowadays.
After looking one up... https://www.engadget.com/img/gallery/apple-iphone-duo-announ... It looks awkward to hold.
no
This is ignoring the fact that developers who choose these cross-platform frameworks don't seem to care much about quality and general polish.
For iOS 27, apps are automatically automatically opted in to resizability. Apple was clear at WWDC that apps need to dynamically adjust to any available scene size at runtime, not just for iPhone Duo, but also for iPad windowing and iPhone Mirroring on Mac. There may be a grace period, but Apple hasn't shared one AFAIK.
I'm not trying to discount the efforts involved here, just pointing out that they aren't starting from scratch. And much of the required features to support a dual-screen (triple-?) phone has been in the works for a while.
Of course, these days a three or four or more year old phone is often still perfectly usable even for a tech enthusiast.
You see it a lot on YouTube videos where people are talking to the camera and they're waving their hands around all over the place and pointing for no discernible reason. It doesn't change the information they're presenting, nor does it add to it. In fact, it just distracts you with someone waving their hands around.
So the same applies to presentations from a company. If you watched two people talking in a park, you wouldn't see this many gestures.
If someone truly can't tolerate their phone screen being in any way perceptibly different from a single flat pane of glass, then they shouldn't buy foldables. It's something you have to get used to or ignore, with any brand. Especially over time as you bend and unbend the phone repeatedly and the crease deepens.
And it absolutely is a feature.
These are unparalleled features. You cannot even imagine them, if you don't own an iPhone.
Apple employees get to claim very little ownership over their work (even in the context of a large tech company), so having all those speaker slots is one way they can provide that ego boost that is so crucial for long term employee morale & retention
It's also probably better for Apple to lose the immature egoist weirdos as managers because there were thousands of employees involved in shipping all of the stuff unveiled today who didnt get their 5 seconds in the spotlight either, and I don't see any of them crying about it.
The screen real estate is bigger than the numbers indicate, as the more square a display is, the larger its area is compared to its diagonal.
I'd rather have a touchscreen macbook pro.
But I don’t want macOS on an iPhone/iPad. If I wanted a device with poorer hardware security that ran an OS with a fundamentally weaker security model I’d just buy a MacBook and be done with it.
Basically no one knows Samsung Dex exists. They could be the ones to bring it to the attention of the mainstream.
I like the idea that if I was stuck in a car dealership or something for service, I could just plug into a laptop docking station with USB-C and use my phone on a bigger screen. Realistically, I’d probably never do it.
But they also might be afraid it would cannibalize Macs, especially now that they have the Neo. And it would certainly just be one more thing to test and keep working.
It's possible that the audience for anyone that would plug in their phone to a KVM setup is just too niche to care. Just seems like with computing being so expensive these days, I really want to get the most out of my devices.
Running android in a DeX mode is fine, but its still android. Now that MacOS is already optimized to run on mobile chips, it seems so limiting that it can't run on iPhones just because of customer segmentation.
I bought them to code more effectively on my laptop at my then girlfriend (now wife)'s house. The display was too pixely and distracting for me to code on. However, its plenty good enough for videos.
For videos I mostly use it with my phone (16 pro). Some apps are great (Netflix, AppleTV) and are smart enough to turn off the iPhone screen. Others (VLC, HBO) leave the screen on and burn battery at 2x-3x the rate of AppleTV or Netflix. I can watch AppleTV or Netflix on a coast-to-coast flight an still have plenty of battery left over. With HBO I use probably 20% battery per hour.
I'm still rocking my iPhone 12 mini but am planning on getting an 18 when the normal one is released :-)
No problem buying it either, though it’s about 2x the price of letter. (I go through about 100-200 sheets per year mostly due to my daughter drawing on it.)
I don’t actually store any printed paper since anything gets scanned and shredded, so no comment on long term filing.
(Due to this experience I recently partially switched to B5 paper, which is a nice size compromise instead of A5 which would be too small. Anything A4 will print to it without scaling issues of course, just takes up a bit less space.)
- Opened in portrait it has replaced my kindle.
- Opened in landscape it's the perfect tablet - great for media and web browsing.
- Add a GameSir G8 plus and it replaces handheld gaming device like a steam deck
- Dex mode + a monitor on an arm, keyboard & mouse and moonlight/jellyfin to your main computer and now you have a full fat computer at your couch
- Even closed the front screen is just better. I didn't trade in my Pixel 10 Pro XL because I like to keep one backup phone around. Now when I go to keep it charged it just feels goofily tall by comparison.
I'm probably a fold convert forever at this point. I don't think I'll go back to non-folds. But also I don't think I'll ever buy a non-passport aspect ratio phone again ever if I have the option. The ratio is everything, the crease by contrast doesn't matter a bit.
Also: if you’re going to charge laptop-grade prices for a phone because it… gets bigger? Well, better make it a really good experience, i.e. no crease that develops fractures later.
Obviously, if you have macbooks of different sizes, you would need to buy separate duos for each size. MacBook Air might have a 27" dock, incompatible with the rest.
That's every year since it's introduction
H/W = W/(H/2) (halving long side H and flipping maintains aspect ratio)
= 2W/H (multiply numerator and denominator by 2)
H² = 2W² (multiply both sides by HW)
H = √2·W ≈ 1.41 W (take the positive square root; H, W > 0)2. Receipts: https://postimg.cc/8sDTTT0W
I think this was a first year project, and a small correction: mine want quite the same aspect ratio.
A whole market of 1990s/2000s folding devices in similar categories, clamshells, PDAs, microPCs, palmtops, subnotebooks, handheld PCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_PC
Apple has been pretty consistent with cheaper iPhones.
Oh, well there's the problem. Apple isn't catering to millennial jeans fits any more. Only half-joking.
Let a video do the big reveal and overview then let the people talk about details or do demos.
I don’t know exactly toy. But there must be something with a little more life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg
Yes they had some good other presenters at the keynotes but Steve Jobs was extraordinary.
It actually comes right from Apple. Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple employee, has claimed it was originally said in 1981 by another employee, Bud Tribble, to describe Steve Jobs. It was supposedly a reference to Star Trek.
