The presentation went into extra detail about durability w/ a titanium construction, and the iPhone Air was indeed super durable with it. The hinge at-the-least looks like it could survive the dust test.
They went over their multi-layer design to give it strength and flexibility, and noted over 100 components in the hinge alone. I'll be looking out for JerryRigEverything on YouTube to see how tough it really is!
That's about $675k/year, assuming a 35% tax rate. I think that is a small fraction of HN users, but more to the point, if your argument is that the phone is not expensive if you make over $500k/year, I'm not sure that is a compelling argument...
I think there were rumors going even higher since Apple is so often a premium priced product.
Matching their top competitor in price is a good look.
They could’ve absolutely floored everyone if it had been $1500, but there’s no way that’s possible, at least having margins anywhere near what Apple likes.
Personally I find passports slightly too large to comfortably fit in my pants pocket, and a passport is definitely thinner than this phone. Whenever I travel and have to have my passport in my pants pocket I’m always a bit uncomfortable about it, I usually prefer to keep it in my backpack or somewhere else. If you’re carrying this in a purse then it sounds great. The passport aspect ratio is pretty awesome on phones, I tried one shaped like this at a Chinese phone store last year and enjoyed it. But shoving a $2000 device the size of a thick passport into my pocket on a daily basis feels like a bad idea.
I was actually looking forward to a smaller iPhone. To have less addictive screen time.
It looks like the Air was a once-thing. I don't see them releasing an e-ink phone either.
Maybe the answer lies in only wearing an Ultra watch if it becomes powerful enough and can function independently of a phone.
Most women I knew with shattered screens had relatively large phones (max, plus, etc.), and the few of them who listened to my advice and got smaller phones, never broke the screens. Either girls over estimate their hands size (I guess compared to some YouTuber they see), or maybe bigger screens is just a status, or something else, but most girls have large phones for some reason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"designed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here dude. They don't do any actual screen materials work at all. If by designed you mean specified they wanted rounded corners and a mat coating I'll grant you that, but they've got zero horse in the race in terms of flexible glass development.
Live resizing apps and dealing with apps that don't have a specified new design for the unfolded screen size is one of the big hurdles for folding phones that's new to the Duo for Apple so it remains to be seen how well that works for random apps.
I don't know, their whole product announcements since they went the way of the pre-recorded ones seem like exactly the type of company they would smash in their 1984 commercial. Feels over-produced-airburshed-perfectly-rendered-ai-generated souless evil corporation trying to pretend to be good, completely disconnected from the real world, but that's just me, and I am deeply into their ecosystem.
Its the reality distortion field. (this term comes from the register)
The original iphone was full of tradeoffs that made it not a great phone at launch. It had no apps, it had no copy paste, it had no 3g, it had no flash.
The browser was good (apart from the lack of flash) and the touch screen was good. The big reason why it became a behemoth is that it had great music support, and it was fashionable.
The apps, and the thing that actually drove it to monster success only really happened because the public gave them the benefit of the doubt (and developers changed their products to fit)
The capacitive multitouch screen and the software/gestures to go with it was what made the iPhone a success. All the other feature phones of the time were so much less pleasant to use - I had one, the Nokia N95. On paper it destroyed an iPhone. In practice, it was clunky and annoying to use.
The original iPhone was amazing to use. Yes on paper the Nokia destroyed it, as my roommate thoroughly tried to convince me, but browsing the web with multitouch was a revelation and just made the Nokia feel like an archaic tool.
The new phone OS destroyed them along with a few features integrated into the original iPhone all the existing companies were caught completelyflat footed and they spent the next three years debating on what they should do and by then it was too late.
The only reason Google and Android took off? Well it didn’t hurt to have a mole/spy Eric Schmidt on the Apple board.
> Its the reality distortion field. (this term comes from the register)
It actually comes right from Apple. Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple employee, has claimed it was originally said in 1981 by another employee, Bud Tribble, to describe Steve Jobs. It was supposedly a reference to Star Trek.
