GoKawiilApple has announced its long-anticipated foldable iPhone, which arrives more than seven years after the first Samsung Galaxy Fold phone hit the market. My colleague Allison Johnson has already had the chance to try out the device in person at Apple’s event, so read what she thinks of it so far.
The Duo will be available to preorder on October 16th, going on sale on October 23rd, a month later than the two 18 Pro models. It starts at $1,999 — $100 more than Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, but $100 less than its Z Fold 8 Ultra — for 256GB of storage, with the option to go up to 2TB total. Like the iPhone Air, it’s eSIM-only worldwide.
Much like Samsung’s recent Galaxy Z Fold 8, Apple says the Duo is a similar size to a passport when closed, with a 5.4-inch display, but it opens to a 7.6-inch panel, the largest on any iPhone yet. Both screens use the exact same aspect ratio, and the large inner screen is 50 percent larger than the screen on the new iPhone 18 Pro Max, and 80 percent bigger than the iPhone Pro’s. Both screens support ProMotion, always-on displays, and up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness, and Apple says that Apple Pencil support is coming “later this year.”
Johny Srouji, Apple’s newly minted chief hardware officer, says they didn’t want a crease or a plastic feel to the display, so they used a custom nano-texture display material that is “perceptually flat.” It reduces glare and reflections, minimizing the visibility of the crease, and Apple says it also “feels great to touch.” Meanwhile, the multilayer display stack used custom adhesives that Apple says allow the layers to “glide” over each other when folding, reducing how much the crease deepens and distorts over time. Oppo’s Find N6 from this spring is so far the foldable with the least noticeable crease, and I’m curious to see how the two compare.
The phone’s frame is primarily titanium, strengthened with internal ceramic fibers. There’s toughened Ceramic Shield glass on the rear and Ceramic Shield 2 on the front. An IP68 rating should guarantee safety from both dust and water. It’s launching in two colors: star white and a dark blue called night sky. It’s 5.2mm thick when open, and 11.3mm when shut, making it thicker than both Samsung’s similar foldables, and most other recent Android models.
There’s a dual rear camera, both lenses using 48-megapixel sensors — and the ultrawide is actually the same camera found on the 18 Pro. While it lacks the variable aperture main camera and pro controls of the 18 Pro phones, it does benefit from the same Photographic Styles updates, allowing you to tweak textures and grain levels in shots. Foldable specific features include the option to take a FaceTime call on both sides of the phone at once when you’re in a group setting, using the outer screen to preview selfies taken with the main cameras, and a Smart Take feature that can automatically take photos once it detects you’re striking a pose within the frame.
While you’ll see a selfie camera tucked into the rounded corner of the front screen — complete with Center Stage support — you won’t see the usual iPhone Dynamic Island or Face ID cameras. You won’t see any selfie cameras on the inner screen, but there is one there, with an under-display camera specifically for the foldable screen. Instead of Face ID, Touch ID is built into one of the side buttons, and Apple Watch users can unlock with their watch too.
Like the 18 Pro and Pro Max, the Duo is powered by Apple’s A20 Pro chip and C2 modem. The 2nm, six-core A20 Pro has two “desktop class” super cores, which Sribalan Santhanam, the VP of Apple’s silicon engineering group, says are “by far the fastest in any smartphone.” Four performance cores complete the CPU, which is joined by a seven-core GPU and two neural engines in the 32-core NPU. A new vapor chamber — three times the size of the previous generation’s — helps maintain thermal performance.
There’s no sign of the silicon-carbon batteries Samsung adopted for its new foldables, but Apple says the dual-cell architecture will deliver 24 hours of regular use, or up to 31 hours of video playback on the larger inner screen. You can get 50 percent of the battery back in just 20 minutes of wired charging, or in half an hour over wireless or 25W MagSafe.
The Duo’s new hardware is paired with a suite of software updates to iOS 27 designed to make the most of the foldable tech and deliver the best of both iPhones and iPads. While apps and content will expand and react as you open or close the screen, including the option for two-app multitasking, the core device controls have been designed to stay consistent in either orientation. The home screen dock has moved to a new vertical bar on the right-hand edge, along with app navigation controls and the Dynamic Island. The usual status bar has been condensed into a small, expandable circle in the top-right corner.
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