iPhone Duo: What We Missed!

All right, so unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard by now that Apple finally has unveiled their folding phone, the Duo. And there's been a lot of reactions to it finally being unveiled.

And I've been curiously watching those reactions kind of just as much as studying the phone itself. Because Apple has a very interesting challenge on their hands that I don't think they've had before as a company, which is that this new product...

essentially combines two other existing products, the iPhone... and the iPad. a phone and a tablet. And that is significant because they've really avoided that for so long.

Apple, of course, makes a bunch of different products, and as a company, they would love you to buy literally as many of these products as they can sell you. You know, they all work so well together. The ecosystem is so seamless and protected.

You have continuity between them. So the iPhone is basically the hub of it all... And then I actually remember when I first switched to mostly using Macs myself, it was around 2015 because they roped me in with Final Cut Pro.

And so the iPad has always forever sat like perfectly in the middle ground between the iPhone and the Mac. I mean, it sounds obvious, right? But it's, you know, a much bigger screen, much more powerful and capable as a media machine and with a

stylus... to always be better than an iPhone at that, but never too powerful enough that it would become like a full-on desktop-class computer and step on Mac sales. So it's always been right in between.

and it's even gotten more and more interesting to watch at the highest end because that iPad Pro is, has gotten literally macOS-like features and UI paradigms. It also has a desktop-class M-series chip in it. It's gotten to the point where they had a lot

of people sort of questioning... should we try to replace our Macs with iPads? And then they actually started getting that question of maybe would they merge macOS and iPadOS? That's what prompted the famous 'No.' No.

Of course not. So, okay, fine, you're not merging any of these things together. You can keep selling the iPhone... and the iPad and the Mac separately.

Justifiably great. But now your newest product... is the iPhone... Duo, and the iPhone Duo is quite literally an iPhone when it's closed and it behaves...

exactly like an iPad when it's open and it's very close in size to an iPad mini and it's getting full Apple Pencil support. Later this year, the Apple TikTok account literally posted this video...

with the caption, 'The Making Of' of course referring to how the Duo was made with an iPhone and an iPad mini. So are they finally doing it?? Are they actually gonna step on the toes of their

own products with this, or do they have to wiggle their way out of that somehow? I actually got to talk briefly with Craig Federighi, the global head of software at Apple, also the guy that said 'No' on stage.

And so I asked him about it. I think the basic explanation I'll be able to give people who are totally unfamiliar is this is it's an iPhone when it's closed, and like a small iPad when it's open, it's like the basic value prop.

I don't know if you disagree. That's how I'd be describing it to people. And it's interesting because Apple sells an iPhone and an iPad. I'm curious how you think about the way this will