iPhone Duo
apple.com1179 points by thecosmicfrog 14 hours ago
1179 points by thecosmicfrog 14 hours ago
I see apple keeps copying Microsoft. Can't they come up with any original ideas of their own?
I think the Duo looks great. And from the few hands on video I have seen I think the Apple presentation actually doesn't do it justice. There is no crease at all! [1]
On the note on this year's keynote. I can't be the only one who feels the whole vibe of the keynote changed. This isn't Tim Cook style keynote and John Ternus wasted no time to try and changed a few things already. I can't wait for John to further shake things up at Apple. But everything so far, all the small minor details suggest they are in the right direction.
I don't think the vibe significantly shifted in a positive way. It seemed like it was going to with Ternus' opening statements, but then it was back to the same vibe. Hard to put into words, but kind of a droning boring safe microsoft-y vibe. Craig Federighi brought more energy for his segment but he sounded almost sarcastic at times. John Srouji is a breath of fresh air. I liked Dr. Desai's vibe in the health section more than the average segment.
A real vibe shift might not even be possible if they don't bring back in-person live presentations. Can't believe they flew all these people in to play them a video. Though seeing how John Ternus' hands were shaking during his demo with ishowspeed, I don't know if they have it in them to go back to live presentations.
And what was the surprise in "surprise and shine" anyway? The name of it?
Yeah I was never the biggest fan of Craig Federighi previously but contrasted against the new generation of usual suspects being fielded by Apple, he actually stands out as having character.
But yes the format of the Apple Event was formulaic and way too scripted/produced. Sure there's a place for some scripted content but losing the live unscripted element makes it like a corporate event from Microsoft or IBM. In fact those guys probably do more live unscripted stuff nowadays.
The iPhone Duo is a nice change from formulaic iPhone designs but it's long overdue and is at best a sideways step not a forward step by an Apple that seems increasingly out of touch and driven by cloud service KPI-targets over all other metrics. I wonder how long it will be before the customer revolt manifests, not because I dislike Apple (I loved their products for years) but because I believe that their current business focus leads them to erode trust and play it safe which ultimately alienates the very demographics that made Apple cool and then persuaded all those wanting to emulate that demographic to join the Apple bandwagon. Many of those power users are increasingly moving to Linux or using Mac/Apple ecosystems tactically. It won't be many release cycles for Apple to become the new Microsoft - something you have to use for certain tasks in certain industries but increasingly something you would choose to avoid.
I saw ~20 year old presentation where Craig Federighi presented (for first time??) - dude was shaking like leaf and could hardly do the demo.
It turned out fine and now he’s one of more charming presenters.
> Can't believe they flew all these people in to play them a video.
Apple can't afford to have demo problems or presentation glitches anymore. Hence the system that they have now.
An authentic Steve Jobs demo presentation would generate 100x more excitement than this canned, blan, nearly AI boring level cringe presentation. I'll just wait for a YouTube review where an actual human you can relate to handles it.
says who?
True, I remember years ago, the presenter was doing a demo and ran into a problem. He quickly transitioned to another identical device nearby, and continued almost seamlessly. Didn't seem like much of an issue. Although that might have been WWDC, which is a different crowd.
A live presentation fail could take 5~15% off their stock price in minutes, for no good reason at all.
People’s life savings are at stake.
I coded one of these for whatever was the latest Nokia handset ~2005. Live on-stage reveal and demo to the world's press by CEO IIRC. The software on the phone was supposed to run off our co-host server, but bugfixing down to the wire, so nobody knew but the demo was running off a half-built PC in my buddy's closet connected to his janky cable modem with us watching and sweating and praying. It would have been really, really bad if that demo had failed on-stage.
You had a closet? Luxury! Our demo ran out of a disused lavatory, and there was a leopard around.
finally an actual benefit to widespread generative ai ... supporting retirements
"We must protect the AAPL stockholders from the irrationality of the AAPL stockholders"?
I really miss the live presentations. They had a lot more humanity.
But I miss the Steve jobs presentations the most. I was watching one of his old presentations the other day from when he was in his 20s - he’s just so engaged and present and speaks from the heart compared to the polished media trained drivel of modern ceos
It feels like Apple is a company on autopilot, a well oiled money making machine, nothing else.
Remind me if AVP is proof that they have no creative spark or proof that they only do boring stuff that will sell 20m units?
Apple Vision Pro
Abbreviations waste people’s time
Here I thought we were discussing a return of the Aliens vs Predator franchise
Here’s my theory about AVP.
Apple’s strategic position is to be the main device by which apps and AI can gain access to end users. This puts them in a nice position to charge a toll on everything that passes through their device. Now if someone were to come out with a new type of device and a new paradigm that could disrupt iPhone as the main device, Apple would be in trouble.
Not long ago, Zuck seemed really confident about metaverse/AR/VR. Apple took the disruption threat seriously and countered with AVP. Now it looks like metaverse flopped. I suspect the priority of AVP has gone down inside Apple accordingly.
Hadn't the Metaverse already well and truly flopped before the AVP came out? It's a cool device, but when it was released I felt like Apple was a couple years late and 3499 dollars short.
The AVP I thought looked like amazing hardware. It was just bizarre they didn't also go all in on making it useable for gaming.
They failed to come up with a strong selling point. Health is the big seller for Apple Watch. But AVP, at its price point, needs something better than "well you can watch movies on a big screen or work in a café while looking silly".
But remember health was a small thing when the watch was launched. Then the focus was on notifications, communications etc. Fitness was more of a ”oh and it also tracks your heart rate”
It absolutely failed to justify its price point IMHO. If it were affordable people would be finding uses for it, but when it is that expensive you basically need a business justification for buying one. That means you won't have a hobbyist community finding new and interesting things to do with it.
This leaves Apple and maybe a handful of subsidized third parties as the only people making applications for it, which is pretty much a guarantee that it will remain a tiny niche industry.
Agree, it’s basically the Apple Lisa all over again. Innovative, but not mass market.
But I think Apple learned some things from the Lisa, even though it barely sold.
I think the lack of a AppleVision non-pro that was just some really good screens and a battery, hooked up to your iPhone/MBA/MBP for use as an immersive display was a miss. I tried the AVP but realized I didn't want/need to strap a Macbook to my face: I have a computing device, I just wanted the display.
Scrap the passthrough cameras, the LCD eyes, and all that complexity.
Yikes. I can’t imagine it without passthrough. You have to take it off to move around at all?
Yeah? It's just a display for sitting on the couch or in an airplane, watching videos or viewing a huge virtual desktop. Scrapping the cameras would save a ton on size, BOM, and complexity. Basically a "Pimax Dream Air" formfactor.
I'd love the ability to have AVP immersion with my MBP on a flight, and combined with Airpods, you'd be able to block out everything. I don't need to walk around and wouldn't need to interact through it. It's like transparency for Airpods: an overengineered alternative to just taking an airpod out (or in this case, lifting the headset up).
Short reminder to the younger folks that 30 years ago it felt just like that for Apple, and then they almost went bankrupt.
Did it? At that time, I felt like they were an expensive boutique manufacturer that basically catered to a niche audience of media professionals.
At the time, they weren't even among the biggest tech companies. Today, they are one of the largest companies in the world.
Apple silicon was not an autopilot decision, kind of an insanely cool decision.
Apple Silicon was autopilot. Or more specifically the insanely cool decision happened under Jobs, and everything else is just coasting (i.e. repeating the same business success again and again without taking very many risks). Their first custom core design was the A6 in 2012, a year after his death, but they bought the team that made the design (P.A. Semi) in 2008. It took the team about a decade and change to scale up to something that could power a laptop, but the decision was made very early on and was specifically part of the same set of decisions that Apple has been coasting off of ever since. If Apple hadn't bought its own chip design firm they likely wouldn't have remained competitive long-term, in the same way that their computers got really uncompetitive for a few years before every major architectural transition.
Unless by "Apple Silicon" you specifically meant "the decision to transition from x86 to ARM". There is actual work there, but not a lot of risk. Apple famously maintained an internal x86 port of Mac OS X for years after Rhapsody was shitcanned and renamed "Mac OS X Server", so doing the same with ARM isn't that worse. iOS was derived from OSX; and just having iOS already up and running on ARM is already a good deal of the way towards a macOS port to ARM. In fact, it got easier as iOS got more technology hand-me-downs from macOS.
OpenSTEP was already multi-architecture when the merged happened, as NeXT was going cross platform to try the rescue the company at the time.
It's incredibly how long an era of good decisions can allow a company to coast.
Does he have a problem with his hands shaking ? Or you just mean he's nervous
not sure, he doesn't have shaky hands in the videos though so I assume nerves
Everybody is nervous their first few times. Hell, I’d rather see that somebody’s nervous and actually human at this point lol.
Apple’s post-COVID keynotes have been like watching plastic people try to out virtue signal one another as they do their best Zuckerberg imitations. Nervousness and humanity anytime, please.
The first few years of recorded presentation was okay because they were showing the Apple Park building which was pretty unique and the transitions were super cool. But now, it's the same old stuff again and again. It's the same building, same transitions. Live presentations would be so much more authentic.
In the later presentations, presenters definitely looked like Autons of the Doctor Who, from the first episode of the Ninth Doctor, where they were CGI.
I'd wait before believing no crease. My Z Fold 8 had basically no crease for the first week, after it has a slight crease that hasn't seemed to get any worse in the 3 weeks since. It's only noticeable in dark room with dramatic down lighting at certain angles, or when display is off, but it IS there. There has been some talk of Samsung actually having a better anti-crease solution than they opted to include in the z fold 8. Apparently their display division and mobile division are pretty separate and mobile only gets what they are willing to "pay for". It's possible apple ponied up for the better tech where Samsung mobile did not this year. But I'd still want to wait until people have had the thing for a few weeks and put it through it's paces before I believe any "no crease" claims.
Only people who don't use foldables worry about crease. I've used one for 5-6 years, and even with an older generation it has never been an issue. Half the time it's literally bent, so obviously there is a kink. At this point my screen has hairline fractures down the middle and even that doesn't actually bother me.
I would wait until there's a display model at an Apple Store, then give it a week while it goes through approximately a bajillion fold/unfold cycles, then see what the crease looks like.
Assuming they don't swap it out every night/week.
Speaking of which, when will it be in the stores to play with?
Likely on launch day next month (October 23). Apple doesn't do display units until the day of the launch.
The general public is always better at destructive testing than a machine built for that purpose.
> There is no crease at all!
Like first reply he literally says
> There is sorta one at some slight angles but basically no crease
And someone replied with a picture of it showing the crease.
It's probably fine and you don't notice it during use, but it's not some magic creaseless breakthrough.
Creases are overblown. Z7 Fold had a somewhat noticeable one, except... I stopped noticing it after first few minutes of use, and only realized it's there when light reflected off it at weird angle. Didn't get worse over a year.
With Z8 Fold Ultra, the crease is much more subtle and flat enough that I sometimes don't feel it while sliding my finger over it. Doesn't show signs of worsening over a month of rather intensive use (average 27 folds per day, yes there's an app that counts it, and it's underreporting because it took me two weeks to remember and exempt it from background activity limits and battery use optimizations...).
Point being, crease has stopped being an issue for actual use experience at least a generation or two of foldables ago. It's only something you worry about before purchase.
I know we aren't allowed on this website to say Apple marketing is posting comments.........
But, reddit either has fully religious people devoted to the Apple cause, or Apple is using their marketing team on Reddit.
Sorry for posting old news.
I watched this video by Marques Brownlee on the Oppo Find N6 (foldable).. https://youtu.be/eFUB_jL_XcM
It apparantly is a magic creaseless breakthrough... I'm eyeing one, and might put it on the Christmas wishlist...
The Find N6 still has a noticeable crease, it's just much smaller than the average foldable (here's a video of it with the screen off: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ss31thoK7xM).
If someone truly can't tolerate their phone screen being in any way perceptibly different from a single flat pane of glass, then they shouldn't buy foldables. It's something you have to get used to or ignore, with any brand. Especially over time as you bend and unbend the phone repeatedly and the crease deepens.
That's how it is on my Z Fold 8, I can really only see it with the screen off.
Yep, and at that point it doesn't matter. I mean, I know Apple likes to paint the back of the fence, but the technology isn't quite there for no crease just yet.
Somewhere between the 5 and 7 the crease was drastically reduced (except on mine, because the screen protector is delaminating)
yeah, don't put a screen protector on the inner screen
They come with one stock, and Samsung says you shouldn't remove it (which doesn't mean you can't, but I'm not brave enough to try). It's like $20 to get it replaced if you live near a Samsung shop
I removed it on Fold 5-7 and it felt a lot better. It won't kill the product like it did back in Fold 1 days. The screen is a lot more sensitive to micro scratches than your run if the mill gorilla glass though.
