Get the iPhone 18 Pro Max, not the iPhone Duo, because of these five reasons

So the first foldable iPhone – named iPhone Duo – was officially announced a few days back and yes, it naturally got more attention than any other upcoming Apple product during the company’s recent presentation. It’s coming in October and it will definitely have an impact on both the foldables market and the smartphone market at large, both short-term and long-term. It’s an important device that marks a new, Ternus-led era in Apple’s history, one that will hopefully allow for more innovative and disruptive products than the Cook-led one.

All that the iPhone Duo undeniably is. It’s also not the model the overwhelming majority of people thinking of getting a new iPhone this year should purchase – even if money is no object, which it is.

Yours truly had already decided to upgrade his trusty iPhone 16 Pro Max to a new model in 2026 and, having daily driven no less than four such models since 2020 – the 12, 14, 15 and 16 Pro Max to be exact – he actually considered splashing for an iPhone Duo. Having basically used the same smartphone for sever years straight, a change would be more than welcome.

But after gathering a lot of information about it during the days leading to preordering his next iPhone, yours truly changed his mind: he’d go for the iPhone 18 Pro Max instead. Yes, yes, that one again – because, simply put, there are just too many reasons why the iPhone Duo does not currently look like a smart choice. Here are the five most important ones.

The sticker shock

Let’s not mince words here: starting at $2000, the iPhone Duo is more of a statement piece or a luxury item than a smartphone – yes, even an advanced one. It costs more than an iPhone 18 Pro Max and the latest iPad (or the incoming OLED iPad Mini) put together, or more than an iPhone 18 Pro and a MacBook Neo put together, which is crazy. In Greece, where yours truly resides, the most affordable Duo costs €2400 (around $2800), while the most affordable 18 Pro Max costs €1660 (around $1915). Still a pretty penny for a new Pro Max, obviously, but not the kind of investment the Duo is.

For devices as personal as smartphones it’s not just the price sticker that’s important – it’s also the value delivered. But, when it comes to the iPhone Duo, that’s just it: the value may or may not be there – consumers don’t really know yet, they will have to find out for themselves – while the $700/€800 difference between that and an 18 Pro Max is already there. If everything else was perfect with the Duo, the high price would still be an issue, but it would be part of a more nuanced conversation. But that’s not really the case… hence the initial sticker shock that doesn’t exactly subside after taking a close look at everything.

The app situation

This being an iPhone adopting a completely new form factor, there will unavoidably be a transitional period for the apps running on it too. We are now clear on what the iPhone Duo operating system is: it’s not a modified iPadOS version, but an extended iOS version. This means that typical iOS apps do run on the new device… but it does not mean that they run as intended or in a way that actually makes use of the extra space to deliver improved functionality.

Here is a good article over at Appwrite explaining things in detail: there is a new list of parameters that app developers will have to take into account in order for their apps to not just run, but to actually work well on the iPhone Duo… and, truth be told, it’s a long list. Sure, many of the most popular third-party apps, owned by major companies, will (hopefully…) be updated in order to take advantage of the Duo’s extra screen and/or real estate. But that won’t necessarily be the case with most other apps, as their developers will probably want to see some Duo sales numbers before putting in the extra work needed.

Those numbers will not be impressive, though. Not at first – the Duo will run into availability problems over the next few months – and maybe not well into the next year, so developers will have less of an incentive to deliver Duo-optimized versions of their apps. Yes, it’s the same old “chicken-and-egg” issue of early software support, which can take more time than anticipated to resolve. Long story short: Apple’s own first-party apps will work well on the iPhone Duo early on, many other popular ones will do that too in due course, but what happens with all the rest is anyone’s guess at this point. Care to bet $2000 on it?