Hard disagree. It was a great phone. The only disadvantage was battery life, if you were a heavy phone user you needed to charge it to get through the day, but as a phone itself (phoning/messaging people) it was delightful!
Look at the clip here of Steve scrolling through contacts like it is butter and the awe of the audience: On other phones large contact lists were cumbersome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9kahkr/11_years_ago_...
Than visual voicemail! On other phones you called into voicemail and had to hear sequentially through all. With At&t Apple had the unique feature that one can scroll selectively through voice mails.
Of course the second iPhone 3G with the wjooshing sounding light saber app and the app were a beer is poured out made it cultural viral. And then Apple noticed withe the 4/4S that a good camera in your pocket was THE must have killer feature (especially for the women and newborn parent demographics). But the first model was a great tool for just phoning people.
No, it was the touchscreen and new UI paradigms.
The area where all the other existing foldable phones are dead in the water is the OS software integration with the hardware and unlike the first time around, they are competing with Apple that has four other ecosystems that can interface with the new phone seamlessly.
And more importantly, all the developers who bothered to follow most of the rules will have most of their stuff running on that new phone on day one.
They were not cool.
Their phones were not cool. The music services bundled were shit.
What made the iphone cool? no buttons, screen running at 60hz. nice animations.
The only reason Google and Android took off? Well it didn’t hurt to have a mole/spy Eric Schmidt on the Apple board.
It's bizarre and makes no logical sense.
now i know…
I don’t think Apple should or even would allow any sort of bare metal macOS mode on their mobile devices, but at least for iPads with M chips I could see them offering macOS via VMs. We know hardware acceleration works, there’s a working virtualization app that runs macOS at native speeds on jailbroken iPads.
I get why they do it, but it sucks that at least at minimum we don’t have a mode that turns it into basically iPadOS when connected to an external monitor, even if the performance and heat problems would be worse. But making that feature available and exclusive to the Duo would have made it more appealing.
That's 800 Euro less and Samsung will mostly decrease prices further while Apple will barely.
It had not hurt Apple to not have the most unit sold in the past while taking most of the money.
I imagine that the $2000 Samsung Phone has a healthy margin and makes money insofar it's not great for them that apple enters this segment of the market.
But of course you are right: Samsung is of course not dead in the water. But it's obvious that it already lost in regard to mindshare (exemplified by the number of comments here).
They let other tech companies break the ground, release something new and truly innovative and unique -- say a folding phone (it's basically a solidified meme amongst the IT crowd now - "Oh Apple will get all of samsungs features from 2 years ago finally!" -- not realizing that this is intentional), and they will let them front all the risk of whether or not it has staying power -- then they will come in and innovate at the margins and bring it into the Apple ecosystem, which is an advantage in of itself at this point.
At least the most memorable
Don't charge me 2000-3800$ and insult my intelligence with stuff like this
(No, I don't know what "celebrate" is meant to mean either! It's daft!)
Many office workers gets some MacBook and iPhone by their employees. Do they actually need both if the employer can just hand them something like a duo which transforms to a desktop computer via usb-c cable?
Ive said for years there is nothing technical hindering an iPhone to become a something that looks like macOS when connected to large display, its just ui transformation.
But then, apple can't sell you an iPhone, an iPad and a MacBook. This is why they don't go this route I think, and this is maybe the hinder that something like the iPhone duo won't reach the full potential it could have.
Apple isn't omnipotent, they have misses too.
Speaking of which, when will it be in the stores to play with?
Very few have the same problem among FAANG and others.
Internally they can do anything EXCEPT fuck with the ad revenue. If you get more ways to get data off users and ad views, good.
We can't mention that?
Maybe the C suite doesn't understand how bad their current talks are.
It's Apple, not a budget Samsung. They 100% would not put out a product that starts having obvious lines down the center of it after using it for a couple months. You'll see when the 6-month reviews come in.
Danox is just saying (IMHO) that Google can’t be bothered because they don’t need Android to be good, they just need it to be good enough to continue existing.
Google has led many horses to this spring, only to watch Samsung ship some godawful monstrosity and refuse to drink. It's part of Android's identity, not Google's.
Red Hat, systemd, Chrome, Webkit, Android, and a few others come to mind. Others might include Kubernetes, OpenJDK, Clang, React, Docker, Git/Github.
Forks are possible but sustained forks are expensive, and <https://xkcd.com/927/> is always relevant.
It's helpful to note that the guy who literally wrote the textbook on lock-in went on to have a career as Google's chief economist: Hal Varian, Information Rules.
Google lacks the authority to unify folding phone software any better than they can unify homescreen launchers or dialer applications. It's a lost cause. They can spend billions on building the best one ever, and then Motorola or LG will ship a worse proprietary version and never update it. This pattern does not arise from a lack of charity on Google's part.
The tech just isn’t there yet. Apple tends to wait until it is.
Playing it safe with media-trained MBA-centric thinking to avoid volatility works on one level if that's the KPI you're monitoring but it doesn't track the invisible damage done to the brand. Apple is at real risk of becoming a stagnant, Microsoft-like behemoth to the very users that made it cool and that can turn into an exodus that pummels the stock by more than 5-15% for a few weeks and would be much harder to fix.
Ternus hasn't impressed me so far - he's a safe choice and the iPhone Duo is a safe level of innovation alongside the predictable spec bumps to the regular phones and watches. Macbook Neo devalued the brand permanently despite its popularity it kills hardware margins and shows Apple is looking to move all its customers to recurring revenue models using the cloud such that low margin hardware is no longer a problem as it provides a ramp for more customers to the cloud. However that model is now being pushed by Apple like cocaine yet the tech-savvy creatives and heavy weight tech users want something not that. Apple's success or failure medium to long term depends on them not losing relevance to those demographics or the brand value will drop way way way more than 15% for way longer.
I'd say a big part of the problem too is the culture that developed at Apple after they moved into their new Giant Ivory Sphincter HQ building. It's isolated the company from users and allows their internal culture to disconnect from the real world. Such a shame as the HQ could have really been awesome.
