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The iPhone Duo is one of those Apple products whose arrival inevitably raises a question: why did the company introduce it only in 2026, rather than back in 2022? Apple has taught us to expect it to enter new market segments only when it considers the technology mature enough and/or has an idea capable of genuinely shaking up the industry.
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The Strategy We’ve Come to Respect
Over the years of watching Apple, a clear pattern has emerged in the company’s behavior: it almost never enters a new market segment first. Instead, Cupertino waits, studies its competitors’ mistakes, and only steps into the arena when it has something to offer beyond simply “yet another device of the same kind.” We’ve seen this with music players, smartphones, smartwatches, wireless earbuds, and mixed-reality headsets – every time, the company arrived later than everyone else, but brought along its own “rakes” that the rest of the industry eventually copied.
That’s why the release of the foldable iPhone Duo only in 2026 – rather than, say, 2022, when the foldable market was already taking shape – naturally raises the question: what exactly has Apple been preparing all these years? What innovation, capable of once again turning the category on its head, has the company been saving for this moment?
Comparing It With Apple’s Previous Breakthroughs
Apple’s history gives us a clear template for what to expect. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, but its click wheel, compact design, storage capacity, and dedicated music store created an experience no competitor could match. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone either, but replacing the physical keyboard with a multitouch interface rewrote the rules of the game for the entire industry for the next two decades. The Apple Watch wasn’t the first smartwatch, but its Digital Crown, pressure-sensitive display, and refined haptic feedback changed the category itself. AirPods weren’t the first wireless earbuds, either, but Apple’s custom chip delivered a level of convenience and battery life that competitors simply couldn’t match. Even the Vision Pro, despite not being the first VR headset on the market, impressed with its level of technological execution.
Against this backdrop, the iPhone Duo looks like an exception to the rule. The expected formula – “later, but better” – doesn’t work here as clearly as it has in the past.
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Technical justifications that do not stand up to scrutiny
The simplest explanation for the delay would be that the technology simply wasn’t mature enough. But the facts don’t really support that.
Screen proportions. The “short but wide” form factor is genuinely convenient, but similar designs had already been implemented by OPPO in the Find N (2021) and Google in the Pixel Fold (2023). In other words, the technology needed to create a compact foldable phone with these proportions existed well before 2026.
Even Vladyslav Surkov, after testing the Galaxy Fold 8, would probably admit: these proportions really are excellent.
Thickness and weight. If this were a matter of miniaturizing components, the delay would be understandable – the first foldable smartphones really were bulky. But the iPhone Duo turned out to be thicker and heavier than the Honor Magic V2, which was released back in 2023. That suggests the issue isn’t the availability of thinner components.
Screen Fold. The only real technical argument here is the visibility of the crease on the inner display. Only in recent years have several manufacturers reached the point where the crease is practically invisible, and Apple has added a matte coating on top of that. But the question remains: was it really worth years of waiting? The experience of using foldable phones since 2019 suggests that the crease is purely a cosmetic issue that has no impact on functionality or screen readability.
So the technological explanation for the delay doesn’t hold up. Millions of potential buyers already invested in Apple’s ecosystem could have had a foldable iPhone much earlier – if the only obstacle was the aesthetics of the crease.
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Inconsistent Priorities
Interestingly, Apple itself has shown a willingness to make aesthetic compromises in other areas – for example, openly acknowledging that the under-display front-facing camera remains visible.
This undermines the argument that the imperfections of the crease were what kept the product from being released for years.
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The Problem Isn’t Quality – It’s the Lack of Novelty
The main criticism of the iPhone Duo isn’t that it’s a bad device. Foldable smartphones stopped being “half-baked” gadgets a long time ago: the industry has been refining the category for at least four or five years. So, technically speaking, there’s nothing stopping Apple from building on what others have already developed.
The problem is elsewhere: where Apple once brought a package of fresh ideas to a new category, the iPhone Duo feels like a collection of things we’ve already seen:
- The “book-style” form factor with a foldable inner display and an outer screen – developed and popularized by Samsung, which showed off a prototype as far back as 2008 and has since released eight generations of devices.
- An interface that adapts to the folded and unfolded states – implemented by Samsung as early as the Galaxy Fold 2 (2020).
- Taking selfies with the main camera by folding the phone – also a Galaxy Fold 2 (2020) feature.
An under-display front-facing camera – featured in the Galaxy Fold 3 (2021), although Samsung later abandoned the approach.
Support for a stylus sold separately – and one that doesn’t even fit inside the case – also debuted with the Galaxy Fold 3.
- A fingerprint scanner integrated into the power button – a solution Samsung uses across the entire Fold lineup.
Some of these solutions may be technically cleaner or more reliable in Apple’s implementation. But the device’s underlying concept and its key features feel more like a compilation of ideas that already exist on the market than a new standard that could change how we think about the category.
“A Nice Animation” Instead of Innovation
What’s telling is that in the first reviews of the iPhone Duo, the feature getting the most attention isn’t the underlying technology but the animation that plays when the device is opened and closed. Combined with the fact that Apple also introduced a voice assistant this year that is limited to a single language but comes with a pleasant interface, this paints a worrying picture: the year’s flagship announcements are being carried not by functional breakthroughs, but by visual details – a smoother screen crease and a flashy animation.
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The Question Isn’t “Is It Too Late?” but “Why Wait?”
If the iPhone Duo had arrived in 2022 as a competent but uninnovative foldable smartphone, it could have been dismissed as a cautious market-entry strategy. But launching in 2026 – after years in which competitors have already solved most of the category’s technical challenges – turns the wait into a direct question for Apple itself.
In the past, Apple’s delays always came with an explanation: “We were waiting until we could do it truly differently.” In the case of the iPhone Duo, that explanation no longer holds up – the device is thicker than three-year-old competitors, repeats design decisions rooted in the nearly two-decade history of the Galaxy Fold, and stands out mainly for cosmetic details.
It leaves the impression that a company accustomed to arriving last but bringing something genuinely new has, this time, arrived last – and brought something that has been sitting on everyone else’s table for years.