The crease uncertainty

That’s something that countless people – everyone who ever owned or used a foldable smartphone for a while, plus anyone following the evolution of foldables – has feelings for when it comes to the iPhone Duo: feelings ranging from curiosity to worry. See, basically all such smartphones released so far have failed to make the unsightly crease – the vertical line in the middle of the foldable display, under the hinge – both appear invisible to the naked eye and stay that way. Recent ones managed to make it barely visible at first, but in 9-12 months or whereabouts the crease starts to show. It gets worse after that because, regardless of how well they might be put together, these flexible screens are still strained. It’s just physics.

Granted, Apple seems to have done a great job minimizing the chances of a crease appearing prominently on the iPhone Duo’s inner screen for some time. The engineering work the company put into the hinge, the way the layers of the screen move underneath the flexible glass and the matte coating protecting it will all help. But, right now, nobody outside of Apple’s HQ really knows what happens to that screen after e.g. a year of folding and unfolding it dozens of times a day. The crease might not be as visible as it is in the case of other foldable smartphones… or it might. Hell, it could be worse because we simply don’t know – hence the uncertainty. Some people may not mind a crease right in the middle of the larger screen the very expensive smartphone they use every single day is built around. Others will.

The unproven use case

This one heavily depends on how individual people use their iPhones today and how they expect the iPhone Duo to will help them do the same things more efficiently or more enjoyably by comparison – let alone how they’ll be able to do new things with it they were just not able to do before with “traditional” iPhones. Since not all consumers do the same things with their smartphones, not even necessarily use the same apps in the same way, it’s hard to accurately predict how the Duo would help these people – most of them power users, presumably – do more or do better with it just by sporting a much bigger screen.

Some use cases are obvious and proven, such as the dual-pane e-mail client, the side-by-side browsers or the multiple messaging windows opened at once, but these are just a handful: whether it’s worth getting a new, expensive iPhone for those is debatable for the majority of people considering one. What’s more, Apple showed off extremely few – if any – others that are actually new. Even no-brainers won’t work for everyone. Yours truly, for instance, is not convinced that typical video material is that much more enjoyable to watch on the Duo screen that on an Pro Max screen. This might easily be the case for some games, but only for certain types – and those games will have to be updated for the Duo’s inner screen aspect ratio too.

At the end of the day all this comes down to, again, how individual consumers use their current iPhones during most of the day and what they expect of the iPhone Duo as a result. But they won’t really know until enough people – whose smartphone usage patterns and habits match their own – post detailed enough Duo impressions online, which will take some time. It may also be telling, that: if enough Duo-exclusive features were genuinely, undeniably valuable, shouldn’t consumers be able to tell for themselves? Just a thought.

The v1.0 vibe

All of the above aside, here’s something to consider: “the first” of anything in tech is, by definition, the version 1.0 of that particular anything – let alone of something that a company like Apple releases after years and years of work. There’s going to be an iPhone Duo 2 at the very least, most probably an iPhone Duo 3 – maybe an iPhone Duo Pro or an iPhone Duo Max too at some point – and they will all be better than the first Apple foldable smartphone is going to be come October. For people who do not absolutely need a foldable iPhone right now, for some reason, there are superior variants of this device in their future – ones that won’t have to deal with so many hardware limitations or app compatibility issues.

So why buy a very expensive, imperfect, unproven, v1.0 product like the iPhone Duo today, when one can get a less exciting – but just as powerful, even better in some ways – iPhone in a basically perfected form factor and just wait while the new form factor’s kinks are all ironed out? It’s not the bold choice, yes: it is the safe, boring choice. But maybe the safe choice is currently the best one for the overwhelming majority of iPhone power users because investing in an iPhone Duo frankly seems more of a risky bet than it should be.

Then again, maybe that was part of Apple’s plan all along. The company knows it won’t be able to produce huge numbers of the iPhone Duo at first, it knows this device is not for everyone anyway – not just in terms of cost either – but its first foldable being so expensive may have a psychological side effect: the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max do not seem quite as expensive now by comparison. Yours truly would bet, in fact, that the company’s latest “traditional” top smartphones will sell more units over the next 12 months than the 2025 models because of the iPhone Duo. Let’s put a pin in it and come back next year to check, shall we?