With my wife's folding Razor, there's a factory applied screen protector.
Z Folds come with a factory applied screen protector too, which i assume i was gp was talking about.
Is the factory applied screen protector user replaceable? Or is it a screen protector in the same way that the glass is 'screen protector'? It's just a part of the assembly?
The crease appears after months of use on other phones, so I'm curious what it would look like after a little bit of wear.
Yeah, I'm interested but I'll definitely give it a year or two for other people to discover any durability problems before committing (plus it's missing a lens option compared to the 18 Pro but that's a minor quibble.)
It does make me wonder if the era of foldable phones is finally here. Apple probably wouldn't bother making one if the tech wasn't there yet, despite the questionable experimentals others have been peddling for years now. Or it's a sign of Apple dropping their standards perhaps.
I guess the apple making Vision Pro shows that VR tech is here?
Apple isn't omnipotent, they have misses too.
I mean, their implementation was the best in the industry. The tech wasn't what held it back.
I would argue that the tech being top notch doesn’t mean it isn’t what’s holding it back.
The tech just isn’t there yet. Apple tends to wait until it is.
Z fold 8 comes slightly creased out of box, and creases within a week [1]. My 7 was significantly creased out of the box!
Months is a long time. You're supposed to return your iphone to apple and get a newer one as per your subscription.
Based on rumours Samsung finally cracked the secret on removing creases…iPhone is just the latest model on the market with the technology from them.
That said..I believe I’ve also seen some Chinese models ready claim this.
> Based on rumours Samsung finally cracked the secret on removing creases…
That's every year since it's introduction
At $2000, I'm not going to be an early adopter this time around. I'm concerned about screen crease/debris ingress, and I'll want to see user reports on how useful it ends up being.
That said, I'm much more intrigued than I expected to be, to the point that I found myself thinking "maybe ...". Kudos to the team. The fold/unfold transitions are really slick, and I like what they've done with the extra side space.
I really do love the idea. It just comes down to the idea that a cell phone shouldn’t cost as much as a run down, but serviceable used car used to cost in a world where inflation hasn’t run rampant.
The solution, of course, is the idea of leverage. 12 easy installments, or just lease it bro which apparently we’re doing now..for cell phones. But this solution isn’t sustainable. I’d have rather Apple not brought it to market it at all.
Me and my friends were naively hoping Ternus would switch back to the Jobs era format, or at least dial down from today’s.
We all hate the over acted, over produced keynote format of today
Maybe next year. It is a bit of an ask for someone who is just in the job for a few weeks. (Of course he has been groomed to get there. But still.)
We were hopeful of that towards the end with just him on the white virtual stage
Disagree on it looking great. It doesn't look like an Apple product. It looks geeky and clumsy. Which I personally don't mind, but absolutely not the sleek one is used to from Apple.
I agree on that, just like the iPhone Air, feel more like clumsy Samsung phones, seems there are a lot of compromises.
the core problem seems to be you can't make something that fold in half, yet has 4 curved corners both when folded and unfolded.
To be fair, my Fold 8 didn't have crease either when new month ago. Now the crease is increasing when most of the use is on the cover screen. I notice that when I open the fold, there is noticeable crease but if I read or watch something for longer time, the crease levels and goes more invisible.
Of course there is a crease
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1wbx1wo/there_is_a_cr...
very visible with a dark/black image https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2d-Mgaw9kXY
This Reddit thread shows a slight “bend”[1]. I’m distinguishing between an intentional allowance for bending vs a deformation that shows up later due to folding. But this is obviously splitting hairs because whatever we want to call it, the thing people don’t like about folding phones is the bend in the display where the fold occurs. And it looks like the Duo has that. Maybe the optical and technical tricks Apple has thrown at the problem will make the slight bend so inconspicuous as to be a non-issue. To me, telling that story is more impressive than claiming it doesn’t exist.
I would be more worried about the weird white stuff squeezing out of the lower right of the screen.
Agreed. I am excited to see what changes appear. I did enjoy the "One more thing" + smirk bit too.
There is still crease, noticeable in dark scene.
Basically Apple does what Chinese has done so far, 3d print a buffer to ease the crease. Oppo find n5, afaict, is the first one to do that.
> There is no crease at all!
Put down the kool aid mate.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1wc3ei0/...
What's the name for this?
Apple distortion field or something?
Since we can't mention Apple marketing making comments on hacker news, let's say they are on Reddit. :D
It was even more American over the top Marketing which really doesn't work well in the rest of world.
We laughed out loud when they claimed "the controls on the side let you celebrate your pictures on your lockscreen more"
Yea it's nice we can put whatever picture on a phone's lockscreen. It really is. Every phone does that.
Not once have I CELEBRATED my picture tho.
Open a bottle of champagne anyone?
>Open a bottle of champagne anyone?
Over the top European celebration that doesn't translate to the rest of the world. Especially countries in the Middle East that don't drink.
Personally I think it looks both incredibly ugly and also really non ergonomic.
I can’t see it being comfortable to hold and type on at all.
I predict the form factor will be gone within two years.
I have a few qualms with this phone:
For an Android user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting two phones, attaching them with a small hinge or case, and using an app to synchronise content between the displays. From a laptop or tablet, the same applications and files could be accessed through existing cloud services
Underappreciated Dropbox memory lane
Best comment of 2007, I’m sure it was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
At least the most memorable
Having to build a distributed system to sync storage between two devices or build your own custom hardware isn't exactly trivial
I have a Samsung Z Fold 7. The stock keyboard is split so it's a bit more comfortable to type on with my thumbs. Granted, this phone is the square form factor and not the wide version but I think the concept stays.
My iPad from 2018 still has a full width keyboard so I have to hunt and peck which is annoying. I would hope that apple designs this better for the iPhone duo.
Apple did have a split keyboard for my iPad mini but it seems like they make it hard to access. I don't think there's one on the bigger tablets.
There is on my iPad Pro. But I never use it. Not sure why. Probably because I never hold it with two hands.
Given that it's basically an iPad at that size, and those have been around for 16 years, I wouldn't be so sure about that.
> I predict the form factor will be gone within two years.
I predict you will be wrong.
This esim handoff is interesting. Why don't MacBook pros have modem and esim and work even more seamlessly between iPhone and MacBook? - Because operators wants to charge you for separate subscriptions
Many office workers gets some MacBook and iPhone by their employees. Do they actually need both if the employer can just hand them something like a duo which transforms to a desktop computer via usb-c cable?
Ive said for years there is nothing technical hindering an iPhone to become a something that looks like macOS when connected to large display, its just ui transformation.
But then, apple can't sell you an iPhone, an iPad and a MacBook. This is why they don't go this route I think, and this is maybe the hinder that something like the iPhone duo won't reach the full potential it could have.
> I think the Duo looks great.
I could not disagree more.
There are 3 ways to fold a phone:
1) The trifold: A phone that folds out into a tablet. (e.g. https://consumer.huawei.com/my/phones/mate-xt-ultimate-desig...)
2) The clam shell: a phone that folds down into a more compact form. (e.g. https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/samsung-galaxy-z-flip8-5g...)
3) The book: an awkwardly squashed phone that folds out into two awkwardly squashed phones taped together. (e.g. https://news.microsoft.com/surfaceduo/)
The trifold fits in your pocket.
The clamshell fits in small pockets (making it popular for women).
The book in a pocket is just uncomfortable (assuming it fits in at all).
They looked at all the folding phone formats and went with the worst possible one: the one that you can't fit in your pocket comfortably.
Further more, they looked at the worst book fold and decided to associate themselves with it by stealing its name, The S̶u̶r̶f̶a̶c̶e̶ Apple Duo: https://news.microsoft.com/surfaceduo/
--------------------
Apple releasing this is exactly what it looks like when there's no one helming the wheel.
fwiw, Apple had a PowerBook Duo line in the mid 90s, so maybe that's the reference
A proper PowerBook Duo of modern day would be a 32" iMac-like monstrosity with a big ass slot (opening on the right) into which you slide the whole MacBook Pro, and a whole lot of ports in the back. The MBP attaches by its thunderbolt ports and magsafe in the back of the slot.
Obviously, if you have macbooks of different sizes, you would need to buy separate duos for each size. MacBook Air might have a 27" dock, incompatible with the rest.
These threads are often amusing with people obliviously asking: why doesn't Apple make exactly what I want? And then stating with certainty how well their custom requirements would sell.
I'll probably wait and see how this phone does over the next few years. If it is still highly regarded by version 3 then I could imagine making the switch to a folding phone. For now I will remain conservative since my phone is such a critical piece of tech.
100%. It was so funny to see how for years, everyone on HN was harping on about how well a smaller iPhone would sell. Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.
Basically, try to do the opposite of what HN is saying and you might just create a successful product.
I kept an iPhone Mini until an App I need for work started consuming so much memory it became unusable on it (iOS would kill it after 15s). Even then, I raised ticket after ticket with support to get them to fix their app – which they did, then slipped again, for months.
Now I own a 17 pro, which feels like a brick in comparison but has 12 GB of RAM instead of 4.
I really miss my mini.
Fun fact: The iPhone Duo‘s outer display is 5.4 inch, just like the iPhone mini. Ok, with different proportions.
You could have bought an Air and been closer to your Mini than the Pro is...
You're just proving the point of this thread by pining for a niche phone that almost no one wanted enough to actually own.
Apple sold around six million Mini models per year that they were on sale.
It's hard to envisage a boardroom scenario where that's not considered successful, but apparently it exists.
Apple sold ~230M iPhones the year the mini was discontinued. 2% is an unquestionable failure.
-an iPhone mini fan
6/230 seems closer to 3%. And while the number is relatively low, it seems to be a niche where they might lose customers to other platforms. It must have been unprofitable/very expensive to maintain that they killed it.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
I don't get that mentality. Millions of units, shares many parts with other models, OK margin. This is no reason to kill a product.
For comparison, that's roughly like Ford killing the Bronco Sport, or VW killing the ID.7.
this is exactly what Steve Jobs did after coming back from Next. Simplifying is very useful, especially in a big corp that want to be differentiated
well, VW has cancelled the ID.7 for the US market, and by 2030 will have killing 50% of their models across all brands (according to topgear).
Of course, they never even brought it to the US. It has no chance there, there's barely a market for lowslung station wagons, and close to no market for EV wagons. Always was a niche in the US, while it was always the primary family vehicle in Europe.
And yes, VW is fighting for survival. The things they are killing are the low volume models specific to the Chinese market (because absolutely nobody in China is buying any VWs) and a lot of the variants and overlaps they've accumulated over the years. They'll continue making less than 100k iD.7s, and will be happy to do so (it's modestly profitable).
https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=LRWaCeOMC5z-dLOg very relevant video from almost 10 years back which was about Oneplus but says the same thing in much greater depth.
> Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.
And by "nobody", you mean "actually a lot of people, just not as many as the bigger model". It's ok to have a model that meets a less common, but still extant, need in the market. If everyone followed Apple's logic on this, people with very small or very large bodies would have to go naked because companies would go "that size doesn't sell as much, we have to kill it" rather than (as actually happens) charging more per unit to make up for the overhead of lower volumes of sales.
The mini accounted for 3% of sales. Personally I’m a believer, and a buyer, but 3% isn’t a good number.
By that logic a supermarket would sell only 33 items.
Trader Joe's limited SKU model. They are also 4x more profitable than a standard supermarket per square foot of store space.
"Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air. Supposedly they're gonna refresh the Air next year, we'll see. But even if they don't: we're well into the "keep phones 3 years or more" era of the smart phone. You don't need an exact match for every phone for everybody every year.
> "Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air.
The iPhone air has a 6.5" display. That's bigger than the base iPhone 17 (6.3") and the iPhone 17e (6.1")
You're probably thinking about the thinness of the phone. iPhone air is 2.4mm thinner than iPhone 17, but I don't think anyone is asking for that, as most people use a case which makes the phone thicker.
Yeah, it's smaller in a different way than the mini was small.
But the thinness isn't actually the appeal. The key thing is that it's a lot lighter. (And yes, a case adds weight as well as thickness. But if you start from a lower baseline, you still end up in a lower place.)
But I think you do need some level of consistency to retain customers. Churning models, especially given Apple's otherwise-excellent retention metrics and mechanisms, seems like a self-goal by almost encouraging those buyers to switch after 3 years.
If you bought an iPhone Mini or an Air, but that model is gone at T+3 years, that's a lot more likely to result in you looking to Android, than if you bought an iPhone 13 and want to upgrade to an iPhone 16/17.
