Sep 10, 2026 Sep 10, 2026 2026-09-10

I’ve been covering iPhone since iPhone 3G. As a matter of fact, the post about my top 13 apps on my iPhone 3G is still getting clicks in Google 17 years after I published it. With the launch of iPhone Duo, I feel privileged to witness another iteration of this scale in our digital environment. And I think this device will be the “book” of AI age, in terms of disruption.

Not only the device looks absolutely beautiful, but I think it has the potential to reorganize from the ground up the way we consume information from a handheld.

If you want to see this post as a video (with a few different angles too) there you go:

Foldable Devices Have Been Around For A While

Samsung Galaxy launched the first foldable maybe 10 years ago. I don’t even remember clearly, and I’m too lazy to search. So, if this kind of device have been around for a while, what makes iPhone Duo so special?

Well, it’s a combination of Apple design supremacy with their deep technical expertise. You get incredible finish, a huge battery time (dual battery system) and 48MB cameras. That’s already a videographer studio in your pocket. Titanium bezels and water proof. This thing just feels “special”.

There are reports that Apple have been working on this since before Samsung launched its first foldable, and I tend to believe those rumors. Every year we got some “leaks” about an “imminent” foldable from Apple. Yet, it took 10 years in the making. From the keynote and by looking at the Apple website (from where I borrowed the hero image for this post, by the way) I think it was the right call. They waited until they identified all the potential use cases and they transformed a duplicate screen (which is what most of the foldables were before it) into a completely new experience.

What Are The Inside Stories?

Design and tech stack alone cannot warrant such a bold claim, that the iPhone Duo will disrupt our lives in comparable terms with how book disrupted, thousands of years ago, our precursors lives.

Well, Apple has an enormous potential with their App Store inventory. All these hundreds of thousands of apps can be refactored to fit the Duo new layouts. From one surface, they will have at least 3 new angles: folded, standing, and posing.

This gives a certain depth to the apps that wasn’t there before. Not only the devices feels like a “book”, because you can fold / unfold it, but the richness of pages is completely new. An app can be on the home screen, but also on the inside foldable pages. It can have a certain layout when the phone is folded, but a completely different when the device is standing, like a desktop calendar.

At the moment of writing, this is still uncharted territory. As an Apple Developer I had early access to the guidelines for porting apps to Duo and I am a little bit dizzy. The sheer number of possibilities makes an app to be become 3 or 4 apps at the same time.

I have 13 apps in the App Store now, and I cannot tell you how eager I am to port them all on iPhone Duo. The SDK will be available in about a few weeks, and I can expect to have something working mid December.

The Price To Pay

There’s only one thing that looks a bit off, now, and that’s the price. It’s $1999. Almost double the price of an entry level Mac Book Air, at $1099.

But then again, the iPhone Duo may unlock specific use cases that may be between a normal iPhone and a laptop. Time will tell. And also time will lower the price, if there’s enough demand and production capacity.

I personally don’t intend to jump on it, at least for now, but if, by any chance, I would get my hand of one of these devices soon, I will gladly do a review. Until then, I’ll stick to my iPhone 17.