Nearly 10 years in to foldables, and they still bring so many caveats. They are consistently worse for size, weight, shape, cameras, battery, robustness, and longevity. I don't think I'd ever recommend one.
On the other hand, the advantages are... an iPad like experience sometimes? Or a smaller phone for the flip form factor? The flip form factor certainly does not pay off. I'm honestly not sure who the trade-offs pay off for.
I feel like the average tech enthusiast just assumes that most people have computers, but they do not. Most people have a phone as a primary computing device. Tablets have gone up in popularity, but for a significant portion of people, their only device is a phone. Those people are buying phones on carrier financing or other deals, so they don't even see the full cost of their device at all. So for people doing this type of upgrade cycle, a folding phone is quite compelling: an expanded screen size for watching video, consuming content, or heck, even maybe productivity, while being effectively a marginal upgrade in cost on a monthly payment.
Also, just for the record, some carriers in Japan are offering financing that gives you the option of paying over 48 months and Apple offers 36 months. Is that quite absurd to most people? Absolutely, but for the average person who wants a bigger screen sometimes, the cost is not even going up much on a monthly basis.
For the record, especially in Japan, folio cases where you open your phone like a book are already the default. Effectively most people on the train have their phone open in some "Duo-ish" form-factor already. So the jump from a folio case to a folding phone is already substantially lower.
Obviously the gimmick nature of folding is not the compelling reason why people want folding phones. The question is more about tradeoffs, and I think that especially in asia, the demand for folding phones is quite obvious: upgrade your primary PC to have a huge display when you want it that way, otherwise it stays compact enough to be with you all the time.
I love my Pixel 10 Fold and can't imagine ever going back to a non-foldable now. The larger screen is great for productivity. Reviewing PRs on the larger screen is way more comfortable than a normal phone size. The built-in terminal app also works nicely with herdr and Tailscale to let me connect to my work machine. I can interact with my agents and get real work done on the go. I also have saved split views so I can quickly launch two apps side-by-side. I do mobile app development, so being able to have the app I'm developing open side by side with Slack or Linear to create issues or discuss with people is very convenient.
I don't know if terminal access is as easy on iPhones, but the utility is there for many work related use-cases. I do think the more square-like form factor of the Pixel to be better for productivity than the rectangular form of the Duo, but the latter is nicer for videos.
Interesting, reviewers (Joanna Stern) said that it was not great for productivity, more for consumption. Perhaps it works for your kind of tasks, but not hers/others.
I was saying the Pixel Fold form-factor was great for productivity and that the iPhone Duo was better for video watching. But even the Duo could be nice for some productivity tasks if you hold it in a portrait orientation instead of landscape.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, they are different markets – most people need a smartphone today, nobody really needs a PS5. A better comparison is to say that of smartphones sold in 2025 (~1.65bn), foldables represented ~1%. That's pretty niche.
That’s pre-Apple’s entry into the market, which will triple the size of the foldables market in the next 12-18 months. And cnsidering how bad foldables have been and how much better they’ll get, that’s surely not the ceiling.
Apple sold ~250m of those ~1.65bn, so if you work on it being Android only, then foldables are ~1.4% instead of ~1.1%.
For the foldable market to triple in size, Apple would need to sell 40m this year, which if we assume a flat year for overall numbers (likely given rising costs this cycle and the trend of flattening sales anyway), then it would mean the fold taking 16% of all iPhone sales. For a ~2500-3200 USD phone (base model, international pricing), that's not happening.
Why would you think foldables are about to get a lot better? They have improved over the last 10 years, but the original caveats are pretty much all still there, and the iPhone Duo doesn't appear to improve on any of them in any meaningful way.
> For the foldable market to triple in size, Apple would need to sell 40m this year
For the record, it seems like the production will not get close to 40m phones this year. According to most outlets, it is backordered to January and Apple had to ramp production higher than anticipated. I highly doubt that it will literally 3x the market this year. But the pattern has been, excepting the Vision Pro, that when Apple enters a market, it suddenly proves the viability to other market entrants, and to the general public who view it as a mature market.
> but the original caveats are pretty much all still there
I don't think this is true at all. A significant portion of people complain about the crease, light reflections, and poor software. It seems like initial reviews don't find problems due to the "nano-texture" display (probably achievable in third-parties with a matte screen protector). As for software, once apps have been optimized for Duo, I expect that designs will carry over to similar form-factor folding devices on Android.
From what I've gathered, China is much more in to mobile gaming and livestreaming than the rest of the world. Folding phones seem to appeal to those who primarily consume media on their phones, so it checks out they would want larger phones.
I suspect this might be my blindspot. I use my phone a huge amount, but almost never for watching video or gaming. Being able to have a "full screen" video, and another app running "full screen", with the effectively 2x screen space, makes sense.