The Air wasn't "smaller", it was thinner in some areas and as far as I can tell just a pathfinder for a folding phone
6 to 7 million units is a good number.
6 to 7 million units at the scale of Apple is not necessarily worth the investment.
It's not ok if it uses resources that could be better spent elsewhere. At 3% share what do you expect them to do?
If we’re talking about unattainable dreams, I want a scroll rather than a folding phone - it’d be much better than a me-too form factor like this.
Don’t expect this to sell well - too big for trouser pockets and not enough advantages to the form factor, plus inevitably wear will make it either unprofitable for Apple or an expensive mistake for the purchaser.
The price point also outs it squarely in the luxury end of the market rather than mass-market.
I mean, they have a return policy. Give it a try! It could be fun.
How many years did you keep your Nokia 3310 when smart phones were released
Exactly. Obviously Apple did the research on this.
Personally I still like the "flip" style fold (normal phone size that folds into a smaller square). The lack of durability for the inner screen seems like less of an issue if it's protected inside (while folded). This seems like it really incentivises leaving it unfolded except for pocket use
Being average person is like winning lottery. Everyone is making products for you.
Also you get most anonymity on the internet because they can't fingerprint you.
Everyone is unique, even if average. They 100% can fingerprint anyone.
Especially once you interact with a site. Who types, clicks, or swipes just like you?
Except there’s no average person, the average itself is a combination of people with the most diverse needs and constraints. It’s like the joke that the average human being has 1 breast and 1 testicle.
My favorite similar statistic is that the average human body contains more than one human skeleton
Given... things, it's more like 1.9 breasts and testicles. I was talking with someone who just couldn't get why though.
"Bring back the headphone jack, it's what everybody wants and will sell squillions!"
Contrary to popular belief, Apple did not kill the mini because iphone 13 mini sales were poor. And they were poor.
Apple killed it because Mini 14s are illegal in Europe. There are tons in the US though.
The Mini 14 never existed. Perhaps you're thinking of a specific (non-mini) model of the iPhone 12 which was temporarily banned in France or maybe the USB C requirement which went into effect ~1 year after new sales of the iPhone 13 mini were already discontinued by Apple worldwide?
I think maybe they're making a joke about the Ruger Mini-14? It's a rifle.
LOL, hilarious if that's what it was! Can't say I've ever shot one but it sure looks fun.
The mini-14 is probably the best and most useful rifle I’ve ever owned and would 100% recommend to anybody.
I always felt the mini-14 occupied like an uncanny valley position between the sensible utility of a lever action and the high fashion of an AR15. Granted, it predates the ubiquity of ARs by like 3 decade or so.
It's also New York legal which is rare for a semiauto that comes in 5.56. Ruger nailed it with guns that don't look scary. Don't have the mini-14 but do have the 10/22 and their PCC - both of which have all the functionality but none of the scary features.
I think you meant to say “due to correct belief, Apple did kill the mini due to sales”?
I was ready to switch to a foldable. Then they said there is no FaceId and that idea went out of the window. I sure hope they will include it in later versions.
As a recent Android foldable phone owner (Google Pixel), I'm excited that the Duo will get developers to actually design apps for foldables. Right now, some apps don't work at all and others are just stretched. I feel a better use of the screen space is around the corner for both Android foldable and Duo users.
As a dev who regularly works on apps for both platforms, I think one of the main causes for poor support for form factors beyond a standard smartphone on Android boils down to Google refusing to give developers fully fleshed out APIs to support said form factors.
Instead, they just hand you some poorly documented loose parts in a box and tell you, “good luck” and you’re on your own to fill the gaps. Compose is a little better about giving the tools you need than the preceding Android Framework, but it’s still much more “assembly required” and “batteries not included” than the UIKit+SwiftUI world is.
Many iOS apps built using system components will behave 90%+ correctly on the Duo by just compiling against the iOS 27.1 SDK because there are well supported methods of doing things that Apple can leverage to reduce dev work. In contrast, on Android there's 10 ways of doing anything none of which get full-throated support (on top of all the other ways devs invent), and so any time it gains support for a new form factor almost nothing is automatic and it all falls on the devs’ shoulders.
Another reason is hardware fragmentation. An Android developer has to account for over 20,000 unique devices, compared to an Apple developer targeting around 40 supported models at most.
It’s a factor, but the bulk of those devices can be generalized into a handful of categories. Google could also throw around its weight a bit more to get manufacturers to form a consensus on things like how various components are addressed so it doesn’t need to spin its wheels as much on papering over those differences.
> Instead, they just hand you some poorly documented loose parts in a box and tell you, “good luck” and you’re on your own to fill the gaps.
Google is fundamentally a spy company, not a product company
All of FAANG is, if we're being cynically reductive.
Apple has a very different business model than Google (Alphabet). It's not even close to the same in terms of how they make most of their money.
As if hardware companies don't quite famously include spyware in their products. Everything from phones, cars, fridges, TVs, monitors, speakers, light bulbs, laptops and everything else that supports inclusion of spyware.
You're not wrong today, but they are expanding their ads department to the detriment of users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911901, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501511
I don't disagree. They're still a spy company, if we're being cynically reductive.
Is there a way to ELI5 Google's primary business model without it coming across as spying on people?
Very few have the same problem among FAANG and others.
???
WindowSizeClasses, Postures, Navigation3, ListDetailScaffolds, the list goes on. Android & Compose is pretty much flawless when it comes to develop for it, it's thoroughly documented and works well.
Layouts will not magically be not dog shit on iOS because Apple put out another version of SwiftUI that you can't use in prod because nobody has the update. 90% of the apps will be stretched. Horizontally. The reality of it is, it's pretty much never worth it to make layouts that are specialised for foldables/tablets.
Also, it's pretty fucking funny to be worshipping Apple like that when they have a single device to support, and then complain about Android that literally had to pave the way and today works on phones that can unfold three times, phones like the galaxy Z Flip that have instead half screens, etc. Apple will tell you they can't back port dynamic islands on last year's release, while latest Compose is happily running on devices from 10 years ago.
> WindowSizeClasses, Postures, Navigation3, ListDetailScaffolds, the list goes on.
Yes, those are the loose parts. They still have to be assembled correctly for everything to work as expected and every app does it a bit differently (there is effectively no endorsed "correct" way to assemble them). This means that Google cannot extend them with new functionality later without breaking some if not most usages of those parts in the future.
Compare that to UITabController in UIKit, which has been present since very early on and got extended recently. If the dev adopts iOS 18 revisions, configuring that single view controller gets you more or less correct presentation and navigation across all sizes and orientations of normal iPhone, iPad, desktop, and now iPhone Duo and implementation is close to identical between apps.
> …and then complain about Android that literally had to pave the way and today works on phones that can unfold three times, phones like the galaxy Z Flip that have instead half screens, etc.
That's fair, but users can't reasonably expect any kind of meaningful adoption of new oddball form factors like that until the platform vendor (Google) rolls out standardized APIs to streamline the process (which Google has partially done, but won't commit to a unified solution for).
> Apple will tell you they can't back port dynamic islands on last year's release, while latest Compose is happily running on devices from 10 years ago.
That is an advantage, but iOS users tend to stay much more up to date so it's something of a moot point. The userbase of versions just three major releases behind is typically below 5% and anything older is fractional at best, so unless you're a Google-scale giant you're probably fine only supporting the newest 2-3 versions of iOS. That's pretty nice since I don't need to keep a drawer full of prehistoric phones running ancient versions of Android to test adequately (so I don't find out about some weird behavior that only occurs under Android 11 in prod)…
It would depend on the sales volume. For a long time the iPad has been available and many developers simply are content to have a stretched version of their iPhone app on their iPad, because the sales volume isn’t sufficient. If foldable phones sell like iPads, this could very well happen to them too.
I still think that there are very few examples of apps that utilize tablets well even among the apps that aren't stretched phone apps. I don't know if it is the ergonomics of the large screen or what, but the experience of using a tablet has always been pretty bad in my opinion.
Maybe the folding phone form factor will inspire some better UI/UX for apps.
Exactly, I remember until recently even instagram didn’t have a proper iPad app that uses the complete screen space
The rumours say 10 million iPhone Duo are being made, there are hundreds of millions of iPads so the numbers might not sway any opinions for a while.
I think they need to aggressively court developers, just give a buttload of advertising credit to nice apps that predate AI slop if they add compatibility, what does it cost Apple to "give" you $10k or $20k credit in their own ad system...
But the rumours also say they are going to squeeze the App Store for higher margins so maybe it is too late.
> "A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in."
This is a quote from John Carmack and should sit over every developers monitor. At the same time, OS designers should be doing everything in their power to reduce the number of states a developer has to think about.
Like one of the things I hate about frontend development - and admire people who do this professionally - is the stupid and arbitrary rules browsers impose on you.
'You may only play audio if such and such conditions are met. However these are different based on browser and platform. Good luck making a solution fitting all these.'
'The browser might lie about what's the available screen estate is, but only sometimes'
'There is a perfect API for what you wanna do, however it's not in Safari'
And a testament on how obscure and arcane knowledge is on doing things right is that I thought there would be some npm packages that do these things for me, but no - you have to hunt around for solutions and fix things yourself.
And LLMs are completely useless and confidently wrong mostly about everything involving this.
Yep fundamentally different from back end because you don't control the client.
In theory the client can do literally anything (for example, someone could be using an ancient version or have some features voluntarily disabled) and you have to decide which things you're going to handle
I don't want to be pessimistic, but I can see a single app now showing two different feeds to doomscroll.
My immediate thought seeing this design was how expensive this is going to be for companies to get their existing apps to look good on this thing.
> I'm excited that the Duo will get developers to actually design apps for foldables.
For Apple foldables yes. Not Android.
Same here. I ditched the google pixel fold after a year because the hardware had some issues, also tbh I prefer the iOS ecosystem. I’m so glad this is coming out.
> a better use of the screen space is around the corner
I see what you did there :)
Developers will design apps for Apple's foldables.
Cross-platform is a thing.
If anyting, Apple stands to gain from what was already developed for Android.
Like https://developer.android.com/phones-tablets-foldables
Which targets iOS also: https://kotlinlang.org/compose-multiplatform
React Native and Flutter are way more popular than KMM/CM, and yet both have struggled to support even small iOS visual changes in a timely fashion.
This is ignoring the fact that developers who choose these cross-platform frameworks don't seem to care much about quality and general polish.
It is a thing to some extent, but there’s also a correlation of companies that do cross-platform for simple apps being cheap on development, and making it work very well on some specific platform isn’t their priority.
Thought it will bring "desiging for foldables" onto the table which would benefit Android foldables too.
> As a recent Android foldable phone owner (Google Pixel)
"There are dozens of us!" (not me though, I wouldn't buy a Pixel foldable)
I don't think I would want this device for $500, let alone what Apple is asking.
What is the appeal? There are a few screen scenarios that make sense for my life: (1) Multiple displays at desk to work; (2) TV + couch; (3) laptop + lap or surface; (4) phone (anywhere). I'm never in need of a tablet. If I needed that screen real estate, I'd be reaching for my laptop.
Many people (possibly a majority) use their phone for most of their computing, and perhaps a tablet to stream movies/tv. They use a laptop or desktop for work only, and see those as frustrating and clunky devices. There could be a lot of demand for "phone, but with a tablet screen when I want to watch Netflix" from the segment of the population that has zero overlap with people commenting on a tech forum.
The folks around me that computing includes a lot of social and game consumption.
I know many people without a laptop or desktop at home. They don't find it strange. I can't imagine not having at least a laptop in my life.
I know someone exactly like that. He runs a very profitable side business (reselling) using only his smartphone to take pictures, upload them, message customers, emails etc. I'm always baffled how he doesn't at least have some small laptop to help him type out stuff when needed, but he's doing just fine.
> If I needed that screen real estate, I'd be reaching for my laptop.
Which you commonly have in your pocket? I have a GPD pocket 4 and love me some portable laptops, but I do sorta hope we get somewhere with foldables to where I'm happy just breaking out an arc mouse and small keyboard and treating that as the computer.
We're obviously not, and i'm probably not anywhere near willing to shell out the cash for this, but "the tool you have" and all that.
I think the current iteration of foldables is still too bulky for me. But I can see how it'd be cool to have a large screen while the device still fits in my pocket.
I commute by train. I would never watch a tv show on a phone but watched plenty on my iPad. If the big screen gives you an actual access to “desktop” web, then suddenly more web starts working (the switch in Safari is perfectly useless)
Tmux does not work that well on a tiny screen, and I use it a lot.