18 months ago I bought a used iPhone 13 Mini, and much prefer it. I used to feel unhappy every time I held the SE 2022. I never liked the wider, rounded-edged shape of the iPhone 7/8. I'm finally going to get a battery swap for the 13 Mini from Apple this afternoon.
I'm hoping that stops me vaguely wondering about battery swapping for my SE 2016 (1st gen) and going back to using that. I don't think I'd want to go back to a camera that old, and too many apps are not supported. That was the last iPhone I really loved. Fastest smartphone on the planet in benchmarks when it was released, and in the rare event that it slipped out of your (someone else's) hand, it felt unbreakable compared to newer iPhones.
I remember one WWDC, where Ian Diery was giving a demo with a young man, and asked “Where’s the beef?” The kid looked down at his pants, and the crowd burst into laughter.
Diery did not laugh. He was a fairly serious chap, with no discernible sense of humor, so I expect his assistant was sanctioned for that.
I think the last DuDub I went to, was around 2005 (pre-iPhone). I know it was at Moscone. Jobs led that. He was one of the best presenters I’ve ever seen. He could recover from curveballs almost imperceptibly.
The first, was in 1987, or 1988. One of the first.
> Face ID ... didn't quite work as he expected. "Your passcode is required to enable Face ID" popped up, eliciting a nervous chuckle out of Craig and forcing him to switch to the spare demo phone
From that perspective, the discontinuation feels more like an act of embarrassment by management than the result of a rational cost/benefit analysis. Given that reportedly the Air is selling substantially worse than the Minis, and I suspect the Duo will also fail to match its internal sales target because IMO Apple _usually_* overestimates the number of buyers willing to drop $2k+ for personal purchases (lots of corporations are willing to buy laptops for $2k+, but I suspect that almost all AVP/iPhone purchases are direct to consumer), I wonder if Ternus be willing to adopt a strategy that will keep profitable products around even if they don't meet their target. I suspect this is sort of an effect of the predictors being in some kind of high income bubble where _everyone_ they know has enough cash to drop $3500 to try out an AVP.
I had a Mini 12 and upgrade every 3 years, so I didn't bother with a mini 13. I ended up buying a base 15 and hoping that I wouldn't mind it, but my regret has only gotten stronger over time.
* Exception: they have dramatically underestimated the number of people wanting to buy high ram minis/studios for local AI.
I have worked for multiple companies that provide iPhones to employees, but neither of them would budget for the newest best version, unlike with the macbook pros. Companies know that if they buy devs computers with more ram and a bigger high resolution screen, we will get more done, but the main reason to provide a top end iPhone is as a perk.
Might be different with the Duo because I can see an argument for it being a better productivity device for people who need to send a lot of emails from a mobile.
The Duo has the same diagonal as a Mini when closed (5.4"), so I'd love to see them eventually embrace that size and release a 7:5 ratio SE or something similar.
I'm curious, what iOS are you running on it?
Stumbled on my old iPhone 5S in the back of a drawer recently and could not believe how good it felt in my hand, even having only used 12 and 13 Mini models since 2021. What an excellent form factor and construction. Would happily pay a big premium for a modern version of it. Dreaming of a sub-mini phone trend. Sell me a $1500 Zoolander phone—not even joking!
Or financing, paying it off over a fixed term, after which you own it outright?
The latter, I understand. And I'm also familiar with it.
But the former, I find hard to believe. Although, I'm not from the US. Are you telling me people rented nokia bricks in the aughts?
> Are you telling me people rented nokia bricks in the aughts?
Myself and my family did, for sure. My parents made me pay my own phone bill too, so I spent a long time in the Alltel shop staring at the different phones and probably annoying the clerk.
Like leasing a car, the residual value may differ, which can either make it worthwhile or not. Around ten years ago the lease deals were really good. Nowadays my carrier has all but discouraged them.
2. If you’re upgrading your phone on a one or two year cycle, you end up paying the sticker price minus the trade in value at the end of the term.
I don’t really see an issue in either scenario?
To this day, I suspect many people have a line-item on their Internet bill for their modem/router rental/lease.
Why you would find this hard to believe is actually the curious thing to me.
People have been leasing and renting phones since the 1930's. I guess you missed out on the Ma Bell century.
Where I'm from, it is common to finance a phone as part of a mobile contract: your monthly payment includes a device payment and the network subscription cost. Typically 24 months, but in recent years I've seen 36 month contracts as well. But at the end of the term the device is yours outright. No further down payments needed. Usually the device payment is effectively 0% APR over the 2 years, so it's a pretty lucrative deal. I've purchased all my phones this way over the past 20 years.
I just buy more shares of blue chip companies and let them pay in the future for anything I want to buy.
Apple can force developers to use APIs that make the apps work correctly on the foldable even if they are not directly optimized.
This obviously makes life easier for both users and developers.
If I were to guess, this does look like a new ratio to support, but at least it's just 1 instead of 2.
Absolutely no need to be rude.
How? Most foldables I've seen have an inner screen with a ratio so bad that the full screen video results in mostly black bars and the image is barely bigger than watching it on the outside screen.
The word "refined" is doing a lot of work here. Just a few examples:
- The iMac had a design unlike any desktop computer before it.
- While a couple products had come before it, AirPort was the first affordable, mass-market consumer Wi-Fi router.
- The iPod was the first MP3 player to incorporate the then brand new 1.8" Toshiba hard drives that enabled it to have for the time incredible capacity for the package size. And Apple innovated with the click-wheel user interface.
All three of these products most people would see as much more than "refinements" but actually big innovations compared to what was already available in the market.
Debatable, but it was still just a personal computer - sure, refined in exterior, but inside it was still just a workstation.
> AirPort was the first affordable, mass-market consumer Wi-Fi router.
Absolutely not. There were plenty already on the market. Was it the first one to have a name, rather than some crappy codename? Maybe. But mostly it was the polished version of an existing product.
> The iPod was the first MP3 player to incorporate the then brand new 1.8" Toshiba hard drives
It was still an MP3 player, there were already loads on the market - some even with similar capacity. It was refined in UI, yes.
