Apple didn't invent the foldable. It redesigned the experience
Last night I watched Apple unveil the iPhone Duo, its first foldable. I have used a Galaxy Z Fold 6 as my work phone for almost a year, and the form factor has now fully evangelised me. But deep down I am still an Apple user, so I wanted to see what Apple would do with it.
The laziest take on the internet, as always, is that Apple copied Samsung and they are late to the party. If that is what you believe, I hope this changes your mind. What got me was not the hardware. It was how many product decisions in one keynote explain why Apple so often wins categories it enters late. The name, the ergonomics, what you say on stage and what you save for later: most companies file these under marketing. Apple treats them as product.
I build hardware and software for a living, which means I can no longer watch a keynote like a normal person. I watch it the way a chef eats at someone else's restaurant: enjoying the meal, but mostly trying to work out what they did in the kitchen.
What's in a name?
Most people expected the name to be iPhone Ultra. Apple already uses the name on the Apple Watch Ultra, and I would bet it was a finalist in the boardrooms of Cupertino. They must have passed on it for two reasons.
First, hierarchy. To a normal customer, Ultra sits above Pro. Call the foldable phone an Ultra, and you have told the world this is the best iPhone, which means the Pro Max is no longer the best, and now you spend three years explaining why the "best" phone has a crease and a worse camera, and why they are trying their best to defy the physics to cram in more and more.
Second, what Ultra already means at Apple. The Watch Ultra is the rugged one. Titanium, dive-rated, built for people who fall off mountains. Ultra says, "You can abuse this". Not the message you want on the most delicate phone you have in your current lineup, the one with a hinge.
Duo dodges both. It does not claim to be the best iPhone or the toughest one. It claims to be a different one. Two screens, two modes, a new experience rather than a better one. It also survives every accent on earth, which matters when you launch in nearly a hundred countries.
I have seen how much a label can carry, at a much smaller scale. Of the many experiments we tried on the NeoSapien app, the best one was when we renamed a button that sat in the corner called "Forgot Neo 1?". It was a simple button to trigger the backup capture on the phone using the phone's microphone when the Neo 1 was not around. We renamed it to "Capture on phone" and made the button more visible, and this simple change and more relatable lingo made the active user % double and discoverability almost triple.
A product name is the one decision you cannot patch in a point release. Nintendo learnt this with the Wii U, which a lot of buyers assumed was a Wii accessory.
How would you have built a foldable?
Say you are the EPM on iPhone Duo (the engineering programme manager, for the uninitiated) and someone hands you a blank whiteboard.
The obvious answer writes itself. Apple has the most popular phone in the world and the best app catalogue for the phone aspect ratio. It also has the best tablet with great iPad apps. So: iPhone when closed, iPad when open. Ship it. That is broadly what Samsung, Google, and most foldables did, and what most of us would have done before closing the project and going for drinks.
But Apple's approach was different; they built a new user experience instead, and the decision that tells you the most is where the status bar and navigation went: down the right edge, in a curved rail, not across the top. Apple's own reason is that side controls free up vertical space and keep the phone usable one-handed. True, and I suspect only half of it.
I have long fingers (I'm 6'0", by the way) and I type with both hands, so when I tried the Fold 8 I could reach every corner of the inner screen. Most of the world is not built like me, and thankfully so. My guess at the unstated half: China is the biggest foldable market on the planet, eight to ten million of the roughly twenty million sold worldwide last year, and people there are shorter on average than in the US or Europe. Shorter people, smaller hands, shorter thumbs. It is the same reason several motorcycles sold in India get lower seat heights than their European versions. You design for the hand actually holding the thing, not the one in the ad.
The asymmetry bothered me for about ten minutes when the iPhone Duo was first unveiled. Apple, the company that centres everything, shipping a lopsided screen? Then I saw what the rail does. It keeps the one-handed reach of a slab phone on a tablet-sized screen. It swallows the awkward corner radii, so developers get a clean rectangle instead of designing around curves. It frees vertical space for content. And the curve sits in your palm, so the doomscroll thumb has a home. One decision, four problems, and the lopsidedness choice seems intentional. And there is a fifth win that only shows up when you hit play: with the rail out of the way, the inner panel is an almost perfect 16:9, so full-screen video finally runs unobstructed, no notch, no island, no cutout floating over the picture.
The screenshot effect
The rail might also do something sneakier. The moment someone drops a Duo screenshot into any group chat or socials, every slab iPhone's screenshot looks old. I have lived through this twice: on an iPhone 7 Plus when the iPhone introduced the notch, and on a 13 Pro Max when the Dynamic Island showed up. Both times my screenshots suddenly looked like they came from a different decade.
Line them up today and the effect is brutal. The home screen layout has barely changed in a decade; it is the status bar that gives the game away. The UI on the left looks ancient next to the Dynamic Island, and every one of these was the flagship look of its year.