Teams/Zoom calls when not on desk. iPhone Max screen is just a bit too small when people are sharing their screen.
> If I needed that screen real estate, I'd be reaching for my laptop.
It is increasingly common for people to have no laptop or any computing device other than their smartphone, smartwatch, and/or game console. I know very few people who have a non-work computer anymore.
I never thought I'd defend apple, but that was the arguments people (myself including) were making about iPads. So I wouldn't presume this won't find a public, starting with the apple fans.
I find the form factor repulsive though, doesn't fit comfortably in a pocket and seems pretty thick. Screen durability is described as "we have premium material" and an "scratch resistant" coating, but no mention of free screen replacements like samsung is doing ; so I assume you'll have to shelve off half the price of the device every year for a new screen. I think this might not be a great device.
So I guess I agree with you
I want this, this could legitimately replace my laptop. I never liked the samsung fold since the form factor was a bit too ehh. Apple did something right here.
https://www.samsung.com/fi/smartphones/galaxy-z-fold8/buy/ I think that the form factor is pretty much the same?
I am 75, and have a ton of computer gear. I can imagine myself as an old man later in life, not wanting to do any programming, and just wanting a single digital device like a future version of this product. Let’s see what Apple has available in 10 years.
Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming. I used to love this stuff. But after watching all my favourite companies and CEOs turn to greedy villains… I’m just done. How do I survive another 35 years doing this stuff?
Good news! According to some, we don’t have more than 3.5 years in the career path, so that’s 10x less time you have to survive.
I hope they're wrong, I need to squeeze out 6 years for this career. Fortunately I work for a big stodgy old company whose idea of fast tech adoption is measured in years anyway.
Are they hiring and are they ok with remote ;)
Yes but they need people who can hang on to an HN account for longer than a day.
Go work for companies you like. There are plenty of good people out there making useful software. Or make your own opensource software and put your effort where your heart is.
It’s easy in our industry to burn out doing commercial work with no soul. But it’s not the only kind of work out there.
I worked for a large unethical company in the US that worked to emulate big tech, and took a page out of Jack Welch's playbook (stack ranking etc). I was miserable working there and thinking of changing careers.
I ended up moving to New Zealand and working for a small civil engineering firm that has developers to write internal tools that are used by the engineering team to process their data. The technology I'm working with is a lot more dated, the development processes aren't sophisticated (there are 0 meetings and no attempt at project management) and I took a real pay cut, but I genuinely feel that the software I'm working with is beneficial and has a net positive impact on the world, no matter how small. There is also no on call and I work exactly 37.5 hours a week, on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.
They've always been greedy villains.
Nah, this is a really dangerous narrative. Shareholder primacy is a pretty recent concept (a fundamentally anti-American one) that has recently gone metastatic and is now completely self-referential.
We've Goodharted the entire premise of the profit-seeking corporation and now openly say that Goodharting it is actually the point. Maybe it should be called Meta-goodharting or something.
Edit: Since large numbers of 1) historically illiterate and 2) "ideas don't matter" type people tend to congregate on HN, it's worth saying explicitly that the takeover of shareholder primacy is empirically visible in all sorts of corporate behaviors.
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the other robber barons of the Gilded Age have a hearty chuckle and say hi.
If you think Rockefeller (especially) is an example of unalloyed greed, you unfortunately land in category (1) mentioned above.
The problem is not wealth. The problem is not producing massive value and capturing a portion of it.
The problem is thinking that the system-level goal of capitalism is to extract wealth rather than to produce it and distribute it. Of the men you listed, only Vanderbilt supports your argument.
I would be fascinated to hear what value you think JP Morgan created rather than moved around. His company continues to do so long after his death.
If you don't think underwriting and lending (and extended universe of financial services) are legitimate forms of value creation, I'm afraid that a hackernews comment thread won't be up to the task of demonstrating otherwise.
Theres a reason American capital markets and tech go hand in hand after all. Just read the recent Mistral thread about the lack of capital in Europe and why Mistral seems largely third rate in the AI frontiers.
... Aren't we back to a definition, then, that includes tech companies adding value too? All the free services I use every day I would consider value for me. Instant free search, fast home delivery, insightful educational content (90s educational TV had no competition over modern educational YouTube). Etc etc. I see fewer ads than I did in the 90s, too.
Rockefeller, the “competition is sin” guy, sure that has nothing to do with greed. His philanthropy had a positive impact but he was still an unethical business person hellbent on stopping anyone else from making money on his turf
Shareholder primacy certainly is relatively new, but it's also true that "the system-level goal of capitalism is to extract wealth". After that, hopefully we use that capital to produce and distribute goods "fairly".
But Capitalism isn't synonymous with the free market, or any other market configuration, and it's totally possible for the people who control the means of production and distribution to... not produce or distribute. In fact, that may be advantageous in their efforts to secure more capital.
Ultimately, "they" really always have been greedy villains. Shareholder supremacy just made it worse.
Could you elaborate? Goodharting what metric exactly and how was that different earlier?
Isn't the distribution of shares among the population instead of just a few private investors a good thing? Democratizing in a sense, everybody can participate? (If only wealth was distributed more evenly. But that's a different problem it seems.)
I highly recommend Incorruptible by Eric Reis - it makes it clear that shareholder primacy is a relatively recent phenomena, but capital and markets have been corrupting businesses for a long, long time.
He did an AMA here recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477135
There are several business philosophies a person (or a culture) can pick from. The dominant philosophy in the US today is "shareholder primacy" where business leaders believe their only dictum is to maximize shareholder value. This is so pervasive that many Americans (businesspeople and non-) think that it's baked into what it means to be a profit-seeking business, but it is not.
Shareholder primacy took off after Milton Friedman advocated for it 1962. The philosophy that it supplanted (in the US) was "stakeholder capitalism" where businesses explicitly sought to be positive contributors to a much more comprehensive set of stakeholders: their shareholders, their managers, their employees, their customers, their suppliers, and their communities (non-exhaustive).
The central conceit of capitalism is that you can co-opt the individual's greed and, properly constrained by laws and guided by markets, you can reward them for doing things of value for their community.
The question then is what philosophy do you build around that central greed-of-the-individual. Do you temper it with expectations of taking care of people other than oneself? Or do you fan it and unbridle it by saying, "actually, greed isn't the evil that we must co-opt to pro-social ends, greed is actually the pro-social end itself?"
It turns out that if you do the latter, business managers, shareholders, and regulators can collude to create extremely positive outcomes for each other at the expense of other stakeholders. You can save money by dumping your waste product into rivers, you can arbitrage labor away to infinitely far away lands, you can buy politicians, etc. etc.
How might regulators behave differently in a world where people believe a corporation ought to take care of its entire community, versus a world where the literal only purpose of a corporation is to enrich its shareholders? Quite different, probably!
Then all of this stacks on top of the natural "capital flows to capital" dynamic in capitalism which I'd argue is insufficiently mitigated, and you just get this ridiculous feedback loop that piles more resources and positive outcomes into a narrower set of people, while offloading more negative outcomes onto everyone else.
Obviously opting into a different business philosophy doesn't preclude negative outcomes, but I think that more budding business leaders could, should, and would essentially have their careers strangled earlier on if they exhibited antisocial traits if we had a business culture that didn't pretend like this was literally an asset.
Re your second question:
Assuming that shareholder primacy is the only philosophy we could pick from, then yes a market with many public shareholders is better than the alternative. But 1) not everyone is invested in public markets, 2) not all companies are available to purchase in public markets, 3) public markets are demonstrably not good at solving certain types of problems – especially problems that occur over extended time horizons or are easy to externalize off the balance sheet, and most importantly 4) costs-benefits are not zero-sum. You can't generally undo the harms of Company A by investing in its competitor Company B. It would be best if both companies' management felt they had an obligation not to harm their communities even if it could further enrich their shareholders to do so. It would be even better if investors in general felt both companies should have an obligation to take care of their communities or employees, and so companies lived in fear of divestment if they chose to violate their communities.
But in a culture that has opted into shareholder primacy, all feedback signals in this direction are removed. Regulators, investors, shareholders, employees, and the general public all pretty much believe that maximally externalizing harms and maximally capturing benefits is actually literally the way it's supposed to be.
Know any good books on this stuff ?
Stakeholder Capitalism sounds like a much longer term success vector for most companies.
Spend less money, save more money, then retire. I'm retired at 42 and I hardly had a top shelf career, middle of the pack at best. Even if you're starting at zero you can do it in 10 years very easily, 5 if you haven't spent every dime up till now and you are aggressive.
Do you have kids?
The answer to this question seems obvious. There are no 42 year olds that retire by merely "saving and not over spending" when even one child is involved.
Yes there are. My brother in law sold his startup and is sufficiently retired while raising my nephews. Not a common case, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not zero.
I used my words carefully when I said "retire by merely 'saving and not over spending'".
Your brother in law did not merely save and not over spend, he built a business and sold it for a large payout.
> Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming.
It's a shame you didn't come to this conclusion 10 years ago!
Find a hobby that doesn’t involve computers. It’s the only thing that will keep you sane in these trying times.
Switch the work mindset off, turn your nose up at technology and go touch grass. I wouldn’t be recommending if it didn’t work for me.
If nothing else it helps reframe your perspective on the world which technology companies as of late have been trying to distort to enrich the dozen or so people at the helm to their own benefit..
Holy batman, are you me?? I too am 40 and so sick of this industry after the masks came off and AI greed forced all CEOs and execs to salivate like hungry hyenas.
Are you sure you're just not frustrated that you didn't win the greedy villain lottery?
My dad is 87 and I'm seriously thinking about buying him one of these. He wants a phone that will fit in his pocket, but his vision isn't great so he has the text size bumped up pretty high. Right now he's using an iPhone 15. Large text size on a small-form-factor phone, it turns out, makes a fair number of apps nearly unusable. For example, it's super common to see a dialog box pop up where the "OK" button is pushed off the bottom of the screen by the text, leaving you with no way to dismiss it. I frequently get tech-support calls from him that end up boiling down to that problem, and it makes using apps a pretty frustrating experience for him.
A device that fits in his pocket and that he can still hold in one hand when he's using it as a phone, but that has enough screen real estate to run apps in large-print mode without constantly breaking UI designs, would meaningfully improve his life.
Im not 87 and have great vision but I recently got some magnifying shop style glasses for close up work on tiny stuff. It also has the advantage of being like readers in that it corrects for close vision (closer point of focus) in addition to magnifying. That could also help.
This would actually be a growing market in 10-15 years due to increased life expectancy and every boomers has reached retiring age by then. Maybe Apple would introduce an iPhone optimized to be used especially for older people
I know my Pixel has an accessibility setting that is effectively "make this device more usable for older people." It gets rid of the home screen/app switching/go back gestures and replaces them with the old icons at the bottom of the screen, makes all the text and icons larger, and apparently increases the amount of time you need to press on the screen for it to count as a long press.
Apparently as you age, the capacitive touch sensitivity to your fingers goes down as well.
Iphone 15 counting as "small form factor" says a lot.
I encounter the same problem of unclickable buttons on my iPhone 15 fairly often. Sometimes I can make them reachable by switching to landscape mode, but not always. I’m 69 and do prefer larger fonts, though I don’t think my font size settings are causing the problem.
Good catch! I misremembered his model. He actually uses an iPhone 13 Mini, which definitely counts as small (by modern smartphone standards, anyway).
Its a 2200$ device which does the same thing as a 500$ tablet or any other option.
If people would at least use the power they buy... :|
We (the HN audience) have disposable income for that type of thing, I don’t see the issue with being a casual user of an expensive device
I can't even afford the 17e, who is this we?
The audience at large. It’s obviously not every single individual
I also can't fathom paying $2,200 for a phone, which is to say that we're not all working for US big tech companies in here.
I have the disposable income and would still not pay 2k USD for a phone a FWIW. But I spend that on other hobbies (just ordered a programmable power supply and an oscilloscope earlier this week, close to that price when taken together)
>We (the HN audience) have disposable income
Ah the fallacy of thinking a collection of individuals as being a homogeneity.
See the sibling response, not sure how you missed it before commenting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49633340
I cannot with good faith tell you the financials of every HN user to any degree of accuracy to defend a statement like you're defending.
What you have is a "guess".
Maybe one data point is that this forum is open to all, without any gatekeeping based on salary?
It’s of course a guess, I don’t know how else you would read such a large generalization. Most of the HN audience is based in the US, most people here work in software. It’s not a crazy stretch
[flagged]
I intended to generalize, which is what I’ve done. There is nothing wrong with that. You can skip the patronizing tone
The typical HN user likely has more disposable income than most people
Doesn't ycombinator run a business where they let people borrow money with a high degree of likelihood that the venture will be a complete failure?
