The iPhone Duo | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone Duo

daringfireball.net

43 pointsjohnbehnke8 comments

> The Duo name is perfect. It truly is like having two devices in one. The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet, with a UI that out-iPads the iPad. For me, by far, it’s my favorite tablet experience ever. I prefer it to any iPad or Kindle-like reader I’ve ever used.

He uses the phrase "worst iPhone" several times in the article. I havent gotten a chance to play with Duo yet, but is this going the route of Vision Pro - a lot of fan fare at launch, but then fails to capture the imagination (and market share).

Speaking of which, whatever happened to the iPhone "thin". Dont even remember the name. Is it dead?

2025 model still being sold (price went up $100 though!), an iPhone Air 2 will apparently be released in 2027

There's already an established market for folding phones, so it's likely to have a recurring niche. It's not like the Vision Pro that tries to create an XR-headset market by doing everything it can to not have the functionality that would make it competitive against pre-existing VR headsets.

It's likely Apple is optimizing for the unfolded experience rather than the outer screen.

While researching Samsung folding phones, I found it interesting that some users seem to rarely unfold it. I'd guess the Samsung did the opposite and chose an aspect ratio matching regular phones, which gives the inner display suboptimal usability, especially for media.

Samsung have experimented with bringing back the 'passport' format on the Z Fold 8, presumably as a hedge against the Duo taking off.

People seem to find it pretty ungainly compared to the more common tall/thin format - it has to be used with both hands even when closed, even though Samsung's one handed mode shifts the keyboard across as well as down (I don't think Apple's does, so it'll even be worse).

Sure, it's a better format when opened but that might account for only 10-20% of the time in use.

I wonder why there is a need for a nice display on the outside at all. maybe a small display showing notifications or something should be enough. Then the developers can only focus on the inside display.

If only tech companies focused on developers above all of their other stakeholders, then they could make tens or even hundreds of dollars in profit every year!

Its not surprising that this device is a frankenphone. What is surprising is that Apple bothered to come in so late to the game and that iPhone owners even care. There are perfectly good foldables in the world that the Duo and the next several Apple foldables (if apple doesnt go out of business because they cant buy RAM) cant touch for usability.

When Apple cant sell you the same exact thing over year after year, what you get is pretty rough.

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