If what you said was true then all the other companies in existence at that time Microsoft, Blackberry, Palm and Nokia should’ve been able to easily answer the challenge and kick Apple to the curb but they could not because they were so far behind…
The area where all the other existing foldable phones are dead in the water is the OS software integration with the hardware and unlike the first time around, they are competing with Apple that has four other ecosystems that can interface with the new phone seamlessly.
And more importantly, all the developers who bothered to follow most of the rules will have most of their stuff running on that new phone on day one.
> The original iphone was full of tradeoffs that made it not a great phone at launch.
Hard disagree. It was a great phone. The only disadvantage was battery life, if you were a heavy phone user you needed to charge it to get through the day, but as a phone itself (phoning/messaging people) it was delightful!
Look at the clip here of Steve scrolling through contacts like it is butter and the awe of the audience: On other phones large contact lists were cumbersome.
Than visual voicemail! On other phones you called into voicemail and had to hear sequentially through all. With At&t Apple had the unique feature that one can scroll selectively through voice mails.
Of course the second iPhone 3G with the wjooshing sounding light saber app and the app were a beer is poured out made it cultural viral. And then Apple noticed withe the 4/4S that a good camera in your pocket was THE must have killer feature (especially for the women and newborn parent demographics). But the first model was a great tool for just phoning people.
It's really interesting to go back to some of the old Stevenotes and compare. They have a soul to them that's just not there with these newer pre-recorded ones. They were still polished like crazy, but there's this feeling of spontaneity and risk. At the very least, he had to stop and wait for applause and laughter. And there was this sense that they had something to prove. Now, of course the new thing is slick, easy to use, integrates with all your other Apple stuff. It's a sales pitch. Look at the original iPhone announcement and it feels like half of it is convincing the audience that, yes, this thing is actually real, we actually built this, it really does work.
Foldable phone experience is already past "interesting and fun" use cases to practical and useful day to day. Samsung Fold for American market and the various Chinese manufacturers in China proves that.
AR/VR market on the other hand is still way more niche than practical uses on a day to day.
Yes, with a much bigger screen I can definitely see this making me more productive and it is in between an iPad that getting through even minimal productivity tasks would work and bigger screens help a lot. Even though $1999 only gives you 256GB at least you get that low of a price point. Would have to see it in person though especially about the crease and the camera(s). (EDIT) I have a Clicks power keyboard which I can use with this. Seems like I should clarify that I can use this where a regular laptop can't be used.
I was hoping I didn't. But after watching the event, I kinda do.
I have to hand it to them, they added some really nice touches to the OS for the new form factor. Seems almost like the best of an iPhone and a iPad Mini.
Still not sure I want something that bulky, and maybe I'll wait a few months to see the reviews and how the hinge and screen fold hold up. But tempted for sure...
I'm just reaching the age where I need reading glasses late in the day, and so in a couple years when I'm out of school and employed again, this is starting to look like the best option in the Kindle / Tablet space: it isn't just a flat pane of glass and it's no bigger than a Nintendo DS, so it will fit on my crowded surfaces and in my purse.
Do I want it? Ehhhh. I hate heavy objects. I stopped buying the Pro line because the weight just kept increasing. So I will probably not particularly enjoy that mass of batteries dragging on the purse strap. But I enjoy reading glasses less and I just don't want an unwieldy bigscreen that I can't hold easily like the iPhone Air.
No, for that money I can buy an iPhone and an iPad.
Just checked, iPhone 17 256gb plus an iPad 13inch 256gb is about 100 euros cheaper than the cheapest iPhone duo.
I can't think of an application outside of travel or long commutes on a train where I would use this. For a daily driver its too big to fit into a pants pocket and the price tag is TGH.
They just have to make it appealing enough, a loooot of people buy ipads because they're cool and they project themselves into all these fancy advertised situations, 90% of the time it ends up gathering dust or being used 15 min on a sunday morning while you're too lazy to get out of bed.
Most people I know who use iPads do so because a phone is too small to see or type on, but an actual computer/laptop is too complicated and intimidating to use.
Yes I'm quite interested in a foldable from Apple. Have been since I got an 7" Acer Android tablet ~13 years ago and was annoyed at the necessity of carrying 2 devices.