> most people would see as much more than "refinements"
Most people with no knowledge of the market, maybe. Everyone in the space marvelled at the skills Apple displayed in taking existing products, refining them, and selling them like they were the first-ever products in those segments. That's when the "reality distortion field" was first described.
This is also why, multiple times, established players failed to understand these products would succeed - see the famous quips about the Zune and later the iPhone. Everyone knew those products existed already, they just did not grasp how Apple's knack for polishing (and marketing) could make such a big difference.
Please tell us about the mass market, affordable, WiFi routers before AirPort. Links please. AirPort came out in July, 1999. Apple did deep negotiations with Lucent to get the price of the equipment down. And they also innovated with an incredibly easy to use software interface that set the standard for WiFi products to this day. I don't know what products you're talking about that came before it that similarly cost $100 for client and $300 for router.
And if you can't see why great product and user interface design can be a type of big innovation (re iMac, iPod) then you're blind.
Utterly brilliant.
Or like many of us, you buy cheaper phones outright for your prepaid phone plans. The fact that people still go for contract phone services and finance a new phone every two years blows my mind. Especially when I can get all the data/minutes/texts I need for $15 a month on a service like Tello, and just get a phone for $200-400 that I can use until it dies. Which is currently a used iPhone 11 I recently opened up to replace the battery.
Yes they would, and neither of the existing scaling methods works robustly on regular phone sizes, so this is a particularly exciting opportunity.
Also there is an under-recognized problem with touch target sizes. For most touch targets, the common minimums are OK but not great for many people with large fingers and/or minor tremor. With a 1.31 zoom (I did more precise math) you get ~1.7x total increase in pixels in touch targets. Some may read their messages, etc on the outside screen, then flip to expanded for the tricky interactivity.
Or laugh at ourselves about it, which is what we normally do.
I think switching to metric would make far more sense than this.
On page 52 (57 of the PDF), there’s a letter dated December 18th 1978 (Carter administration, not Reagan) from the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing adopting 8.5”x11”, effective January 1st 1980 so departments & agencies could use up their 8.5”x10.5” stock.
I also found this article from Time from January 15th 1979 that this was actually slightly cheaper despite using more paper: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0%2C33009%2...
The government adopted 8.5”x10.5” to save money back in 1921 vs what was already the industry standard of 8.5”x11”, but this ended up backfiring and a General Services Administration report in 1972 recommended switching to 8.5”x11” would reduce by 5% the amount of times a secretary would need a second page. The Joint Committee of Printing estimated this change would save several million dollars.
> On hearing the news, one straight-faced bureaucrat in the Government Printing Office said of his colleagues' reaction to the news: "Some people think that this issue has been inadequately studied."
Apparently the American Forest & Paper Association is under the impression that it was the Reagan administration’s proclamation:
> Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120220192919/http://www.afandp...
“The most beautiful invention of all time”
Check whether any device you’re looking at requires a subscription.
I'm not sure how; the UK is an Anglosphere country that uses A4 and desktop machines as far back as I can remember (mid 90s) also correctly defaulted to A4 when printing. I suspect it's more likely to be that there's been English (UK) and English (US) options in OS's for a long time and Aus got defaulted to English (US) rather than English (UK) which carried some settings that weren't correct by default.
It’s a terrific car if you want a great handling convertible at a low price point. As you said, it’s fun.
It’s not good at moving a lot of people or things, or going really fast, or lasting for 500k miles, or being as cheap as possible. Other cars are good at some of those things, but what is the Miata missing that is otherwise required to be a ‘good’ car?
Abbreviations waste people’s time
Apple’s strategic position is to be the main device by which apps and AI can gain access to end users. This puts them in a nice position to charge a toll on everything that passes through their device. Now if someone were to come out with a new type of device and a new paradigm that could disrupt iPhone as the main device, Apple would be in trouble.
Not long ago, Zuck seemed really confident about metaverse/AR/VR. Apple took the disruption threat seriously and countered with AVP. Now it looks like metaverse flopped. I suspect the priority of AVP has gone down inside Apple accordingly.
At each step the tech gets smaller and more physically accessible, the use case gets more interactive and less demanding and serious, and the demographic gets wider and less technically educated.
Apple owned a huge part of the last change with the iPhone.
What's the next step in the series?
Clearly it's not a huge device you strap to your face.
But it's also not an easy question to answer. What is the next step after social media?
From a software POV it's AI, but where's the matching hardware? The next gen has to be even smaller, multimodal, but still physically interactive, likely always on.
Glasses are the closest, but not there yet.
So I think we're still in the early Nokia mobile stage. The concept exists and the current tech is beginning to be workable, but the gamechanger refinement and perfection of the concept is still a way off.
The processors have to be what? Three or four times faster and the battery life has to be at the level of a MacBook Pro with everything squeezed into a device half its current size how many years away is that 3-4 years? And don’t forget the accessory processors that Apple designed specifically for that Vision Pro.
Every 4-5 years they need something to show off their tech and they begrudgingly look to gaming studios to provide some demos for them. They get the demos, get some hype, then put it straight back into the box. Devs move on because they know their audience isn't there anyway. Rinse and repeat. This last time was to help show off their unified architecture with AAA games running on an IPad.
For nice hardware with hardly any content, not making huge strides to get existing VR content on it was a terrible strategy. And Apple can afford to just buy one of the bigger players to get content too.
Scrap the passthrough cameras, the LCD eyes, and all that complexity.
At the time, they weren't even among the biggest tech companies. Today, they are one of the largest companies in the world.
As much true back then, as it is in 2026, with the added category of some GNU/Linux users buying shiny hardware and then complaining macOS UNIX implementation doesn't overlap with GNU/Linux, beyond regular POSIX.
The MS investment didn’t save them. It provided both companies cover in the news. “Apple won’t die” and “Microsoft isn’t a monopoly”.
Neither was a fact and both benefited.
It was presented as an investment, but the $150 million was just the initial payment of a much larger settlement which was not disclosed.