A big iPhone is the wrong way to think about this, it is in fact a foldable iPad mini. An iPad Mini you can comfortably fit in your pocket and take on the go with an always on cellular connection that can take phone calls.
As someone who used to carry an iPad mini in his back jeans pocket (it barely fit), I am very much looking forward to my pre-order showing up.
My iPad mini gets multiple times more use than my iPhone, there have even been times where I’ve left my iPhone by the bedside table for days.
It’s mainly a consumption device, I got it initially for reading ebooks while on the train. It’s also a surprisingly good workhorse by itself, or as a second screen for a MacBook. I even make phone calls with it (via the iPhone) simply because it’s always in or near my hands.
So the Duo certainly piqued my interest when it was announced, until I learnt it doesn’t do iPad-y stuff like universal control or sidecar. I’ll wait for the next gen.
It felt wrong to me when they split iOS in two to make the iPad OS, and now it feels super wrong.
The whole selling point of this is that it’s an iPad mini in your pocket, IMO. It’s really a shame they couldn’t give it all of the iPad’s best features.
??? everyone I know who's gone fold hasn't gone back.
yes, battery & camera are a generation back and water/dustproof is even worse.
but productivity and fun are off the charts: slab phones feel pathetic once you've got a fold. Communication apps show you the list of conversations as well as the current one - or the current one and the details/multimedia. Google Maps shows the map and the listing details/reviews. Games and multimedia are delightful. Photos are full sized, and you can see what you're shooting in detail - if you shoot with a digital camera, remote shooting is amazing because there's enough space to show detailed focus.
Not to start an endless device debate but a good chunk of these use cases make more sense to do on an iPad or to just have a separate device in general.
I know, I know, that’s not as portable, that’s not a device you have with you all the time like a phone.
But we’ve seen pretty mixed results on the “combine devices into one” playbook. Sometimes it’s a huge hit, sometimes not so much.
Well, besides the software, which is very much not laptop-like.
I think the main thing is that for this kind of money you have a lot of options. You could even buy a GPD device that is an actual full blown pouch sized laptop and buy a regular iPhone for the same price.
> I think the main thing is that for this kind of money you have a lot of options. You could even buy a GPD device that is an actual full blown pouch sized laptop and buy a regular iPhone for the same price.
I have done this! I currently carry a GPD Win Max 2 around, but let me be clear about some elements of this: the keyboard on a sub-device is just as important as any other, and the keyboard on GPD devices is not great. A sub-device has to be maintained and charged and given love and care just the same as any other device. The amount of times I have found my cute linux laptop dead when I wanted it, outdated, or randomly signed out of services is quite high (and this is with an onboard LTE modem). Carrying around a folding (or even non-folding, like a Magic Keyboard) is lighter than a sub-device, will last significantly longer in terms of charge/battery, and does not require any of the secondary device maintenance that is needed with one normally.
To me a folding phone is an absolute no-brainer in terms of why it is useful. You can get a very, very good keyboard for cheap, or try many, and completely eliminate the need to carry a second device.
Another huge use case I have is transit/travel video playback. I do not normally want to bring an iPad or even a secondary laptop during travel, so this effectively deletes one more device that I have to charge, update, bring adapters for, etc. It is effectively all of the benefit of having a tablet at all times, a sub-laptop at all times, and requires absolutely no additional charging or maintenance.
I own a GPD max 2 and a GPD win mini and both are really not suitable for my workflow: the battery life is not as good as an iPhone and the fan keep screaming. Maybe I should try installing linux on them. Now they are just gaming devices and a backup machine in case I really need to open office documents.
OTOH I have used my iPhone pro max for development for a long long time. The trick is to use a always-on linux VPS pairing with many excellent terminal emulators on iPhone (e.g. blink.sh).
Essentially I'm using iPhone as a thin client to visit a true linux development machine, and both of them play their roles perfectly. While other solutions while trying to be both roles with a single device failed miserably.
Huge screen that's pocketable and also your primary device (not a 2nd device you need to choose to carry in addition to your phone, and have a bag for) and ability to have 2 apps at once on iOS is in fact highly valuable for many.
I had a flip phone and I got it for this reason, but it honestly just sucked. The outer screens are too small to be useful, or in the case of Samsung, just don't have the right feature set to be useful. That means the phone ends up just being a full size smartphone with more steps to be able to use it.
Spending thousands of dollars on hardware I don't own is not for me, but foldable touchscreen phones are, objectively, pretty freaking cool pieces of engineering work. Very cool breakdown of the hardware.
Maybe 2027 will be the year of the Linux desktop (thanks to AI), but meanwhile, I 'll just pay the $100/yr Apple tax to run my code on my device, and get on with my life.
ive been really enjoying my iPhone duo so far, its hard to imagine going back to a normal phone. it makes it so much more fun to schedule appointments, read blog posts, vibe code, update my calendar before a trip, watch movies, etc...
