The iPhone Duo is Apple’s first foldable

Apple has introduced its long-anticipated foldable iPhone, which arrives greater than seven years after the primary Samsung Galaxy Fold cellphone hit the market. My colleague Allison Johnson has already had the prospect to check out the system in particular person at Apple’s occasion, so learn what she thinks of it thus far.

The Duo might be out there to preorder on October sixteenth, happening sale on October twenty third, a month later than the 2 18 Pro fashions. It begins at $1,999 — $100 greater than Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, however $100 lower than its Z Fold 8 Ultra — for 256GB of storage, with the choice to go as much as 2TB complete. Like the iPhone Air, it’s eSIM-only worldwide.

Much like Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Fold 8, Apple says the Duo is an analogous dimension to a passport when closed, with a 5.4-inch show, however it opens to a 7.6-inch panel, the most important on any iPhone but. Both screens use the very same facet ratio, and the massive internal display screen is 50 p.c bigger than the display screen on the brand new iPhone 18 Pro Max, and 80 p.c larger than the iPhone Pro’s. Both screens assist ProMovement, always-on shows, and as much as 3,000 nits of peak brightness, and Apple says that Apple Pencil assist is coming “later this year.”

Johny Srouji, Apple’s newly minted chief {hardware} officer, says they didn’t desire a crease or a plastic really feel to the show, so that they used a customized nano-texture show materials that’s “perceptually flat.” It reduces glare and reflections, minimizing the visibility of the crease, and Apple says it additionally “feels great to touch.” Meanwhile, the multilayer show stack used customized adhesives that Apple says permit the layers to “glide” over one another when folding, lowering how a lot the crease deepens and distorts over time. Oppo’s Find N6 from this spring is thus far the foldable with the least noticeable crease, and I’m curious to see how the 2 evaluate.

The cellphone’s body is primarily titanium, strengthened with inner ceramic fibers. There’s toughened Ceramic Shield glass on the rear and Ceramic Shield 2 on the entrance. An IP68 score ought to assure security from each mud and water. It’s launching in two colours: star white and a darkish blue known as night time sky. It’s 5.2mm thick when open, and 11.3mm when shut, making it thicker than each Samsung’s related foldables, and most different latest Android fashions.

There’s a twin rear digicam, each lenses utilizing 48-megapixel sensors — and the ultrawide is definitely the identical digicam discovered on the 18 Pro. While it lacks the variable aperture foremost digicam and professional controls of the 18 Pro telephones, it does profit from the identical Photographic Styles updates, permitting you to tweak textures and grain ranges in pictures. Foldable particular options embody the choice to take a FaceTime name on either side of the cellphone without delay while you’re in a gaggle setting, utilizing the outer display screen to preview selfies taken with the principle cameras, and a Smart Take function that may routinely take photographs as soon as it detects you’re placing a pose inside the body.

While you’ll see a selfie digicam tucked into the rounded nook of the entrance display screen — full with Center Stage assist — you gained’t see the same old iPhone Dynamic Island or Face ID cameras. You gained’t see any selfie cameras on the internal display screen, however there may be one there, with an under-display digicam particularly for the foldable display screen. Instead of Face ID, Touch ID is constructed into one of many aspect buttons, and Apple Watch customers 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” tremendous cores, which Sribalan Santhanam, the VP of Apple’s silicon engineering group, says are “by far the fastest in any smartphone.” Four efficiency cores full the CPU, which is joined by a seven-core GPU and two neural engines within the 32-core NPU. A brand new vapor chamber — 3 times the dimensions of the earlier era’s — helps keep thermal efficiency.

There’s no signal of the silicon-carbon batteries Samsung adopted for its new foldables, however Apple says the dual-cell structure will ship 24 hours of normal use, or as much as 31 hours of video playback on the bigger internal display screen. You can get 50 p.c of the battery again in simply 20 minutes of wired charging, or in half an hour over wi-fi or 25W MagSafe.

The Duo’s new {hardware} is paired with a set of software program updates to iOS 27 designed to benefit from the foldable tech and ship the very best of each iPhones and iPads. While apps and content material will increase and react as you open or shut the display screen, together with the choice for two-app multitasking, the core system controls have been designed to remain constant in both orientation. The house display screen dock has moved to a brand new vertical bar on the right-hand edge, together with app navigation controls and the Dynamic Island. The standard standing bar has been condensed right into a small, expandable circle within the top-right nook.

“iPhone Duo is the most transformational change to iPhone since the original. With an entirely new design and intuitive experiences, it shows what’s possible when hardware and software are engineered together and redefines what it means to use a foldable phone,” mentioned John Ternus, Apple’s CEO, in a press launch. “With the largest display ever on iPhone that still fits easily in your pocket, combined with the power of A20 Pro, iPhone Duo helps you stay more immersed and productive wherever you go, whether you’re enjoying content, multitasking across apps, or gaming.”

Rumors have swirled a few folding iPhone since a minimum of 2017, when it was optimistically reported that manufacturing would possibly start in 2020. Since then, rivals together with Samsung, Google, Huawei, Oppo, Honor, and extra have launched myriad foldable Android telephones, together with bigger book-style fashions, smaller flip telephones, and extra just lately trifolds. The market has remained comparatively small, although — simply 1.6 percent of all smartphone gross sales in 2025.

Different studies have claimed that Apple was creating variants of every of those type elements, plus bigger foldable iPads, however over the past two years reporting has centered on a brief, huge book-style foldable iPhone, concerning the dimension and form of a passport when closed. That expectation is probably going a part of what prompted Huawei, Samsung, and Xiaomi to all launch foldable telephones in roughly that type issue this yr, proving Apple’s trade affect stays outsize.