Unless by "Apple Silicon" you specifically meant "the decision to transition from x86 to ARM". There is actual work there, but not a lot of risk. Apple famously maintained an internal x86 port of Mac OS X for years after Rhapsody was shitcanned and renamed "Mac OS X Server", so doing the same with ARM isn't that worse. iOS was derived from OSX; and just having iOS already up and running on ARM is already a good deal of the way towards a macOS port to ARM. In fact, it got easier as iOS got more technology hand-me-downs from macOS.
That undercuts the work how?
AND yes, both companies benefited.
What likely saved Apple was the fact that despite undergoing three CEOs, they did not squander the $150 million settlement with Microsoft.
But they still had sufficient funds, equivalent to $2 billion at today’s value, to continue their operations. They also had a team of highly skilled individuals who went on to develop a new operating system, OSX, and build computers with G3, G4 processors. They have also released new iMacs, Mac laptops, and Mac desktop computers to the public.
Does this imply that with $2 billion today, plus or minus $1 billion, one can achieve all these accomplishments and grow into a large technology company? It seems like an unlikely long-shot that Microsoft saved Apple.
In hindsight, it appears that Apple had some exceptionally talented individuals, certainty more talented than the group at Microsoft and Intel.
Because both Microsoft and Intel, in hindsight, sat on their laurels for the better part of two decades. -
Does this imply that with $2 billion today, plus or minus $1 billion, one can achieve all these accomplishments and grow into a large technology company?
You're the only one implying those things!
It seems like an unlikely long-shot that Microsoft saved Apple.
Why unlikely? They got into financial trouble due to bad decisions. They needed a bail-out from a former arch-rival to dodge bankruptcy. They eventually achieved huge success due to better decisions. There's nothing contradictory there.
Jobs was booed when he announced it! It had very much the air of Lando Calrissian announcing Cloud City's strategic partnership with Darth Vader.
Still, a small camera is an odd thing to cut.
I'd love the ability to have AVP immersion with my MBP on a flight, and combined with Airpods, you'd be able to block out everything. I don't need to walk around and wouldn't need to interact through it. It's like transparency for Airpods: an overengineered alternative to just taking an airpod out (or in this case, lifting the headset up).
There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to for example take a stroll in the park and read my email, song lyrics, etc.. without craning my neck downwards or holding my phone right in front of my face. The content should just be where my eyes are looking. Even laying on the couch to watch a movie is annoying when you have to hold your arm up and shift the balance of your iPad all the time to stop getting tired. Just put it in front of me. For input, I favor a ring you can scroll and squeeze.
I’ve thought about hanging a book-holder from the ceiling by a string for this reason. Maybe a ton of helium or a quiet drone would work too. I think thats’ the frontier..having our current setups but just floating around us.
VR gaming is a niche even among hardcore gamers. There’s some value in spatial computing for just being a more ergonomic way to do computer stuff (i.e. not being in a fixed position all day, being able to walk around while you work) but it’d need to be able to hit everything a Mac can do with no compromises to be worth it at that price (and at the cost of making you look goofy). So far it seems like it’s only found real utility in some very specific industrial and scientific research contexts, which is very cool but probably isn’t the lane a mass market consumer products manufacturer wants as their play long-term.
Apple’s UI work on AVP is under-appreciated. It’s been improving over the years, as real usage showed the need for things like shared world anchors and coordinates, prediction for pose estimation, etc.
The hardware isn’t ready yet. At this point I half-think the UI won’t be truly real until we have BCI (brain-computer interface for the offended party above). But it may well take a decade to really land what an always-on, sometimes-invisible AR UI looks like and how it works.
However even today, if you go to the European countries less fortunate with their economies, having anything Apple is usually obtained via credit, or some contract bundling, for example with the cable or Internet operator, naturally bound to a minimal duration of 24 to 36 months contract.
Not something like in US and countries with similar economies where most people don't think twice to get Apple gear, and quickly pre-order new gear after each couple of new product announcements.
Given how many iPhones I've noticed suddenly showed up in hands of regular people, including teenagers, in the last couple years in Poland, I imagine there's healthy second-hand/used devices market going too. iPhones have reputation of being long lasting devices (battery shenanigans notwithstanding), maybe the reputation is true.
However, yeah iPhones hold quite well in 2nd hand market.
Unless there is some upsight I am missing, I think the OP just "doesn't get it"
yes, you do. Two squares will fold together into the space of one square, and the same with 2 A4 sheets of paper, or two 8½x11 sheets of paper, two of them will fold together to make one of them.
I.e. an aspect ratio of Sqrt(2)is the only one where the inner screen (full) and inner screen (half) match, and they seem to have tried to make the outer screen share a nearly identical aspect ratio too. I guess it's a nice consideration for more consistency in layouts for apps targeting the device. Not sure I'm particularly excited about that myself though.
but the context was "see, you can have two different apps running side by side, each with the same aspect ratio as either of the apps when run in the space of the folded screen. not only the same aspect ratio, but the same dimensions"
the whole A3/4/5 scheme is completely overblown as a feature for consumers. You format a document for A4, ok, but you wouldn't print that document A5 because the fonts would be completely shrunken. nobody does that. We use word processors to format documents for the space we have, and we don't ever print wedding invites on A3 or A4
I still think the broader point of there being design reasons to hit these ratios stands and is great. I just think the idea that it needed to be precisely twice the width so apps can fit full-sized doesn't hold too much because there isn't really a "full size" notion. Or if there is, the full-size is probably the double width one. If it wasn't exactly twice the width, most apps are already built to fit into varying iPhone/mobile screen widths.
Unless these things start selling like hot-cakes (unlikely at the price) a lot of developers just might not bother.
“The mathematical brilliance of A*”
The sqrt(2) aspect ratio allows a portrait full app to be scaled up to the exactly to the folded out screen. But does anyone want that? You probably want to fit more content on the bigger screen, so some layout necessarily changes.
Both sides have the same aspect ratio as the whole screen.
> this isn't great design, it's tautology. of course the phone open is twice the size of it closed.