If I was the receiver of such a loan, am I just going to give myself a huge salary, or what it is that you do, here?
Work in a white collar job instead of for example part time retail. That will put you well above average earnings.
Blue collar maintenance worker here. I will have a yearly average income much higher than most of my peers because I'll likely die before I can retire and spend it ;)
A $2200 device and still limited to running dumbed-down touchscreen 'apps' from the App Store.
OP is 75 years old and belongs to the generation that already own a house and pretty much comfortable in their lives and any money they have/earn is just to consume things and live life. So why not spend it on a first generation device
It does far more than just a tablet. If it was easy, there would be one or two other companies out there who is this other vertical computer company?
i've been hearing this critique of new apple products for about two decades now and inevitably: - apple's product "does the same thing" as [device sold at 25% of the cost] AND - apple's product "does the thing" at a level of polish that's in an entirely different league from every competitor.
siri is the great exception here. jesus christ what a piece of shit
This year it's the most ___ ever.
(I hope so, would be embarrassing to say last years iphone was faster but used more power, so ....)
Thats not the point. There is a difference between someone spending a lot of money on compute and never use it vs. doing the same thing.
Its like buying a porsch and driving it always at 100km only.
a better analogy would be a toyota hybrid, which is basically the same as any other hybrid car, except for the one issue of reliability.
So yes, a toyota hybrid and a chevrolet hybrid should be exactly the same, but they are not, the price difference reflects it, as does the number of twenty year old toyota hybrids still on the road.
My wife has gone through a large number of iPhones in the past 14 years, where as I've had a total of 2 android phones. Way easier to repair, and add software well past the end of life date.
Why has she gone through so many iPhones? I’m typing this on my iPhone 12 from 2020. Before that I had an iPhone 6s from 2015. I’m considering upgrading this year, but I could hold off for another few years if I wanted to. My phone still runs like it did when it was new. I get through most days with 60%+ battery remaining.
The biggest problem with my phone is modern software bloat. I only have the 64gb model. Modern software - especially iOS itself - has gotten ginormous. Every time a patch comes out I’ve gotta delete a bunch of stuff in order to update. And running unpatched software seems pretty dangerous right about now.
Perhaps a bit pedantic, but ironically I don't think Chevrolet makes any normal price range hybrids atm
The $500 tablet could be an Apple iPad
In fact iPads start at $429
The iPad Mini starts at $599, with a more comparable screen size.
And there isn't really any competitive tablet with Android in that size. I've only seen cheaper tablets with lower specs.
Hell before the recent price hikes $2000 would get you a Macbook Neo, an iPad Mini, and an iPhone 17e.
There used to be a pretty big gap between iPhone and android in terms of polish. that gap keeps narrowing, but it is still there for sure.
I have an iPhone and an Android phone and I don't see the gap at all when it comes to software. Quite the opposite, I think iOS regressed a lot with iOS 26 to the point where I see quite a lot of render stutters on an iPhone Air and 17 Pro. Besides that, Android is much more configurable (especially OneUI).
Apple is still the indisputable leader when it comes to hardware though. Great SoC, great cameras, great build quality.
Too bad it doesn't have GrapheneOS :).
Is there, though? The last few iOS releases have been pretty classless and inconsistent, imho.
That gap isn’t closing when it comes to the total package software plus hardware, and fit and finish there is a huge gap between Apple being a vertical computer company and whatever PC, Linux, Android product you look at, someone else brought up Toyota or Honda when you look at those two companies and you compare what they make to what GM and Ford make there is still a gap and you can also still see a gap when you talk about some of the other German companies when it comes to fit and finish too.
They can charge as much as they think people will pay for.
Fact is, having a better pocket computer (that is your only pocket computer I might add) is probably going to have a lot of value for people.
Nah, let's just throw a new web framework at them that consumes all their newfound computing capacity. Always leave em' wanting more
Do you think there’s some cabal of executives trying to use more resources so that users are forced buy newer hardware?
Or is it more likely that software companies are making a tradeoff based on typical consumer hardware and would rather prioritize making $$$ over optimizing their software?
You sound like ESR ranting about how Apple was doomed by Android back when the iPhone came out. He would rant and rant every time about how there was no conceivable way that Apple could survive. Somehow, Apple has managed to survive by the skin of it's teeth.../s
You all laugh but yeah your brain is going to directly interface with some small portable client hooked up to the internet. Will probably just be integrated with the microchip in your head.
in 10 years any phone should be able to wirelessly stream it to any monitor / tv and plenty of those will be everywhere
We can do this now, but I don't think the user experience makes it worth it compared to casting. Bandwidth limitations require lower frame rates and responsiveness, which is fine for video but bad for interactive apps (most phones are native 120+hz + VRR_. But re-encoding video is (processor & battery life) expensive and probably lower quality than the original stream.
People who do this a lot probably just use a DV adapter (maybe it just works with USB-C, but I haven't tried it) for native apps, or casting for streaming video.
Right — I would have hoped a while ago already that we transcend past the notion of an endpoint device. A tablet, a laptop, or a phone should all just be entry points to access my one OS instance.
You could think this a bit further still, and have all kinds of devices offer an interface to nearby endpoints with a display or controls, establishing connectivity automatically.
Right now, Apple is the only vertical company out there at scale. Maybe one of the Chinese companies might eventually get there but who is this western company other than Apple? It certainly isn’t Google or Microsoft at this point their efforts are more halfhearted me-too products, and when I say hardware, I mean in-house designed and engineered hardware not buying it from somebody else.
Apple does this right now. I use AirPlay to extend one laptop into an older laptop so I can have 2 displays when I’m away from home
There is a difference between laptop and a phone. Hopefully in the future phone can be switched to a full desktop mode and OS when it beams to large screen. Well that is unless by then we have chip in our brains or what's equally bad everything rented and leased and can be used from any physical location. Convenient but deadly.
I mean you kinda can do that now.
>"kinda" - is a keyword. experience is abysmal, especially when it works but true desktop paradigm is not supported
I find Dex to be decent enough. Its biggest limitation is that it runs Android apps, but for doing stuff in a browser on a big screen and multitasking with some other apps that are tolerable to use that way it's pretty good.
>"I find Dex to be decent enough" - I guess it is very personal. I find it atrocious. Not this and not that. My instincts are screwed
[flagged]
I presume you're trying to be friendly here, but your first couple sentences come off a bit harsh.
I like that he's well into his life and still enjoying writing (or authoring, or whatever we call it now) code, and looks forward to a nice long life. No one lives forever, and I'm sure he's aware of that.
Yeah I'm quite old myself and that's ok. I find that sometimes we put off things unnecessarily. Life is short, enjoy it.
I take it this is a joke? I am in my 50s and don’t see myself staring at screens for too long, let alone coding.
Edit: I don’t know of anyone 75 still coding outside of retired professors here and there. I am not trying to be an ageist. I just don’t think I will be physically capable when I am 75.
>"I am in my 50s and don’t see myself staring at screens for too long, let alone coding."
I am 65 and still enjoy software development (not coding in particular) but decomposing business idea into software architecture and functionality. Decomposing is the part I really enjoy, the rest is a necessity but with AI that rest takes way less of my time than it used to.
I do not work for someone though. I develop products for clients or for my own business, was doing it all my life and was doing it from my own office for last 26 years. Not overworked either. Have enough time to enjoy life. Al in all very happy
Foldables seem like Homer's car to me. It's a worse phone and a worse tablet all in one.
For reference:
https://media.wired.com/photos/593252a1edfced5820d0fa07/3:2/...
Just like people complaining about "phablets" a decade ago right? "more bulky than a phone, smaller than a tablet"?
Modern phones are all phablets and it sucks but it's the only format they offer. Smaller phones are nicer to hold and nicer to use for everyday tasks. My thumb can actually reach things. At least AI will no doubt reduce the need for pressing buttons.
Manufacturers want phones to be thin so the only way to fit in the battery life is for the whole phone to be larger. In case you didn't notice it's really really difficult to find a side on photo of the iPhone Duo closed. They don't want to show the thickness.
Phablets are still bad, and yes, I am aware that a lot of phones today are just phablets. Everyone uses them, doesn't mean they're not bad.
Did the “phablets” take over the world?
The original "phablet" was the Samsung Galaxy Note, considered comically large. At 147mm x 83mm, it's about the same size as the iPhone 18 Pro (150mm x 72mm)
Yes, the note 3 was considered "phablet", and it's much smaller than even ip17 now.
The note 3 was 151.2 x 79.2 x 8.3 mm
The iPhone 17 is 149.6 x 71.5 x 8 mm
So no, the note 3 is bigger than the iPhone 17
But, and this is probably what you meant, the iPhone 17 has a bigger screen. That's because recent phones got rid of the bezels, so they can fit more screen in the same body. That's why they have taller aspect ratios.
I mean kinda, yeah. Since that's literally the only kind of smartphone you can get nowadays.
It seems like it would be really useful for a frequent traveler/commuter, to be able to watch something on a flight/bus ride. I would definitely consider it if I were in that demographic
I bought my Steam Deck for a similar imagined use case but I find myself way too aware of the visibility of a larger than average screen to all those around me.
Clamshell phones were essentially the default design 2 decades ago and people have been talking about folding phones ever since, really. Folding is a unique way to overcome the ever present size issues/comments; however, it looks like the manufacturers have taken an alternate approach and used folding to double the size rather than halve it.
Modern foldable phones are, fundamentally, different than clamshell phones like a Motorola razor
the motorola razr is actually quite similar in the old and new variation though?
The purpose of the og razr clamshell was to extend the small device into something that reached both your ear and your mouth; not so much to have an increased screen surface/working space. Now we're trying to fold the phablets into something that still fits in our pockets.
Mmm I have had two foldables .. 3 years daily usage ... and they're great phones and great tablets.
So, ymmv.
I had one and I can’t wait to but the iphone fold. I think you’re lacking imagination if you don’t think this is the future
You think foldables will replace phones and tablets?
Certainly not at $2000.
Not right now, but I could see eventually. Apple prices are always a bit higher then regular and this is their flagship, the next versions will reduce this original price.
Why does the future require two hands to operate?
My current iPhone I can hold and use with one thumb - what makes this better than that?
It's foldable. You can either fold it and use it with one thumb, or have a much larger screen depending on your actual needs at the moment.
Like that's the very point of foldables, otherwise they would be a tablet..
It's barely worse phone, and it's a much better table. My argument for the tablet is that if it was a separate device I would basically never use it because it's inconvenient.
It's bigger and heavier than a phone.
It has a smaller display with a crease[1] and has less battery than a tablet. The screen is even smaller than an iPad mini. IMO that form factor only really works for like a Kindle.
And the screen has a matte finish which is only going to reduce contrast.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1wbx1wo/there_is_a_cr...
You made a generalization about foldables. I don't have an iPhone I have a pixel. The screen is a normal phone screen on the outside. The weight doesn't bother me, it's smaller than my last phone and very slightly thicker which is still very thin, the crease is completely non issue and it's much worse on my phone than the iPhone. Battery is better than my last phone.
Anybody who mentions the crease hasnt used a folding phone in the last 3 years. Come on just try one
> less battery than a tablet
iPad mini battery life ~10-15 hours, iPhone duo 30+ hours so no...
Matte finishes are great for viewing outdoors too...
Apple claims 30+ hours yes but when using a single screen.
Nope, ~31 hours when using the inner screen, ~44 hours when using the external. Either way 30 >15 hours for the iPad mini.
theyre actually quite nice, and the added redudancy that you still have a perfectly working phone when one of the screens breaks is great.
the phone-ness is exactly the same, but i dont think anyone actually needs a full tablet, but an unfolded screen is just right for say, reading a diff on the bus.
I was much more impressed by the phone->tablet fold than i was expecting to be.
In my house, even the iPad hasn't been touched in weeks. I frankly don't see how tablets even have all that much appeal beyond little kids or maybe retail spaces. Don't really understand the utility of a convertible device.
I'll give John Ternus credit: the demos are interesting and fun.
Maybe not $2k fun + inherent risk with buying the first generation of an Apple product particularly after the Apple Vision Pro, but still.
I agree. The demos were great. They really showed off how things you already do today are "better" on two screens. This is in contrast to the Vision Pro where the demos were of things that were neat but I can't see myself needing (watching 3D captures, watching a big virtual cinema screen).
I think this will be a hit, but the $2k is a bit much for me to even consider getting one. Obviously they'll likely drop that price over time.
