GoKawiilis a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.
Apple announced the company’s first device with a folding screen today, the iPhone Duo, but that’s where the firsts end. The Duo is not only far from the first foldable on the market thanks to the efforts of Samsung and Google, but it’s also not the first product to be called the Duo.
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs popularized the saying “good artists copy, great artists steal,” but will the iPhone Duo’s folding screen, which features a custom nano-texture display material to help minimize the visibility of its crease, be enough to make us forget these other Duos that have come before it? Only time, or how aggressively Apple plans to market its Duo, will tell. Is there a Duo we missed? Let us know.
NEC TurboDuo
Merging the functionality of the TurboGrafx-16 console and the TurboGrafx-CD that added CD-ROM functionality, the NEC TurboDuo (later rebranded to just the Duo) launched in North America in 1993 after debuting in Japan a few years earlier as the PC Engine Duo. The console was developed as part of a joint venture between NEC and Hudson Soft but never reached the popularity of the original TurboGrafx-16; its short run ended on Christmas Day in 1995.
Google Duo
Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge
First released in 2016 and eventually merged into Google Meet in 2022, Google Duo was the company’s proprietary VoIP service meant to compete with products like Skype or Zoom and replace Hangouts. Its cross-platform availability included Android and iOS mobile devices as well as web browsers, and while it supported hi-def video calls, the service was also optimized for slow mobile networks.
Apple PowerBook Duo
The iPhone Duo isn’t even Apple’s first Duo. The PowerBook Duo predates everything Apple announced today by decades. It was an ultraportable laptop, and when Apple introduced it in 1992 it was the smallest and lightest PowerBook available, but still weighed over 4 pounds. Apple managed to shrink the Duo using an approach it still uses today: omitting built-in ports and expansion features. If you wanted to connect peripherals and accessories you had to rely on optional docks. If you’ve ever had to buy a USB hub to connect all your devices to your MacBook, you can thank the PowerBook Duo.
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