Well, it sounds obvious now, but before Archimedes, ancient engineers split their screens 60-40, so the full screen wasn't twice the size of either side.
second - main idea is about proportions, if you want to design apps that seamlessly transfer from one screen to another they have to have the same proportions of the sides. This is not a given and depends on the height and width.
If you take iPhone 18 Pro resolution : 2,622 x 1,206 doubling it would make the screen with 2,622 x 2,412 - almost a square screen.
They chose to have the folded phone to have 1.4:1 aspect ratio which is consistent when folded and when unfolded.
Also, when you rotate the device, the ratio changes. This is especially common when unfolding a foldable.
Even if apps transition well between aspect ratio / screen size breakpoints, there is a cognitive load to maintain 2+ UI configurations.
Preserving aspect ratios eliminates these issues. It'll make every app better.
Despite all the responsive design tools and declarative layouts to ensure a great layout even on an oddball resolution... the fact is that in practice it's nontrivial, and remember that the companies that make most of the apps you use have finite design and QA budgets. They need to actually use the resolution in question in order to really do a good job of designing for it, and giving them double the work, for a $2000 and up phone which probably won't be super highly adopted, is a recipe for getting apps that end up with layouts that aren't optimized properly on one (or both) of the screen sizes.
At WWDC this year, Apple introduced a tool[0] to let developers arbitrarily resize their simulated iOS device screens.
Flexibility and adaptivity are more front-and-center for iOS devs than ever.
[0]https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-...
I also think that I (personally) don't need a front screen and would love to have whatever cost savings or improvements would come if there weren't one. This last sentence is of course a me thing, but I mention it because I think that if people start on the front screen and then open the Duo, they may just want the full screen app or something else entirely. I'm not sure the use case of being in your banking app device folded, deciding midway through flow to open it, and wanting to be in the same UI is really what I want. The part I question is what's going on that step 2 came about—I think it's either you want to go into more depth on it or you're just opening the device the way you would had you not been in your banking app.
The case where I open it to find the app using half the screen and then I have to press something or drag something to make it full screen is not that great (and isn't great today with current iPad window resizing). The best case I can think of for wanting the app in the same size format when I open it is for is something like multitasking, I guess we'll see how that looks or feels and how you get the second app open (or whether it's very common use case anyway).
In general, I've long felt the folding tech is for tablet use cases not for phone use cases. I think Apple's foray (finally) into it more or less validates that. Even though there will be a meaningful number of people buying it to replace their phone, I think this is largely because their phone use is already tablet use case-y (for entertainment especially). I assume many people will also buy it as a(n expensive) tablet replacement in addition to their phone, which is perhaps related to the timing of iPhone Handoff (same SIM on two phones) too.
Speak to a carpenter or construction worker from any country with the metric system. Measure anything by simple powers of ten and simple decimal shifts makes life so much easier. Quick, what is half of a yard-length beam less 12 1/16"?
(In fact, the metric equivalents of construction units are all based on feet/inches converted to a round mm because construction sizes are much older than metric)
So yes maybe you're messing with lengths, etc. 100% true. But unless you're doing fine carpentry, it doesn't matter.
The other thing is that it's a system that divides by 2 multiple times - it's not totally random. But metric only divides by 10 and 5 cleanly. You can't do a "quarter" of anything. Which is fine... but I'm saying that both systems have their advantages and disadvantages.
I don't know which is better. Considering how nothing stops you from doing decimal inches or fractional meters, but people rarely do that, both ways seem fine.
But as a way to describe daily weather (and thermostats) it's woefully inadequate.
The sum total of "comfortable" temperatures in celsius has to be squeezed between maybe 17 to 24 - why? you never ever use anything above 40 except when talking about people that died from a heatwave.
It's based on the freezing and boiling point of water _at sea level_ which almost none of us ever encounter (whether it's sea level, or the boiling point of water).
Fahrenheit is a much more intuitive scale (again... to describe daily weather or human temperature) - 0 - 100 better models the temperatures we experience daily, and you can intuitively separate into 10s, the way you "feel"
For example...
100s - honey, please, let's move to a cooler place.
90s - uncomfortably hot
80s - hot in the sun, not too bad at night
70s - you'd probably want a light sweater at night
60s - light sweater all the time
50s - medium sweater
40s - sweater, maybe a coat
30s - coat
20s - sweater and coat
10s - why am i living in this region?
0s - honey, please, let's move to a warmer place.
The point is that there's enough resolution to describe the actual human experience with temperature.
For everything else, celsius is perfectly adequate, totally agree.
The difference between 20 C and 20.5 C is not generally noticeable. The difference between 20 and 25 really is.
You’ll just have to face the fact that you feel comfortable with a really weird system that nobody else can see the point of, but it’s what you’re comfortable with. That’s OK, you’re allowed.
40 - scorching hot
35 - super hot
30 - sunny summer day
25 - nice warm weather
20 - nice breezy weather
15 - a little chilly
10 - bring a coat
5 - getting cold
0 - drivers be careful
-5 - is cold
-10 - seriously cold
Etc.
Body temperature also has a nice cutoff point of 37.0C before you start to worry.
30° is perfectly comfortable for me.
The widest range of temperatures found in any country is the USA. In the continental US alone the temperatures easily exceed -50°C and 50°C in both directions (much colder if you include Alaska). The USA also has the largest temperature change ever recorded in a 24 hour period, at 57°C.
Merits of specific measurement systems aside, the USA is arguably the most representative single country on Earth when it comes to temperature and "how people feel". It has among the hottest, coldest, and most extreme temperature ranges ever recorded.
To be clear, I don't have strong feelings. Obviously in a lot of science/engineering fields we use Celsius degrees a lot. But we also us Kelvin absolute scale a lot which would be ridiculous for day-to-day usage.
I am used to Fahrenheit but it is also a finer scale and a nice round number for boiling is largely irrelevant for the vast majority of purposes. Yes, knowing the freezing point of water can be important but memorizing one simple number probably isn't a huge stretch especially that the reality differs based on a number of factors. Arguably, knowing that 0 degrees F means fricking cold is sort of a higher latitudes bias but I'm not sure the degree to which Celsius simplifies.