It’s the exact same price point as the Samsung Z Fold 8, which is this phone’s exact competitor.
$2k is a lot to ask, but it answers the market 100% on “I’d like a Samsung Fold 8, but as an iPhone”.
Difference is that the Fold 8 started at 2000 Euro (compared to 2339 Euro including VAT for the Duo) and can now be bought here already for 1500 new.
That's 800 Euro less and Samsung will mostly decrease prices further while Apple will barely.
It's a shame Samsung dropped stylus support after the 6, but I guess the 8 is a good bit lighter weight than the duo.
honestly it's why I am not updating from Fold 5... the stylus is the part that truly differentiated it
Is it really the first generation though? The screen is obviously 1st gen for Apple, but you'd think the rest of it is not: OS, battery, camera.
Considering the most important parts of the Duo are the screen and the hinge, yes it's a first generation device.
The previously released iPhone Air looks very similar to the fold, and I believe it even used the Apple modem C1 generation.
It'll be interesting to see how many/how quickly apps adopt the UI that lets you make the most of the foldable screen. If it doesn't sell in big numbers app developers might not feel the need to and the user experience will be subpar. ...but I suspect it will.
> It'll be interesting to see how many/how quickly apps adopt the UI that lets you make the most of the foldable screen.
For iOS 27, apps are automatically automatically opted in to resizability. Apple was clear at WWDC that apps need to dynamically adjust to any available scene size at runtime, not just for iPhone Duo, but also for iPad windowing and iPhone Mirroring on Mac. There may be a grace period, but Apple hasn't shared one AFAIK.
Well, at the very least the ability to have a larger browser screen on landscape or having two apps side by side is already good on its own.
There is a lot of software support needed to make this work great. So first generation of all that for sure.
Admittedly, software that's influenced by the iPad and iPhone, so there is new software, but it's not that new. Multitasking in iOS has been a thing for a while (iPad).
I'm not trying to discount the efforts involved here, just pointing out that they aren't starting from scratch. And much of the required features to support a dual-screen (triple-?) phone has been in the works for a while.
I find it sad that they're doing it all pre-recorded.
Yeah, I wish they would go back to live, or at least parts of it live. They did a great job during the pandemic but it has lost some humanity and authenticity.
Live was fine for Steve Jobs most people aren’t Steve Jobs who had the gift.
They still had other presenters at those.
Let a video do the big reveal and overview then let the people talk about details or do demos.
I don’t know exactly toy. But there must be something with a little more life.
Especially with the studio recorded voices that uncannily don’t quite match the video.
The Apple Vision Pro was a rare early entry into a field. Usually they wait until the technology is established and the userbase is just starting to take off, as is currently the case with folding phone displays.
Samsung has already worked out the major kinks for folding displays, over dozens of products used by multiple phone manufacturers including themselves, and Android has worked out how to handle the various use cases between the outer screen and inner screen, when closed, open, or partially open, so Apple can pull from the current state of the art and launch with a more fully developed product, as they usually did before the Apple Vision Pro.
>The Apple Vision Pro was a rare early entry into a field.
It was not an early entry into the field. Many well established devices already existed. It was an uncharacteristic entrance into a niche.
Which is exactly what foldable phones are. 1.6% of phone sales in 2025 were foldable.
Maybe they will take off. But the odds are this will be discontinued.
The reason I have hope is that Apple is the only company with a serious Tablet OS. When you unfold this, essentially you have an iPad Mini.
The screen real estate is bigger than the numbers indicate, as the more square a display is, the larger its area is compared to its diagonal.
They're still as cringe as they've been for years; with fake hand movements and marketing-pilled bs postures.
The marketing pilled postures seem to have been toned down a bit.
I wish they would stop changing speakers every other sentence though. I swear drone cameras were the worst thing to happen to video, I'm gettin seasick over here!
> I wish they would stop changing speakers every other sentence though
Apple employees get to claim very little ownership over their work (even in the context of a large tech company), so having all those speaker slots is one way they can provide that ego boost that is so crucial for long term employee morale & retention
I wish they'd just give them more equity so we can go back to being able to actually name all of the people in one of these videos.
It's also probably better for Apple to lose the immature egoist weirdos as managers because there were thousands of employees involved in shipping all of the stuff unveiled today who didnt get their 5 seconds in the spotlight either, and I don't see any of them crying about it.
> with fake hand movements
I don't get this complaint. People talk with their hands, it'd look more fake if they just stood there all stiff and wooden.
Hand movements are fine, but the comment is right that these come off as incredibly fake.
We keep putting more powerful chips into phones, and giving them bigger screens, but we never turn them into useful computers. Why is this?
I think it's clear that Apple has recognized that their target markets don't care to have useful computers. Just look way back to when Steve Jobs was still alive and he was talking about how "PCs are going to be like trucks. Fewer people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy."
They could certainly add features to make them more like general purpose computers, but there's a bit of product development and engineering "tax" they'd have to pay over time to maintain that aspect. Much easier from a product development standpoint to create products that provide a walled-garden experience, especially if that's what most customers want.
The truck metaphor is actually incredibly apt, because if you want to do "truck stuff" with your PC, a lot of people think you can't do that on a phone, but 90% of what people need a beefy computer for could be done on a phone if we had that kind of culture around it.
Macbook pros for a lot of us are effectively like daily driving a lifted Ford Raptor with a snorkel. Most of what I do on my personal device I easily could do on a Chromebook or tablet, and pretty much all of the rest is entirely possible on a Chromebook with the Linux subsystem setup (which is what I did pre-Macbook). It's like if I'd setup an expensive truck for off-roading, but in the end it turned out to be aspirational and I only take it somewhere that can't handle a Subaru Outback once or twice a year.
Trucks analogy is interesting. I (temporarily) live in the US South and trucks are 3:1 to all other vehicles here.
So true. Whether people need them or not, people will spend the money to buy them.
Steve Jobs didn't foresee that Americans would basically only buy trucks (and SUVs) in 20 years. You can barely buy a sedan in the US anymore.
Maybe small phones are like sedans, and the bigger and bigger iPhones are the trucks? Take this analogy where you will.
If that's the case, then why do we go to work on a computer instead of a phone? Oh, wait. A screen. A mouse, a keyboard. Really, if they wanted to, you could simply dock your phone and have that experience if the company was willing to put in the time.
Globally, mobile+tablet crossed 50% of web traffic in October 2016 (51.3% vs. desktop's 48.7%) [0]. For the world minus HN, we’re entering the second decade of phones being useful computers for the most common definition of useful.
[0](https://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobile-and-tablet-internet-...)
“Useful computer” is subjective. It seems to be difficult for HN users to imagine a device that doesn’t have a terminal for example, but the overwhelming majority of users simply do not care. Many of them manage just fine with a smartphone as their primary (if not their only) computer, so clearly they are useful enough.
Samsung dex really excited me when I tried it, but it still had a little ways to go. I am shocked it's not a bigger priority.
Esp for Samsung as they don't have a consumer PC division that they would be concerned about killing...
The Macbook neo has a Phone chip. And Android now integrates the Linux terminal (well, for compatible chips). Valve is also trying to put gaming on ARM chips. So I'd say we're starting to blur the lines between phones and PCs. Personally, owning a samsung phone, I'm looking for a neat option to leverage my powerful chip and work on it on trips, but so far I find the options to do so too expensive considering how much money I already put into my phone (VR glasses, Lapdocks, external monitor/keyboard...)
I did that a few times with a 10 inches Samsung tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard, using the DeX UI. It had Linux on DeX with some Ubuntu version. 16.04?
I can't think about a good way to do it with a phone screen, unless you know that you can find a TV set to connect to. But hotel rooms usually place their TV sets very inconveniently and if you stay at a friend's home, their TV sets will be not so well placed too to be used as a monitor. So maybe a costly large foldable as your next phone?
There have been a few posts from people who have used these XREAL or other AR glasses with an Android and foldable keyboard.
Also, IIRC there was reporting that Apple considered doing the compute for Vision Pro on a device at the hip. Instead of what they ended up with which was just a battery.
I could see this coming back around again where a future iPhone is all of the brains or a lot of the brains for AR glasses.
Android is getting close, with Google adding desktop support akin to Samsung's Dex when the phone is connected to a dock.
Apple has had a patent[1] for like a decade at this point which involved placing an iPhone into a slot on a laptop so it could be used in a laptop form, with the phone itself serving as the touchpad.
[1]: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-patents-device-that-doc...
Edit to add: the phone itself is intended to be the main processing unit, the “laptop” is just a screen and keyboard.
This company https://nexphone.com/ has been doing something like that since 2016 but of course in a different way, by attaching the phone to a laptop shell or more simply to a USB hub.
At this point I don't even really need a phone. Nobody makes calls anymore and I can use my watch for 911 calls.
What I need is a more portable iPad. But that would cannibalize iPhone sales.
I have a Chromebook with an ~11 inch screen. It’s basically the minimum size where a keyboard is still useable. I like it a lot, but it’s actually too big when I want to use it as a tablet.
I think this is the tension. Or maybe we just need to master one handed keyboards.
At least some of the time, when people refer to using their phone as a computer, I think they're talking about plugging into an external monitor through USB-C, and using the phone as a desktop with a keyboard and mouse.
I've tried every so often, and while I think all the hardware is there, the software wasn't. Perhaps Android has improved on this recently? I know there have been niche attempts in the past, like Samsung DeX or Ubuntu Touch, which may have been more solid. I've never tried out any of those.
That seems to be entirely the purpose of this device. Instead of just a larger display, it's meant to provide a "second monitor" for multitasking or more context.
With terminal emulators, tailscale, local and remote agents, there's never been so much computing capability accessible from your pocket before.
The 7.6" screen here is far too small to function as a second monitor type device. This is going to be for pure content consumption
If you still need a remote computer to do your work, in what way are you doing work on the phone?
I would love it if I could use it as a second monitor when working in a coffee shop or library. Unfortunately universal control was pretty solid at launch and then just completely left to die
Have you seen how the average person uses their phone?
You want what, a terminal that you type on w/an onscreen keyboard?
Lots of computers have external keyboards, mice, and displays. Why not a powerful computer like the iPhone? Who cares if it's small? Lots of SBCs are small and are quite useful. This one even has a built in UPS.
You can literally use all those things with an iPhone. Including all at the same time.
So I don't know what you're complaining about?
you can connect those things though right? or you want a mouse and keyboard attached by default like a tiny laptop?
It's easier to make an existing thing better. But far harder to come up with a new idea.
You can get something quite useable these days by plugging a pixel into a USB dock with a monitor and a keyboard + mouse
Android Desktop mode looks so promising, it just needs to support higher resolutions/refresh rates but this is probably a side effect of at least the Pixel having weaker performance versus other flagships.
Although I can’t wait for the more powerful Motorolas with GOS to release. Maybe that’d be enough to make a phone my sole computing device.
abuse over a monopoly is the reason. probably you already knew that though?
if they made it a useful computer, they couldnt charge 30% of revenue to their app store customers
What do you want to do on your iPhone that you can't do now?
Run game emulators with JIT. Currently you have to accept emulators either running very slow without JIT, or go through massive hurdles to enable it.
That feels like an exceptionally niche use case
Retro game emulation isn't mainstream but "exceptionally niche" is overstating it.
Apple's lack of vision and fear of innovation. Jobs is gone. We're back to 90s Apple. Dumb ideas become dumb products, and no one has the balls to say, No.
do you not consider your phone a "useful computer"?
I'm guessing they mean one of the following:
-Installing software without App Store approval filtering
-True multi-tasking and background execution (though this hurts battery)
-Write iOS apps from an iPad
I certainly don't. You simply cannot get actual work done on a phone anywhere near as easily as on a real computer. There's a reason that companies issue laptops (or have desktops even) instead of giving employees a phone.
Artificial limitations open many new avenues for new and exciting revenue streams.
The moment apple ship MacOS on their iPads, sales for their macbooks will all but collapse.
Will they though? They would capture more windows users. They already have the Neo actually. iPad still has another job mainly around simpler tasks. I’ve not yet got to love the Macosy windows management.
What are you talking about?
A MacBook is optimized for a larger screen and comes with a better keyboard and trackpad.
I use both my MacBook and iPad all the time, because their hardware form factors are better for different things.
I don't want to read books on my MacBook and I don't want to do development or writing on my iPad.
I briefly tried using my iPad as a Mac through the screen sharing. It's not as useful as you are imagining.
Have you ever tried to do serious work on a tablet?
Absolutely sales of laptops would continue.
Have you ever connected an iPad to an external display, mouse, and keyboard? I agree with you that laptop sales would continue, but I bet they would decline. Apple could do the MS Surface much better than MS did.
