Last week Apple introduced the world to the iPhone Duo and it has taken up an inordinate amount of mushy gray matter in my head since.

I'm a pretty avid follower of the tech space, especially the phone scene despite never diverting from the Apple ecosystem. The folding phone has always struck me as impressive in a futuristic manner—glass that bends!

But I have never been a big iPad user. I did make the poor decision out of high school to use all my money to buy an iPad mini and a MacBook Air instead of putting it all into a MacBook Pro. I had this vision of my textbooks on the iPad, but that never panned out. I got my dad's older iPad Pro when he upgraded, but never got into it. Earlier this year, we bought a plain ol' iPad and that has gotten quite a bit of use as a cooking companion and music player. That's the kind of iPad user I am: The kind that does two things at once.

Seeing a foldable with, you know, good software has shown me the way of the foldable and how it would fit in my life. It'd be propped up while cooking with Mela and the latest MKBHD video playing on the top half. I'd be folded in half while I eat lunch or rotated in portrait to let me read more of a webpage. It's let me not be locked into one app at a time on my phone. I can imagine reading a FAQ off GameFaqs while playing some classic game.1

Sure, the hardware of foldables has always been impressive, but its nothing without the software. Not unlike a video game console—you gotta have the games to make the console worth it. And while some consoles share the same games, the best are usually exclusive and from the first-party teams that know the hardware inside and out.

Apple is clearly out classing the Android folding scene when it comes to the software experience.

I remember this video Becca Farsace made last summer about trying to replace her MacBook Pro with a Galaxy Z Fold 7. Here's what I had to say then:

"It seems like the issue comes down to software, which makes me wonder, how different this video will be when Apple debuts their folding phone next year.

Or how similar they will be.

Who knows with Apple? Given the changes on iPadOS with window management this year, and the fact iPad does have apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and other great third-party power apps (honestly, just a better overall app selection), I feel like this concept will be more feasible with a folding iPhone."

While the Duo is not running iPadOS or touting iPad-class apps like Final Cut Pro or a "docked" desktop-like mode, the software on display strikes as far more pleasant than what Samsung has been working on for the last seven years.2 I am eager to get my hands on a Duo, whether in an Apple Store or one of my own. I am trying some financial jujitsu to make the latter happen.

But let's be real, most of that mushy gray matter has just been replaying the open and close animation over and over; followed by the status icons merging into that slick, singular circle.

Footnotes

  1. A tangent: Over the last couple of weeks, three prominent bloggers I admire have all daisy-chained links to this legendary Super Metroid FAQ by nemes1ss/rsln. You got your Marcin Wichary, John Gruber, and Jason Kottke. While I can't prove this, I feel like I was responsible for this bubbling up on Marcin's radar. You see, I linked to it on Craig Mod's "The Good Place" a couple of months ago when Super Metroid was the game of the day on my blog because I was aware of the FAQ thanks to a long lost tweet from Craig Mod. Anyway, I feel like I did this (ultimately Craig did it), but I like seeing the recognition bubble up in the higher echelon of blogging. ↩

  2. Crazy to see how far foldables have come in that time though! ↩