Probably, but do enough people want it? The iPhone SE and the mini was discontinued do to "poor" sales, meaning poor for an iPhone. I'm interested to see if Apple will stop selling the Duo if it only sells at the same rate as the SE.
I don't know who this is for and can't figure out what problem this solves. It's cool, but it's not $2800 cool (yes, it's $800 more expensive in some markets). For that price is has to do more than fold in half, maybe fold into a swan of something.
I definitely didn't want one 30 minutes ago, but now that I've seen it the idea of a phone that can be smaller in the pocket but unfold to give a large screen is pretty darn appealing. Appealing enough to pay 50% more for it? Eh... probably not.
Would probably push the engineers to deliver three-way foldables like the Huawei Mate XT from two years ago. The two-way folding phones are wasting a screen and will go down in history as an abomination. The weird 1:1.4 width:height ratio wouldn't be necessary if you could 3x the screen size instead of only 2x. At 3x, the ratio could be 1:1.73 folded, giving you 3:1.73 unfolded (which equals 1.73:1). 1.73 is much closer to 16:9 (1.77) than 1.4 is.
They talked for several minutes on the materials and engineering that went into the screen and how it wasn't "the same plastic all the other folding phones are made of"
One thing I love about metric paper is the beauty of the simplicity: When you fold it, it maintains its ratio. This is because it is 1:1.41, aka 1:sqrt(2)
When I saw that this new phone is 1:1.4, I instantly appreciated why it is that way. Metric paper wins again!
The aspect ratio is the biggest problem with foldables.
The main reason I'd want a bigger display is for more immersive content like videos, which are typically 16:9. On a Pixel Fold, you have all the added complexity of the fold to make the videos you watch on the train 1cm taller.
The iPhone Duo unfolds to be the same height as the iPhone Pro Max. Sounds like it has the exact same problem - a bunch of added complexity without a practical use for it.
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> Touch ID is integrated into the side button
Another foldable flaw - it's hard to distinguish holding the device e.g. to pocket it and holding the device to use it. My foldable does the smartphone equivalent of butt-dialing way more often than any phone I've had before because it likes to unlock itself when it's in my pocket. Unless the iPhone is a lot smarter about using other heuristics to validate an unlock than Android is, this is another major pain point.
iPads have the same issue (to a lesser extent) if you're really looking for a device primarily for fullscreen 16:9 video. To be honest, the iPhone Duo (and iPads) are much more suited for multiple tiled apps and multi-column app layouts than they are for fullscreen 16:9 video.
My pockets don’t care much about ISO paper standards (not sure why you call it metric? That doesn’t have much to do with the metric system as far as I’m aware?)
Most people in the US aren't aware that everyone else uses a different size of paper. Heck, most people in the US aren't even aware that there are names for the sizes of paper we do use.
Naming it like that would subjectively tie them to the release schedule of the main Iphone line, while I imagine such a niche device will have a much slower schedule between new versions. If that is the case, they would want to continue selling this device alongside the Iphone 19 (and maybe 20, or even 21) without the name implying it is an old model.
It looks very useful with all the software integrations. Now the price tag however... Without financing it would be hard for majority of buyers to justify.
Android Desktop mode looks so promising, it jus 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Hah this is very true, though I'd argue the real Raptor with a snorkel is the gaming PC. I'm typing this on one right now and I mostly play Factorio which could run on any old potato, so yeah I'm that guy. The MBP is probably more akin to the BMW when you could be driving a Honda.
All that said, I'll take this hobby over the truck hobby. $3k for a pretty good machine is great vs. $80k for the snorkel truck.
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.
I will admit that "you can barely buy a sedan in the US anymore" was a bit of hyperbole, but certainly they have declined precipitously, from 80% of the US new vehicle market 40 years ago to about 25% today [0]. You can still buy sedans in the US, but not from american car companies [1].
I had a Motorola Atrix and Lapdock years ago, and wished that concept had taken off. The phone was lacking in performance which made it difficult to use in "laptop" mode.
