This week I had the pleasure of Apple’s new product line invading my for you page on all social media platforms. Little of it caught my attention, although a sleek folding screen device unlike any iPhone (emphasis on iPhone) did manage to divert me from edits of Top Gun and James Bond.

Folding phones are not new. Samsung, among others, have been releasing them for years, and are now on their 8th generation of the product (which first released in 2019) – the “ZFold 8”. Arriving late to the party is not always a bad play, if anything its advice college kids have learned to live by. But seven years late for the iPhone Duo? seems a little excessive.

The question now shifts from “did Apple innovate?” to, “did Apple just show up seven years late and slap a premium price tag on an existing product”. This playbook can be seen in releasing AirPods after the wireless earbuds, or the Apple Watch after the Fitbit. To get to the bottom of this, I took to the internet and did some research.

Through countless hands-on video reviews and articles, early reviews were strong. One of the enduring problems with these kinds of devices is that where the screen folds, there is a crease, which in use distracts the user and makes the phone feel more like a used book than one would like.

What Apple has done, and blabbered on for a painfully long time about, is eliminate this almost in its entirety. Reviewers had to go searching for any sign of a crease, only finding one under very close inspection. That to me is bare minimum for a device that I would be spending hours using every day. I have seen other folding phones before, and this crease is the first thing you notice. Its usually so blatant you could see it from 20 feet away, so this change is not nothing.

Now, what no big reviewer or news outlet had the guts to say that I suspect will be the case for many people who are considering buying the Duo, is that after 2 minutes of playing around with the folding mechanism and swiping around on the larger display, most people will fold the thing right back shut and use it as a normal phone. 95% of things I use my phone for are actually ergonomically suited to using a phone with the normal size and shape, such as texting, Instagram, and checking if an Uber is five minutes away or lying to me. I think spending $2000 to look a little more like you are reading a book might be hard to justify for people. On that note, reading articles was said to be a genuinely better experience, and I could see myself appreciating that for things like cramming class readings last minute, which I am almost never patient enough to do on my current phone.

So, bottom line? Apple has done something cool, as they often do, but they have done it to a device that I don’t think is right for everyone, and thus this news is big for a very small population.

This whole thing kind of reminds me of the IMAX discussion I had 2 weeks ago. Paying a premium and uprooting your comfortable phone setup for a little bit more screen does technically enhance what you can see and do, but only to an extent. It will be very interesting to see how/ if this product takes off, especially since it is the first official product launched by their new CEO.

Thanks for reading – Stay tuned!