I’m not so sure personally. A MacBook Air is not that much less portable than an iPad, but is far more useful for work when not docked than an iPad because it still has a keyboard and a precision pointing device. And it can still be docked when you need a bigger screen.
The areas where the iPad beats the MacBook are still (imo) the same as the day it launched: web browsing, watching video, and reading. Workloads that are heavy on the Apple Pencil too, but that’s a fairly narrow slice compared to anything else you might do on a computer.
I mean my iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard case has fully replaced my Mac for everything. I haven’t touched my Mac in months. I literally do all of my work via GitHub Codespaces (soon to be self-hosted Coder). Yes it’s not all on device but it works (for me).
I don’t see anything in my use case that I’d gain from a MacBook over this setup.
Let’s just ignore the price comparison though lol
Yeah I used a Magic Keyboard myself for a while but I found it significantly impacted what I liked about the iPad. It doubled the weight, and removed the ability to hold it in my hand or in portrait (still the most common orientation I use mine). Sure you can take it out any time, but I found it just added a lot of extra friction to a device that previously had very little (iPadOS aside). Glad it’s working well for you though.
This is the biggest disappointment, imagine running a full blown "Ubuntu Touch" that gives you the freedom of Linux with full root access. This is the biggest failure of legislation in the 21st century so far that has enabled a strict Android/iOS duopoly.
I sincerely hope one day we can free these hardware devices from the shakles of their software and run anything that's possible.
Until such a time iOS devices are strictly off limits until at least a grapheneOS can run iOS at a minimum.
The iOS app iSH [0] allows you to do this, it’s a full blown Alpine environment running through x86 emulation in the app. I’ve been using it for a while, as far as I can tell almost all of the Alpine packages run without any issues.
You can already run postmarketOS or PureOS on a phone and get the full desktop mode with no restrictions, except the computing power.
* Select models only. Limitations and restrictions apply. Warranty void in all countries.
Every phone has its own limitations and restrictions, don't they?
> Warranty void in all countries.
This not true for Librem 5 running PureOS.
I think the use case here is for people who have an iPhone as well as an iPad they use occasionally for reading/watching stuff, as well as business people / execs.
Now you can (sort of) have both in one device. Reading the rumours, I was completely disinterested. Now I’m actually tempting to ditch the iPad Pro and iPhone Pro and have a Duo replace both. I’m excited to have a go with one in the Apple Store.
Shame it’s so damn expensive!
I feel like we're not talking about this too much. This phone-o-tablet is the same price as base Macbook Pro. Let me reiterate: a foldable phone costs as much as Pro line computer. This is just crazy
$2K starting price is rough. I’ve upgraded my iPhone every year since my first phone, the 3GS. It’s one of a few “splurge”-type things I allow myself. It’s a hobby and just fun to play with the new hotness. This year might break the cycle.
I don’t care for the 18 Pro colors, I still love my orange 17 Pro, and I’m not sold on the Duo (functionality or price).
I might still end up with a Duo but I’m very much on the fence. I’ll tell myself it’s for development/testing reasons, or just to play with the newest offering but I’m just not sure. I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did. Yes, it’s very different from the AVP and SwiftUI will almost certainly make this process easier but I’m still not sure.
> I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did
Pretty sure that developer interest is not to be a problem. The Duo will sell more units in a month (or less) than every AVP ever sold.
Apple told developers in June at WWDC to not assume fixed screen sizes. Well-written apps will work on any screen size thanks to Apple's APIs.
Some apps will need to be tweaked to take advantage of some Duo features no doubt, but I suspect that's not going to be a deal breaker.
I’m in the exact same situation. Been upgrading every year for a long time (via the Upgrade Programme, making doing so more or less “free”). I was absolutely jazzed they finally did an orange phone, and this is the first year in a while that…I just don’t care. The Duo is far more expensive than I could ever entertain (plus buying a first-gen Apple product has never been a good idea), and there is quite literally nothing in the 18 Pro that makes me want to upgrade.
I may be swayed by a second gen Air in the spring, as I would like a lighter phone that feels less of an imposition in my pocket and my life in general. But it almost certainly won’t have the zoom camera, which has unexpectedly become one of my favourite and most used features of the 17 Pro. Why the two-camera phones all come with the ultrawide instead of the telephoto is baffling to me. Perhaps I’m an anomaly, but I never use the ultrawide lens.
> making doing so more or less “free”
except for those monthly payments you never get to stop making, yeah it's free.
Why do you think I put “free” in quotes? Realistically I was never going to keep the phone longer than the two year finance term anyway, because back when I started doing it a two-year old phone would be really starting to show its age running newer software. So I could either pay monthly and get a phone every two years, or pay monthly and get a phone every year.
Of course, these days a three or four or more year old phone is often still perfectly usable even for a tech enthusiast.
Just checked the price in my home country (Brazil) and it's fantastic: the Duo starts at BRL 21999, which is roughly USD 4300.
> I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did
Apple can force iOS devs to do whatever they want. It may be basic support, but Apple devs will do whatever Apple tells them to do.
You could do the leasing route if you upgrade every year. Might pinch less.
If leasing a fucking phone isn't a sign of the times then I don't know what is.
People have been leasing phones since at least the mid naughties, they just did it via their carrier. I distinctly remember standing in the Alltel store in 2006-ish, before it got gobbled up by ATT, and wondering if I could afford the extra $15/mo that the new Nokia candybar phone would run me. The only thing that's new is that Apple is offering it directly.
Leasing, as in long term renting, required to give it back after the lease period, in near perfect condition, or face a penalty?
Or financing, paying it off over a fixed term, after which you own it outright?
The latter, I understand. And I'm also familiar with it.
But the former, I find hard to believe. Although, I'm not from the US. Are you telling me people rented nokia bricks in the aughts?
You could and still can do both from your carrier, it's pretty standard. In my experience, it's somewhat uncommon for people to actually buy their phones outright unless you make a lot of money (like the folks who tend to frequent HN). Every two years, my wife and I would sign up for a new 24-month contract, which would include two new phones. After those 24 months, we could keep paying off the remainder of the phones and keep them, or we could return them and start a new contract with new phones.
> Are you telling me people rented nokia bricks in the aughts?
Myself and my family did, for sure. My parents made me pay my own phone bill too, so I spent a long time in the Alltel shop staring at the different phones and probably annoying the clerk.
> it's somewhat uncommon for people to actually buy their phones outright unless you make a lot of money
Or like many of us, you buy cheaper phones outright for your prepaid phone plans. The fact that people still go for contract phone services and finance a new phone every two years blows my mind. Especially when I can get all the data/minutes/texts I need for $15 a month on a service like Tello, and just get a phone for $200-400 that I can use until it dies. Which is currently a used iPhone 11 I recently opened up to replace the battery.
See my comment elsewhere in this thread, but you are blowing my mind. I'm not from the US and I did not realize that renting a mobile device was actually this common. I'm one of the lucky 10,000 today, thanks!
The near perfect condition part is not strictly enforced though. For example if your screen broke you could replace with a cheap third-party screen.
Like leasing a car, the residual value may differ, which can either make it worthwhile or not. Around ten years ago the lease deals were really good. Nowadays my carrier has all but discouraged them.
I mean, you might find this hard to believe since you have a fixed view, but I'm old enough that we had one of those old-school rotary phones. My family literally leased that phone as part of our phone bill up until the late 90s. I recall at one point we were forced to trade the rotary for a push button since the telecom was discontinuing support. When "caller id" became a new feature it only worked for the first while on the rented phones.
To this day, I suspect many people have a line-item on their Internet bill for their modem/router rental/lease.
Why you would find this hard to believe is actually the curious thing to me.
1. You can buy it outright at the end of the term by paying the remainder of the sticker price if you really want to keep it.
2. If you’re upgrading your phone on a one or two year cycle, you end up paying the sticker price minus the trade in value at the end of the term.
I don’t really see an issue in either scenario?
Most people are short-term thinkers if you talk to anyone around you at work, school or at home and if you merely suggest saving and controlling their spending briefly to buy something in the future good luck. I have given up.
I just buy more shares of blue chip companies and let them pay in the future for anything I want to buy.
A little bit of this, a little bit of that, we know the average, but we don't know how much time each of us has on this earth.
If leasing a fucking phone isn't a sign of the times then I don't know what is.
People have been leasing and renting phones since the 1930's. I guess you missed out on the Ma Bell century.
I honestly did not know this was a thing until today. I'm not from the US.
Where I'm from, it is common to finance a phone as part of a mobile contract: your monthly payment includes a device payment and the network subscription cost. Typically 24 months, but in recent years I've seen 36 month contracts as well. But at the end of the term the device is yours outright. No further down payments needed. Usually the device payment is effectively 0% APR over the 2 years, so it's a pretty lucrative deal. I've purchased all my phones this way over the past 20 years.
Then you’d like the upgrade program? The only difference is there is a final balloon payment for it to be yours. You end up paying exactly the same as paying up front.
I don’t think it’ll face the developer interest problem. Devs go where the money is and consumers seem to love foldables.
It's high, but Apple's financing arm has it at $84/month, which is a bit more stomachable if you really want it.
I don't know, $1999 seems almost kinda reasonable considering how much an iPhone Pro costs and how utterly fucked the current memory prices are.
To get close to the same functionality as the Duo, you'd buy an iPhone 18 Pro ($1199) plus an iPad mini ($599); that gets you to $1,798. If you want more storage than the entry level iPhone 18 Pro or iPad mini, you're going to surpass $2000 pretty quickly.
That looks... horrible... I like the "calendar" mode, that's quite fun, but it looks way too wide when it's folded up, and a weird aspect ratio when it's open. Also they show putting the phone down on concrete half-open to take pictures, but that will scratch the outer screen, surely?
I you can fit an iPad Mini in your pocket, you don't need a foldable display.
I've had two folding phones and I am not going back until the issues are resolved. Here were my problems:
1. After a while, I think dust would inevitably get in the hinges and wouldn't fold flat. I've seen demos in stores of newer gen Samsung foldable phones and it looks like those wouldn't fold flat
2. The inner screen protector eventually lifted off the screen, causing catastrophic damage, and requiring repair (under warranty thankfully)
3. The aspect ratios were weird. I ended up using native app sizes, making the extra space kind of a waste
One thing I did like about the Samsung foldables was that when they were folded and using the front screen, I finally had a phone that fit my smaller hands! It was nice being able to use my thumb to reach the other side of the screen. Will be interesting to see how this works out because it looks decidedly wider.
> After a while, I think dust would inevitably get in the hinges and wouldn't fold flat. I've seen demos in stores of newer gen Samsung foldable phones and it looks like those wouldn't fold flat
For your first point, the iPhone duo is rated IP 68 Dust and Water protection. Literally none of Samsung's book foldables so far have achieved this IP rating.
I trust Apple to do better here; for example, after about ten years, no one has caught up to Face ID yet.
I get the form factor difference but Windows Hello (which actually works extremely well, probably due to its incubation with Xbox) came out two years before FaceID.
I wonder if they will ever see the wobble as a problem or if it is something people like about the iPhone somehow.
My iPhone 15 pro survives another generation.
Genuinely bonkers. I never thought they’d do this. Just seems so like a Xiaomi Xi7 Super Max Fold Z or something. But I have to say that when I used one of those Android folding phones it was quite cool to end up with a big screen in your pocket.
Just didn’t feel it was an Appleish product.
Contrary to earlier rumours the Iphone Duo will support magsafe:
Steve Jobs is folding in his grave.
This man has been dead for nearly 15 years, just let him be. It's time to move on.
This. He would have never approved a foldable phone, the iPhone Air, or the Vision Pro. Apple is back to throwing shit at the wall like they were in the 90s. Directionless. Visionless.
I really don’t know how you can say he wouldn’t do this things.
The Air particularly - the thinnest, lightest feeling, nicest to hold iPhone ever made, I think that might have been his favorite.
The Vision Pro is clearly an interesting category of device, Apple needs to be in, if it would have seen the light of day under Steve Jobs is unknowable.
He was ruthless at Apple because back then he had to be - now they can run Vision Pro and it not impact their ability run the business, if Apple had A product that did not succeed in the 90s it might have sank them.
The nicest to hold iPhone ever made was iPhone 5. I'm sure it was his favorite.
The first time I held an iPhone 5, I thought it was a demo device. It was too light to actually be the real device. That was such a great phone.
The iPhone 5 size was designed for people who use smartphones a healthy amount, ie not very much, usually in pocket and often one-handed for a small task. At some point, that was no longer how smartphones were most often used.