The modern phone I have is a "cheap" Xiaomi POCO F7 Ultra which has incredible performance, only hampered by the USB2 connectivity. If a dock existed for other phones, I would use this all day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Almost all of these big phone companies are also the ones selling tablets and some of them laptops, so if they did do that they would start eating into their other business units.
Just a reminder to everyone, always buy the second version of any new product category, even from Apple. The first duo will look primitive in a few refresh cycles. It does look really cool though!
Considering how many comments I regularly see on Hacker News from people who still love their M1 MacBooks, I’d say that’s not a particularly strong maxim.
Yeah although my M4 is more powerful I somehow don't perceive it much and it's so heavy and gets hot. My aging M1 is still snappy for most workloads, the battery holds well, it's light. Only thing I resent is the stupid touch bar instead of proper F keys.
But I'd say it's the exception. In general it's better to wait for later generation.
The AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, HomePod, MacBook Neo, and AirTag are also all devices that have had well-received (if not always breakout) 1st-gen releases.
The M1 Macs were a bit different because Apple had already been designing their own CPUs for years, and the machine designs themselves were almost identical to previous iterations with Intel CPUs. The only thing they needed to get right was the software, which they did (and which could have been updated after the fact if they didn’t).
Actually kindof awesome! ...but when I saw the phone call at the end my mind immediately went back to "Taco-Talkin' w/ the Nokia N-Gage"! => https://sidetalkin.com/original/
will buy it for the kid cue feature alone; what a neat idea. i mainly use my iphone for reading books and taking pictures of my kids so the format will be perfect for me.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] threadI doubt you did see any from the last few years.
Plenty of people on HN earn that much money in a single day after tax.
Matching their top competitor in price is a good look.
They could’ve absolutely floored everyone if it had been $1500, but there’s no way that’s possible, at least having margins anywhere near what Apple likes.
Obviously Apple knew where other foldable phones fell short; they clearly planned to overcome those shortcomings.
Will this fit in a woman's hand?
Oh, well there's the problem. Apple isn't catering to millennial jeans fits any more. Only half-joking.
Maybe the answer lies in only wearing an Ultra watch if it becomes powerful enough and can function independently of a phone.
Daily life is ok with it but most of the issues come from banking and governmental apps.
I wish society was not as keen on making everything go through smartphones nowadays.
no
Maybe not $2k fun + inherent risk with buying the first generation of an Apple product particularly after the Apple Vision Pro, but still.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Its the reality distortion field. (this term comes from the register)
The original iphone was full of tradeoffs that made it not a great phone at launch. It had no apps, it had no copy paste, it had no 3g, it had no flash.
The browser was good (apart from the lack of flash) and the touch screen was good. The big reason why it became a behemoth is that it had great music support, and it was fashionable.
The apps, and the thing that actually drove it to monster success only really happened because the public gave them the benefit of the doubt (and developers changed their products to fit)
The only reason Google and Android took off? Well it didn’t hurt to have a mole/spy Eric Schmidt on the Apple board.
It actually comes right from Apple. Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple employee, has claimed it was originally said in 1981 by another employee, Bud Tribble, to describe Steve Jobs. It was supposedly a reference to Star Trek.
No, it was the touchscreen and new UI paradigms.
The area where all the other existing foldable phones are dead in the water is the OS software integration with the hardware and unlike the first time around, they are competing with Apple that has four other ecosystems that can interface with the new phone seamlessly.
And more importantly, all the developers who bothered to follow most of the rules will have most of their stuff running on that new phone on day one.
They were not cool.
Their phones were not cool. The music services bundled were shit.
What made the iphone cool? no buttons, screen running at 60hz. nice animations.
Hard disagree. It was a great phone. The only disadvantage was battery life, if you were a heavy phone user you needed to charge it to get through the day, but as a phone itself (phoning/messaging people) it was delightful!
Look at the clip here of Steve scrolling through contacts like it is butter and the awe of the audience: On other phones large contact lists were cumbersome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9kahkr/11_years_ago_...
Than visual voicemail! On other phones you called into voicemail and had to hear sequentially through all. With At&t Apple had the unique feature that one can scroll selectively through voice mails.