This is not just my paranoia, there is actual research on this. Economists at the University of Chicago wrote a paper on what they call non-user externalities. The simple version: you design a product so that the people who don't own it feel a little worse off, and that feeling does the selling for you. Their example is the green bubble on iMessage. Almost every college student they surveyed knew what a green bubble meant and what it said about you. So they ran an experiment where the green bubble did not exist, and enough people who would have bought an iPhone picked Android instead that it showed up in the numbers. In other words, the stigma alone was selling iPhones. The paper's point is that this is not an accident. It is a lever, and companies pull it on purpose.
That said, I don't mean a screenshot with a right-side rail will pull the same lever with Apple's own customer base. But going by Apple's track record of making older status bars look dated, I am sure there was someone at Apple HQ who wanted to design this one for screenshot envy.
The stylus tells you everything
The feature that would actually pull me over is Apple Pencil support, and Apple's own release says it arrives later this year, not on day one. My read is that the team parked it as a later add, partly to lift the value proposition, partly to kill the "no Pencil?" headline. For someone like me, the promise is enough to keep the purchase alive in a way "no Pencil" wouldn't.
Samsung is a useful comparison. It had years of usage data on Fold owners and the S Pen, and the answer was clearly "not enough", because it dropped S Pen support on the Fold 7 to make the phone thinner and said it would only bring it back if there was consumer demand. A loud minority is still clinging to older Folds over it.
Apple has the same kind of data from a different product. Millions of iPads have told them exactly who draws and who bought a Pencil and never touched it again. Samsung used what it knew to cut. Apple is using what it knows to add. I can't speak to the actual numbers; none of this is public, but this is exactly where the data can mislead you. Some features show small adoption on the dashboard, and the "data-driven" decision is to cut them. What the dashboard doesn't show is how many people would never have bought the phone if the feature wasn't there. I have seen this play out a lot. Some features are only ever picked up by the heavy users, but for those users it makes or breaks the experience, and they are usually the promoters.
The $2,000 iPad
Here is the part nobody said on stage. iPad revenue fell 6% last quarter, the only major Apple product line to shrink, and the wider tablet market had one of its worst quarters in two years. People keep tablets for years and see no reason to upgrade.
A hybrid that starts at $1,999 is a clever answer to that. My own iPad is old, and if I am honest, the only reason I would replace it is to draw. Not Netflix, not email, just drawing.
You can see what an ageing iPad does on this very blog. The early covers were all illustrated on the iPad with an Apple Pencil. The recent ones are type and pixels, not because my taste changed, but because the iPad quietly aged out of the job. The Duo takes that one reason and folds it into the phone I was going to buy anyway. Two upgrade decisions Apple had to win become one, and it is a $2,000 one. This is Apple's way of selling me the iPhone and the iPad in one go, and that is exactly where adding Apple Pencil support makes it genius. Without the Pencil, the Duo is just a bigger phone. With it, I am no longer sure I need a new iPad at all.
AI wasn't the story
The other thing that impressed me was how little of the Duo launch was about AI. The features are all in the press release: Siri AI, Smart Take, the lot. Apple just didn't make any of them the reason to buy the thing. The Duo pitch was hinge, screens, the new UI, and the cameras.
Two reasons, I think. First, AI has become a punchline. Google said "AI" 121 times at I/O 2024 and put the tally on screen themselves, and YouTube has been full of keynote supercuts for a while, edited down to only the AI mentions, which turn out to be most of the keynote. People are tired, and Apple Intelligence has already collected plenty of mockery of its own, everyone and their mom knows that Siri is useless.
Second, Apple is behind. Google is shipping things on Pixel that Apple is still catching up to, and Apple had to turn to Google's Gemini as the foundation model for its next Apple Intelligence models, Siri included. That tells you where they stand. Why put your weakest card on the table during your strongest hardware launch in years?
Keeping AI out of the Duo pitch lets the device be judged on what it does well. Nobody left that segment talking about a Siri demo that fell flat. Clever announcement. Also a quiet admission.
Slow to commit, fast to move
John Ternus's jab on stage was that other foldables feel like two phones stuck together. Annoyingly, having used them, he is right. Yes, the Android fans will joke that Apple invented the foldable. But look at the first attempt: the thinnest iPhone ever, a titanium chassis and hinge, a continuous 7.6-inch display with a crease that is hard to spot, and a UI built for the form factor instead of borrowed from two other products. The whole thing reads as one device that happens to open. Which makes the joke, ironically, a little bit true.
The morning after, our designer Hitesh and I got on a call about how the teams at Apple keep pulling this off while other giants stumble. That turned into a long discussion on discipline, work culture, what counts as acceptable quality, and how far you push compatibility before you break it. Where we landed: Apple is slow to commit to a category and unusually fast at dragging the whole ecosystem along once it does. They do not get everything right; see AI above. But when Apple moves, suppliers, carriers and developers move on the same day, and very few companies can do that.
None of that is something I can copy at NeoSapien on a Monday. But I have ordered Ken Kocienda's Creative Selection, and as a chef, I would like to see the recipe.