I kept my 5S as long as possible, until my carrier wouldn't even provide cell service to it.
And it sat perfectly flat and didn't wobble when you set it down... ¯\_(ツ)_/
90s Apple also coasted on the tailwinds of what Jobs accomplished in the 80s. Same with today. Jobs set things up in the 00s and now Apple is coasting again.
Jobs had products getting people out of their seats and applauding. New products, new industries. As opposed to now where Apple is following the herd and not leading it.
It feels aimless, and Vision Pro ironically is the best representation of Apple's complete lack of vision.
And yet Apple is doing exceptionally well financially, the MacBooks with M series chips are clearly the pinnacle of Mac laptop engineering, and most of the devices are more reliable and more durable than they ever have been. (As someone who was repairing iPhone 4/5 screens multiple times a year for friends and family.)
What you’re noticing is consumers being desensitized to tech. It transformed from bulky computers to slick hand-helds. It’s not like Apple made the first product in all those categories, they just made a decent ones that were easy to use.
Comments like this I think are just missing that Apple is actually doing extremely well without Jobs.
Nothing wrong with the Vision Pro it’s just a little bit before it’s time functionally it needs to be at least three or four times faster and the battery life needs to be as good as the flagship iPhone and it needs to be half of the weight and half the price.
The iPhone Air completely failed though in terms of sales/popularity.
Apple these days has completely lost touch with what people actually want.
The iPhone Air is my favorite phone I've ever had, and if they only made them, I'd be ok with it. (Sample size: 1, but still people)
n+1, i hope they continue it as well its a great form-factor and pretty tough as well
> Apple these days has completely lost touch with what people actually want.
Did you see how well the base iPhone 17 sold? Macbook Neo?
Apple threw plenty of shit at the wall when Jobs ran the ship. The hockey puck mouse and the Mac Cube was under Jobs. The first Apple TV. That was pretty much what the Vision Pro is: a side project to test the waters and get some experience with a new format. It’s just that the Vision Pro by its nature is a much more expensive and ambitious side project.
All the three product you mentioned is exactly the kind of things Steve Jobs did. Don’t make him into this mythological flawless visionary.
You can bash the Air all you want, but it's the iPhone I love the most by far, and I had many iPhones since the 3G. It's such a pleasant phone to hold and the screen size is lovely.
If they release a second version with a ultrawide and maybe tele camera, it would be perfect.
Tim Cook:
[Jobs’] advice to me was ‘Never ask what I would do, just do the right thing,’
He had watched Disney go through this paralysis of sitting around and talking about what Walt [Disney] would do. And he did not want that for Apple.
Exactly what Tim Cook would say. loljk
Wow, that quote should've been pinned at the top of MacRumors since 2010.
He launched the macbook air. Iphone air seems right up his alley.
i dont think it is.
well, the product itself yes, but it would be the iphone, not the iphone air
now that the duo is out, the air seems like a tech demo they needed to validate sold to the public
What are the drawbacks of the Air? Genuinely asking, as that is the one that seems more appealing to me if I had to buy one now.
As an iPhone Air owner here’s my honest take: Build quality, screen, and performance are all fantastic. No compromises there.
Compromises are battery, no additional camera lenses. Single speaker. Some niche USB limits.
Battery life is fine overall but on days of heavy use/travel it’s noticeable. Single camera lens is ok but I do miss the telephoto on occasion. Single speaker gets made fun of online, but for any serious listening you’re going to use headphones anyway.
Charge speed via USB is lower than the pros and you can’t do video-out over USB.
I have an iPhone Air and the ONLY issue I've had is accidentally tapping the screen since the screen is so close to the edge of the device. Not battery life, not the speaker, not the single camera. I've only ever had issues with accidental tapping.
Some people seem to get offended if companies make products with different tradeoffs* than they would make.
*Thinner which means less battery.
I could definitely imagine him loving the Air. But I don’t think he’d segment the market; he’d probably get rid of the normal iPhone
Apple killed the iPhone mini because it only had a 4-6% share of sales of all iPhone models. While some people may really want this, I can't imaging that it'll get more than 5% of iPhone sales (after maybe an initial higher novelty peak).
You dont seem to understand why people buy the most expensive phones. Most of the time (especially outside tech circles) its a show of wealth.
In a lot of ways the iphone has always been the Achilles Heel of the ultra wealthy, no matter how many billions you had, you could never do fancier than a 1500 buck iphone. Apple IMO is just trying to capitalize on this phenomenon and capture the pretentious luxury market. Anecdotally the galaxy fold did really well with the obnoxiously rich circles in my country, people who previously all had iphones. So they kinda have to do it as well now.
> you could never do fancier than a 1500 buck iphone
There's always high-end commercial modders like Caviar [0], who help customers flex both their wealth and their extremely bad taste...
> Apple IMO is just trying to capitalize on this phenomenon and capture the pretentious luxury market.
Yes, that aligns with Apple offering their ridiculous golden watch faces and bands of $1000s for their Watch - it's all just about projecting wealth and 'success' (i.e. in these days of capitalism: mostly exploiting others and/or making them depended).
Asia and America are very different
People who want to flaunt wealth they don't have will do so regardless of the continent they're from.
This statement isn't even factually correct. If you look at some place like Hong Kong and LA, you'll find a lot of similarities in demographics.
They are very different and it’s insane that you think otherwise
They're the same in this regard, and it’s insane that you think otherwise.
Asians might get the fame today with movies like "Crazy Rich Asians" but Americans have long been seen as the typical "flaunting wealth" conspicuous comsuptiom people by Europeans for example. In 2026 even the President has golden toilets and golden everything to flaunt his wealth.
Apple has a fairly good market in Asia, too. It's just that competition is quite high in Asia compared to America.
IOS27 has a killer feature that will boost sales for duo. Iphone handoff. Don't underestimate how deep apple customers wallets are. You now can have multiple iPhones. A pro that you use day to day, an Air that you use when you go to the gym and a duo to use when at home. Now the crease lasts longer because you are not using it 24/7, you spread wear across multiple devices and pump the apple sales.
I'm a 12/13 mini on my second refurbished 13 and a new battery. This is the first iPhone I've considered. Even so, the price is... impressive.
I want a screen that my thumb can reach from top to bottom without stretching or doing weird half-screen swipes to get at.
Also weird that they've gone back to touch ID instead of face ID to open/unlock.
But I'll definitely be looking at it.
Same here: 13 Mini (bought new at launch) with renewed battery.
I took my passport in my hand yesterday to see how it feels. Yikes, it feels even harder to control the whole screen with your thumb.
My 12 was refurbished like... 5 times already - I break various parts of it, and I have a spare 13 that was refurbished 2 times. Even though I can allow myself newer phone, nothing comes close to these models in portability, yet speed.
This is likely a technical limitation rather than a preference; with the requirement to be so thin, there is probably not enough room for the necessary depth scanning hardware required for Face ID.
The reason they gave was that with TouchID it can be unlocked consistently both when folded or unfolded.
For FaceID they would need to include that hardware twice, also under the display in the inner screen.
It's quite a lot wider and thicker than a mini, and imho looks quite ugly when folded, I don't see the appeal as a single-handed device.
If the fold make up 4% of sales, but with 2x or more margin vs mini, it might be worth it for them. Seems like a product that MIGHT survive due to that.
+ the pricing anchor drags the others models up and makes them look "better value" ... vs a lower price model selling 4% but anchoring the price downwards.
I think fold phones are not at least for most OEM manufacturers the bedrock of their business whereas the Mini was supposed to perform at least as well as the mainstay iPhones cause it did not do much beyond being a percentage smaller.
I on the other hand hope they kill the slim iPhone and/or bring back the Plus cause the 16 Plus was a solid deal.
They will stick with this product for a long time. Asia is the biggest market in the world for these kinds of devices.
larger screen possibly leads to more hours of usage per day, more ad-surfaces, more software and services revenue per user per year.
They can possibly justify the lower sales volume if the margins are much higher.
Lots of people in non-tech jobs are dropping their laptop/desktop for their phone for all work-related tasks. They love having more screen real estate, plus their company pays for the premium.
Basically Apple had Samsung et al validate the use case for a flip phone before executing their move. The others proved there is a market for this, hence Apple jumped on the bandwagon.
This is not like the iPhone mini, where they were competing with both lower end phone companies, and their own older refurb models. This one's all about ostentation.
There’s a standard for paper sizes called the ISO 216 international standard, aka A-series paper sizes. You may be familiar with it outside of the American 8.5”x11” letter size. The simplicity, for example, where an A3 sheet is exactly twice the area of A4. One A3 sheet folded in half becomes two A4 sheets. This is intentional: when you fold or divide an A-series sheet exactly in half, the resulting sheets have the same proportions as the prior. The aspect ratio is preserved across all A-series paper sizes.
The iPhone Duo is designed with this in mind. The aspect ratio any way you view it, folded or open, is preserved. Apple design knows a thing or two.
It was useful for paper because it helped save time in cutting, folding, printing etc. None of that matters for a phone.
This is such a non issue given that iOS developers already have so many resolutions to test.
> None of that matters for a phone.
Of course it does. They show the most basic example right on the page, which is that you can side-by-side full screen apps.
Hm, my folding phone doesnt have this aspect ratio and I can still do that.
I think they intended to continue "... without changing their aspect ratios".
I.e. an aspect ratio of Sqrt(2)is the only one where the inner screen (full) and inner screen (half) match, and they seem to have tried to make the outer screen share a nearly identical aspect ratio too. I guess it's a nice consideration for more consistency in layouts for apps targeting the device. Not sure I'm particularly excited about that myself though.
it's a neat tidbit, but not important in the slightest imo. Probably helps with smoothly transitioning between modes, but that's not been a particular pain from my foldable use.
Android devs have always had to handle different screen sizes. Not the case for iPhone devs e.g. I have a game "Ridiculous Fishing" (from 2013) which is a mess layout-wise on my iPhone because it seemingly hardcoded some pixel values and used percentages for the others. They have a fixed version for Apple Arcade.
The first new resolution for an iPhone was 2012 which also saw the introduction of Auto Layout. The second new resolution was in 2014 which added size classes. It's entirely possible that the 2013 game was built before they actually started caring about this. This is a non-issue for almost all apps you're realistically going to encounter.
>I think they intended to continue "... without changing their aspect ratios"
but the context was "see, you can have two different apps running side by side, each with the same aspect ratio as either of the apps when run in the space of the folded screen. not only the same aspect ratio, but the same dimensions"
the whole A3/4/5 scheme is completely overblown as a feature for consumers. You format a document for A4, ok, but you wouldn't print that document A5 because the fonts would be completely shrunken. nobody does that. We use word processors to format documents for the space we have, and we don't ever print wedding invites on A3 or A4
This would matter for bigger versions of the same thing. For side-by-side, the aspect ratio is unimportant since you naturally unfold to have two of them.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but of course the aspect ratio is important. If you unfold a square, you don't get two squares.
I think the person you are responding to is not thinking visually. They basically seem (to me) to think reformat-flowed fixes this, and that having the view of a web page alter because you open a book, is "not a bad thing" when you (and I) are of the view, if you maintain the aspect ratio and simply decimate how many pixels are available to show it, the actual "change" in the layout is kept to a minimum WHICH IS THE INHERENT GOOD HERE -the whole point of the A, B and C series is that the scaling function preserves the ratio of sizes of the contents, under the quality change of bigger or smaller fidelity of presentation.
Unless there is some upsight I am missing, I think the OP just "doesn't get it"
The upsight is that they are responding to a point about side by side apps, not a single full screen app on the unfolded screen
I don't think this is a killer logic either. If you consider that the apps were both running, both full screen on the folded state and alternate which is in view, and now can come into view side by side when you open, surely the "good" is that nothing positional in the layout or styling changes, when you move from swipe-and-select to side-by-side.
>If you unfold a square, you don't get two squares.
yes, you do. Two squares will fold together into the space of one square, and the same with 2 A4 sheets of paper, or two 8½x11 sheets of paper, two of them will fold together to make one of them.
I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say, or what would refute what I said.
You said: "If you unfold a square, you don't get two squares."
In the context of this discussion, it is reasonable to assume that any "square" available to be unfolded is something approximately like the folding phone, consisting of two layers joined by a hinge. When you unfold that, you go from having a square to having a rectangle equivalent to two adjacent squares, and usable as two adjacent squares.
I see. I agree (obviously, it's a fact), but in the context of this discussion about aspect ratios and why the golden ratio would be relevant to this situation, it is reasonable to assume that the point here is that a full-screen, unfolded image would scale exactly to a half-screen/folded image with no change in aspect ratio.