Of course the second iPhone 3G with the wjooshing sounding light saber app and the app were a beer is poured out made it cultural viral. And then Apple noticed withe the 4/4S that a good camera in your pocket was THE must have killer feature (especially for the women and newborn parent demographics). But the first model was a great tool for just phoning people.
AR/VR market on the other hand is still way more niche than practical uses on a day to day.
https://www.clicks.tech/ca/powerkeyboard
That's a very neat product.
I have to hand it to them, they added some really nice touches to the OS for the new form factor. Seems almost like the best of an iPhone and a iPad Mini.
Still not sure I want something that bulky, and maybe I'll wait a few months to see the reviews and how the hinge and screen fold hold up. But tempted for sure...
Do I want it? Ehhhh. I hate heavy objects. I stopped buying the Pro line because the weight just kept increasing. So I will probably not particularly enjoy that mass of batteries dragging on the purse strap. But I enjoy reading glasses less and I just don't want an unwieldy bigscreen that I can't hold easily like the iPhone Air.
This is especially true in the younger generation where many of them don’t own a computer. They do everything on their phones or iPads.
I don't know who this is for and can't figure out what problem this solves. It's cool, but it's not $2800 cool (yes, it's $800 more expensive in some markets). For that price is has to do more than fold in half, maybe fold into a swan of something.
https://www.spigen.com/collections/iphone-duo-cases
When I saw that this new phone is 1:1.4, I instantly appreciated why it is that way. Metric paper wins again!
The main reason I'd want a bigger display is for more immersive content like videos, which are typically 16:9. On a Pixel Fold, you have all the added complexity of the fold to make the videos you watch on the train 1cm taller.
The iPhone Duo unfolds to be the same height as the iPhone Pro Max. Sounds like it has the exact same problem - a bunch of added complexity without a practical use for it.
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> Touch ID is integrated into the side button
Another foldable flaw - it's hard to distinguish holding the device e.g. to pocket it and holding the device to use it. My foldable does the smartphone equivalent of butt-dialing way more often than any phone I've had before because it likes to unlock itself when it's in my pocket. Unless the iPhone is a lot smarter about using other heuristics to validate an unlock than Android is, this is another major pain point.
So your same video on the fold will be about an inch wider because it has the space to expand into in the other direction.
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.
Absolutely sales of laptops would continue.
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 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
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.
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.
> Warranty void in all countries.
This not true for Librem 5 running PureOS.
[0] https://ish.app/
With terminal emulators, tailscale, local and remote agents, there's never been so much computing capability accessible from your pocket before.
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.
All that said, I'll take this hobby over the truck hobby. $3k for a pretty good machine is great vs. $80k for the snorkel truck.
Maybe small phones are like sedans, and the bigger and bigger iPhones are the trucks? Take this analogy where you will.
[0] https://mercercapital.com/insights/blogs/auto-dealer-valuati...
[1] https://carbuzz.com/eulogy-for-the-chevrolet-malibu-and-seda...
What I need is a more portable iPad. But that would cannibalize iPhone sales.
The modern phone I have is a "cheap" Xiaomi POCO F7 Ultra which has incredible performance, only hampered by the USB2 connectivity. If a dock existed for other phones, I would use this all day.
-Installing software without App Store approval filtering
-True multi-tasking and background execution (though this hurts battery)
-Write iOS apps from an iPad
You want what, a terminal that you type on w/an onscreen keyboard?
So I don't know what you're complaining about?
[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.
[0](https://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobile-and-tablet-internet-...)
if they made it a useful computer, they couldnt charge 30% of revenue to their app store customers
I think this is the tension. Or maybe we just need to master one handed keyboards.
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.
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?
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.
But once again as I said before [0][1], don't buy the first version of an Apple product.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638202
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26361985
But I'd say it's the exception. In general it's better to wait for later generation.
That was solved over time anyway as macOS improved and more developers ported their apps over
This lead them to use a garbage CPU and support it for something like 2 years.
Apple has the balls to keep updating the vision pro even after it flopped and it will probably get 7 years.
I will say it was a pain in the ass to open and answer calls though when you were busy doing things.