With literally everything else about those two scales being a matter of preference and getting used to, this is the only objective difference with real world impact. Very tiny impact but still. Focusing on this one thing is the only way to answer the question of which is better with anything other than "whichever you're used to, it doesn't matter whatsoever". And if you focus on this one thing, then by the slightest of margins, Celsius is objectively better.
You mean shifted by 273.15 because Kelvin doesn't have tidy fixed points at the freezing and boiling point of water, unlike Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Celsius and Fahrenheit are both utilitarian systems. Kelvin is the scientific system. Arguments about the relative utility of C° and F° are subjective and neither is particularly optimal for science.
Secondly, the highest temperature ever recorded outdoors was 56.7˚C. So no matter where you are, from that to 99 is wasted.
> Celsius isn't granular enough.
This argument would be reasonable if we didn't have to cut inches into 16 or 32 parts to approach decent granularity. At least we use decimal for cutting Celsius up...
I do concede the overwhelming majority of people that argue that one is better than the other (both ways) are basically just arguing "the thing I grew up with is better" - because when you probe further, there isn't really any supporting argument, just "I understand this system better because I grew up with it" but it's equally vacuous coming from people who grew up with Celsius.
I came to the US when I was 12, so I grew up with Celsius but didn't pay attention to the weather as a young child. But still, I've lived in both systems.
All scientific and engineering use should probably eschew the customary measurements, even in the news. For example, in aviation, they use °C now unless your airplane is very old. Unfortunately, in the US we still use inches of mercury for pressure, both knots and MPH but never km/h or m/s, etc.
It is nowhere near as useful day to day as knowing 0°F means a very specific saltwater brine mixture will likely be frozen, and 90°F is kind of as hot as your insides. Or 96. Or 98.6 as the third revision decided.
If you actually measure a boiling pot (assuming you aren't at the beach), it will likely not be exactly 100 degrees, but less (or more, haven't had my coffee so I can't calculate).
So for most day to day stuff, it's equally arbitrary. And pretty much _nobody_ needs a thermometer to tell if something's boiling, you wait for a rolling boil. Or frozen, you wait until it looks like ice.
So again, great on paper, but in day to day use, not necessarily more useful than F.
In contrast, it's very reasonable to round temperature to increments of 5 degrees Fahrenheit. So for example 58F and 60F are basically the same temperature as far as my perception is concerned.
I grew up using C and now I'm using F, if I move to a country that uses C, I will switch again. Its meaningless.
"One fahrenheit increment doesn't feel like anything"
At least Celsius are grounded in reality, should I be worried about ice? Just check if temperature is below 0°C. But hey you may need to check if your solution of water, ice and ammonium chloride is frozen, so I just need to check if below 0F. That's probably something you do often right?
...making the point that Fahrenheit's 0-100 range is better suited to normal day to day measurements than 0-100 Celsius. The numbers that feel easiest to communicate with are scaled nicely relative to the range of temperatures you most often want to communicate about.
> It is more precise. Fahrenheit has more frequent degrees, allowing for greater resolution with analog thermometers.
this is really about the graduation and size of the thermometer? you can print a useful line pitch as you like, and have it represent what you want, where thats a 0.25C, 3F, 10c or whathaveyou.
everyday temperatures are pretty well centered around 0C, half the year above, the other half below, and the 10, 20, 30, and 40 increments feel quite similar to each other in severity of the season. +30 is damn hot and -30 is damn cold. +/-10 is all mildly warm or cold, with +/-20 really being where you do seasonal acitivites like swimming or skiing.
as far as western units go, C fits fantastically for the the traditional western culture with 4 idealized seasons. I could see F being better for places outside the idealized west - eg. the american south/sun belt, the PNW, southeast asia, south america, a lot of africa, etc where the seasons are different
This leaves Apple and maybe a handful of subsidized third parties as the only people making applications for it, which is pretty much a guarantee that it will remain a tiny niche industry.
But I think Apple learned some things from the Lisa, even though it barely sold.
And even then I proooobably would've been able to justify it? But no external connectivity at all just sank it for me. Like if it had a DP port on it so I could hook it up to a gaming PC, I would've probably at least picked one up second-hand, possibly even new when my bonus hit but 3 large for... what? Email in my house? Movies shown in a way that makes it damn hard to eat popcorn?
But I guess the downside of the DK approach is it means telling developers when the “real” device will ship, which I’m not sure anyone knows.
Watching movies on a big screen would be interesting, but they still do not sell the device in my country in Europe, so I had no way to demo it and judge whether the quality is adequate for a home theater experience.
(I accept, I could book a demo at an Apple Store...)
I'm near-sighted, so I can see how magic glasses that let me focus on everything as if it's six inches away could be nice. That being said, normal prescription glasses work very well for my particular vision impairment, and "You only have to buy glasses once more ever, but they're $3000, weigh over a pound, and need to be recharged" isn't a great value proposition for my needs, but it doesn't take much imagination to figure that being able to toggle even just dark, high contrast, or colorblind modes irl would be nice for some people. Not worth it for me, but possibly for others.
But also like, we have calculators…
In the context of this discussion, it is reasonable to assume that any "square" available to be unfolded is something approximately like the folding phone, consisting of two layers joined by a hinge. When you unfold that, you go from having a square to having a rectangle equivalent to two adjacent squares, and usable as two adjacent squares.
If the user isn't going to be multitasking, then the app needs to additionally support the widescreen dimensions of 2X by Y, and the portrait orientation of Y by 2X. Both of these are so drastically larger overall that aspect ratio is a barely-relevant part of the UI layout problem, because nobody wants every button and text label to be double the size (which would mostly defeat the benefits of having the larger screen for anything other than multitasking).
The issue of the internal screen being the same aspect ratio as the external when rotated is completely separate.