I felt this way since the first Pixel Fold. Now I have Pixel Fold 10 and a Duo. I need work-personal separation thus two devices, but it is a little much with two foldables.
You know how on a computer screen you can just drag any corner of a window to resize it? I had a dream once where I had a phone that worked that way. Want a bigger screen? Just drag one of the corners of the phone. Shove all the corners together and drop it in your pocket.
I used the hell out of that phone all night. Then I woke up and spent about an hour trying to figure out how to build one. I think I could do it in one dimension (i.e. make the phone wider) by rolling the screen around a tiny roller in the edge of the case, and having the case telescope. But that won't work in two dimensions at once. I never figured out how to do it in two dimensions.
Could be 4 screens overlapping each other. Pull the corners and the lower screens pull out from below the upper ones. There would be a visible seam at the boundary, but maybe there's a trick you could use to disguise it.
I noticed a race among social media to teardown or literally tear down the iphone duo this time. Bendgate is always a classic one to do for views, scratchgate is another one content makers love as they can wear an expensive watch while they carve shapes into their expensive purchase while poor people from around the world clutch pearls. The folding design is a great opportunity for content makers to target for views, but my question is why the content makers never invent something, design it, market it, pay large amounts for iso safety testing certification, then make teardown content on what they created a la banksy love is in the bin
I'm sure the 5T multinational corporation is glad you're defending it against the small-time content creators bullying it, but you might notice that the people behind this teardown do in fact sell products they've designed. So do other popular creators in the teardown category like jerryrigeverything.
They can't do teardowns of their own products though. Anything interesting they'd find in a teardown should have been caught at the design stage, and they're hardly unbiased about their own products. At most they can do design decision videos, which many do. For opinionated testing they'll send their products to another creator instead.
Why does it matter if its 5 or 5T? The teardown or tear down is what is important. I invented something a few years ago in my backyard workshop while on welfare and it got tore down which made me realise something odd is going on
nah they're right, legit teardowns with microscopes & CTs & chip identification are interesting; most 'teardowns' are little more than destruction porn. jerryrig at least gives some info (scratch test) but even he quickly devolves into uninteresting destruction.
It's nothing new - is will it blend still a thing? - but man it seems like they're everywhere now
On the other hand, the advantages are... an iPad like experience sometimes? Or a smaller phone for the flip form factor? The flip form factor certainly does not pay off. I'm honestly not sure who the trade-offs pay off for.
Also, just for the record, some carriers in Japan are offering financing that gives you the option of paying over 48 months and Apple offers 36 months. Is that quite absurd to most people? Absolutely, but for the average person who wants a bigger screen sometimes, the cost is not even going up much on a monthly basis.
For the record, especially in Japan, folio cases where you open your phone like a book are already the default. Effectively most people on the train have their phone open in some "Duo-ish" form-factor already. So the jump from a folio case to a folding phone is already substantially lower.
Obviously the gimmick nature of folding is not the compelling reason why people want folding phones. The question is more about tradeoffs, and I think that especially in asia, the demand for folding phones is quite obvious: upgrade your primary PC to have a huge display when you want it that way, otherwise it stays compact enough to be with you all the time.
I don't know if terminal access is as easy on iPhones, but the utility is there for many work related use-cases. I do think the more square-like form factor of the Pixel to be better for productivity than the rectangular form of the Duo, but the latter is nicer for videos.
Interesting, reviewers (Joanna Stern) said that it was not great for productivity, more for consumption. Perhaps it works for your kind of tasks, but not hers/others.
Why does it have to be an all-or-nothing fight for the final smartphone form? Can't it just be a semi-niche product that some people buy?
For the foldable market to triple in size, Apple would need to sell 40m this year, which if we assume a flat year for overall numbers (likely given rising costs this cycle and the trend of flattening sales anyway), then it would mean the fold taking 16% of all iPhone sales. For a ~2500-3200 USD phone (base model, international pricing), that's not happening.
Why would you think foldables are about to get a lot better? They have improved over the last 10 years, but the original caveats are pretty much all still there, and the iPhone Duo doesn't appear to improve on any of them in any meaningful way.
For the record, it seems like the production will not get close to 40m phones this year. According to most outlets, it is backordered to January and Apple had to ramp production higher than anticipated. I highly doubt that it will literally 3x the market this year. But the pattern has been, excepting the Vision Pro, that when Apple enters a market, it suddenly proves the viability to other market entrants, and to the general public who view it as a mature market.