Here's just the screen sizes, not even taking into account actual resolution:
iPhone (2007) 3.5" 74.0 × 49.3 36 cm²
iPhone 5 4.0" 88.6 × 49.8 44 cm²
iPhone 12 mini 5.4" 124.5 × 57.5 72 cm²
iPhone Duo, cover 5.4" 113.4 × 77.2 88 cm²
iPhone 6 Plus 5.5" 121.8 × 68.5 83 cm²
iPhone X 5.8" 133.7 × 61.8 83 cm²
iPhone Air 6.5" 150.0 × 69.1 104 cm²
iPhone 18 Pro Max 6.9" 159.2 × 73.3 117 cm²
iPhone Duo, inner 7.6" 157.6 × 111.5 176 cm²
So it's a lot of work, yes, but it's work that's already been done and that engineering teams already assume in their processes. The future is the same because this has been the status quo for a few years. Whether the Duo has a 2:1 ratio or something slightly different, the apps are at about the same readiness for it.
I'm just saying that they don't release a new version of Uber, Instagram, etc. without checking to see what that flexible and responsive layout looks like on the most popular devices and, where important UI ends up suboptimal on one of them, it'll be tweaked before release. And I'm saying that nobody really wants more of these 'significant formfactors' to check.
theyre both just arbitrary degrees though, since 0 isnt actually 0. they both have better alternatives too - Kelvin and Rankin. your criticism about freezing applies to celsius too. freezing is at a certain pressure and temperature, so both the 100 and 0 celsius only sometimes describe boiling and freezing
As someone who lives in a northern US state, there are so many other factors that affect winter road safety that aren't a binary above/below freezing temperature at sea level. I'm not really going to argue against Celsius but F is a very workable scale that has some (minor) benefits at human scale.
All those other reasons are exactly why I said the difference is minimal. But that minimal difference is not zero. If you add every single such difference that exists between °C and °F, of which there's literally just one, then Celsius very clearly comes ahead, although by an amount way too small to matter.
Black ice is always dangerous. No matter how many other dangerous road conditions you can come up with, black ice is still one of them. And black ice happens exactly when the temperature crosses 32°F boundary multiple times. It's far more important to know if it was 31°F than to know if it was 30°F.
50 hurts to the touch, your chip has likely broken and given off its black smoke 30 is good for swimming in cold water >25 is worth worrying about sun stroke. make sure to drink a lot of water 24-26 is a nice summer day 18-22 is comfortable room temperature >15 is good enough shorts weather 0-10 needs at least a light jacket <0 you have to be attentive about frost bite, but not worried -5 either wants gloves or good pockets -15 wants a sweater and jacket < -15 you should probably plug in your car -10 - -25 is good downhill skiing weather -20 - -27 is right cold, full winter gear: toque, scarf, mittens, thick socks, the whole kit and kaboodle, but still chic -30 - -40: ski version of the full winter gear, including snow pants, double socks, and good boots. both your warmest sweater and ski jacket
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its really just what you grew up with that will make sense.
like, wtf is 72 and 54 and mid 80s? i have no backing reference to put them into scale, even after living in the states for a decade. 500, 275, 425, 150 do make sense in F for me because thats what ovens list
Exactly what their relation to 0 and 100 would imply. Middle, ~75 percentile, 80+ percentile.
Most have the closed screen plus another view. Or the lock screen which is a full photo open and a small section closed.
Im not saying its not possible but it doesn’t seem like that is their intention.
Their selling point is: Not having to switch from one app to another when Multitasking.
A few comments up, someone was saying F only makes more sense than C because you live somewhere with specific temperature ranges. But the US has all sorts of ranges.
But for the apps that don't currently support both orientations, it's possible they don't have support for switching aspect ratio on the fly. This design might help with those apps not completely breaking when folding/unfolding.
And the extra irony is I'm currently shipping an app that doesn't deal well with different size phones (just pads the edges), heh, so do as I say, not as I do.
wrong. you answered under the context of yunwal's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630931#49634166
> None of that matters for a phone.
Of course it does. They show the most basic example right
on the page, which is that you can side-by-side full screen
apps.
> The iPhone Duo is designed with this in mind. The aspect ratio any way you view it, folded or open, is preserved. Apple design knows a thing or two.
which is talking about the aspect ratio being preserved in the open and folded/half modes.
there were plenty of other threads under that comment in that direction
Sure, but aside from being interesting from a mathematical standpoint, there are no practical implications from that fact. When the user unfolds the phone and rotates it by 90 degrees, the fact that they're left with about the same aspect ratio (modulo whatever changes with status bars, etc.) means very little for UI design in light of the much more important fact that the screen doubled in size and thus the application's layout should be using the extra screen space to show more information, and should not assume that a majority of the screen is easily reachable by a thumb.
Otherwise people turn to BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) hour by hour / day by day records and forecasts of temp. and rain with radar cloud coverage - these just use nearest whole Celsius numbers, eg: https://www.bom.gov.au/location/australia/western-australia/...
Almost everything you've conjectured about "how they do it in a metric country" has been wrong; builders don't use a third of a metre, for example, everything is typically in millimetres - 1200, 1600, etc (aka, 1.2 metres, 1.6 metres) along side usages of 1 mm and 5 mm for small tolerances, expansion gaps, etc.
People usually just say the temperature they’ve heard in the weather report, without giving a range. If you say “over 20”, people don’t assume “close to 30”, because then you would have said that.
What's so special about the number 50? Why aren't you comparing to 40°C instead? 40°C is a more useful boundary than both 50°C and 100°F.
50˚C is the highest temperature that regularly occurs in the hottest place I can think of, Death Valley. The point is, half the 0-100 range never gets used even in extreme settings. But yeah, in most places, more than half is unused.
I still don't get why are you so fixated on 50°C. Why not 125°F? You'd get even more unused range if you go 0-125.
Also, I get some measures being pointlessly precise just cause it lines up with the units, but they deliberately add a decimal place to the displays to support ˚C, even in countries where ˚C is default. The same display could support 0.5˚F increments, but they intentionally don't.
> I still don't get why are you so fixated on 50°C. Why not 125°F? You'd get even more unused range if you go 0-125.
The 0-125˚F range gets used though. Usually 0-100 though. It's perfect.