> but the original caveats are pretty much all still there
I don't think this is true at all. A significant portion of people complain about the crease, light reflections, and poor software. It seems like initial reviews don't find problems due to the "nano-texture" display (probably achievable in third-parties with a matte screen protector). As for software, once apps have been optimized for Duo, I expect that designs will carry over to similar form-factor folding devices on Android.
As a fan of smaller smartphones (the likes of which aren’t made anymore), I thought the answer to this was supposedly a resounding no.
I mean, Apple sold millions of iPhones mini but we were told that wasn’t a viable product.
As someone who used to carry an iPad mini in his back jeans pocket (it barely fit), I am very much looking forward to my pre-order showing up.
It’s mainly a consumption device, I got it initially for reading ebooks while on the train. It’s also a surprisingly good workhorse by itself, or as a second screen for a MacBook. I even make phone calls with it (via the iPhone) simply because it’s always in or near my hands.
So the Duo certainly piqued my interest when it was announced, until I learnt it doesn’t do iPad-y stuff like universal control or sidecar. I’ll wait for the next gen.
The whole selling point of this is that it’s an iPad mini in your pocket, IMO. It’s really a shame they couldn’t give it all of the iPad’s best features.
yes, battery & camera are a generation back and water/dustproof is even worse.
but productivity and fun are off the charts: slab phones feel pathetic once you've got a fold. Communication apps show you the list of conversations as well as the current one - or the current one and the details/multimedia. Google Maps shows the map and the listing details/reviews. Games and multimedia are delightful. Photos are full sized, and you can see what you're shooting in detail - if you shoot with a digital camera, remote shooting is amazing because there's enough space to show detailed focus.
I know, I know, that’s not as portable, that’s not a device you have with you all the time like a phone.
But we’ve seen pretty mixed results on the “combine devices into one” playbook. Sometimes it’s a huge hit, sometimes not so much.
Then they make perfect sense to do on an iPhone Duo, because the inner screen size is basically the same as an iPad mini.
That's the point. It's a foldable iPad that carries the iPhone name.
I think the main thing is that for this kind of money you have a lot of options. You could even buy a GPD device that is an actual full blown pouch sized laptop and buy a regular iPhone for the same price.
I have done this! I currently carry a GPD Win Max 2 around, but let me be clear about some elements of this: the keyboard on a sub-device is just as important as any other, and the keyboard on GPD devices is not great. A sub-device has to be maintained and charged and given love and care just the same as any other device. The amount of times I have found my cute linux laptop dead when I wanted it, outdated, or randomly signed out of services is quite high (and this is with an onboard LTE modem). Carrying around a folding (or even non-folding, like a Magic Keyboard) is lighter than a sub-device, will last significantly longer in terms of charge/battery, and does not require any of the secondary device maintenance that is needed with one normally.
To me a folding phone is an absolute no-brainer in terms of why it is useful. You can get a very, very good keyboard for cheap, or try many, and completely eliminate the need to carry a second device.
Another huge use case I have is transit/travel video playback. I do not normally want to bring an iPad or even a secondary laptop during travel, so this effectively deletes one more device that I have to charge, update, bring adapters for, etc. It is effectively all of the benefit of having a tablet at all times, a sub-laptop at all times, and requires absolutely no additional charging or maintenance.
OTOH I have used my iPhone pro max for development for a long long time. The trick is to use a always-on linux VPS pairing with many excellent terminal emulators on iPhone (e.g. blink.sh).
Essentially I'm using iPhone as a thin client to visit a true linux development machine, and both of them play their roles perfectly. While other solutions while trying to be both roles with a single device failed miserably.
Why would I want the ergonomics of a small laptop when a folding phone and bluetooth keyboard is much better?
What software do you need that android cannot support? Surely ssh or tailscale can fill that gap.
We've been asking for a small phone for so long now
And then now we have one. But its too costly. I'm waiting for the cost to come down
For foldable phones the factor is that you have a phone and a small tab all in one.
It’s not about the steps to be able to use it, it’s about fitting in your pocket.
Everyone I have ever met with the new Motorola Razr product lineup owns that phone so it fits in women’s jeans pockets.
I used the hell out of that phone all night. Then I woke up and spent about an hour trying to figure out how to build one. I think I could do it in one dimension (i.e. make the phone wider) by rolling the screen around a tiny roller in the edge of the case, and having the case telescope. But that won't work in two dimensions at once. I never figured out how to do it in two dimensions.
When somebody builds one of these, I'll buy one.
They can't do teardowns of their own products though. Anything interesting they'd find in a teardown should have been caught at the design stage, and they're hardly unbiased about their own products. At most they can do design decision videos, which many do. For opinionated testing they'll send their products to another creator instead.
It's nothing new - is will it blend still a thing? - but man it seems like they're everywhere now
The first broken iPhone Duos are here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223580
The iPhone Duo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189055