Apple’s New $2000 Foldable iPhone Duo

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SPEAKER_5 (1:26)

John Ternus just stepped into the CEO role at Apple, and he chose to use his very first product announcement to drop a completely new hardware category on the market. I mean, he just unveiled the iPhone Duo, which is a foldable iPhone that carries a starting price of $1999.

SPEAKER_2 (1:44)

Yeah, a $2,000 starting price puts this entirely out of the standard smartphone category. Like when you look at that number, your brain immediately associates it with the cost of a high-end laptop. You know, a machine you purchase for heavy production and complex software rendering, not a device that just sits in your pocket while you walk down the street.

SPEAKER_5 (2:04)

Right. It's a completely different mental bucket for a purchase.

SPEAKER_2 (2:06)

Exactly. I mean, stepping into the chief executive role and immediately releasing a product with that kind of financial barrier, it sets a very specific, confident tone for how he intends to lead the company. He is not easing into the role with like incremental updates to the camera bump or a slightly thinner aluminum chassis. He is demanding the market accept a completely new paradigm right out of the gate.

SPEAKER_5 (2:31)

Which is wild because the global market for foldable phones is incredibly small right now. The question we have to carry through this entire discussion is whether they can take a hyper-expensive, very niche concept and force it to become normal consumer behavior.

SPEAKER_2 (2:46)

The entire mobile industry has been tinkering with folding screens for quite some time now.

Up until this point, consumers have largely treated them as interesting novelties rather than daily necessities. People are just deeply entrenched in the physical habit of using a single flat sheet of glass.

SPEAKER_5 (3:06)

Yeah, it's all muscle memory at this point.

SPEAKER_2 (3:07)

It really is. It's a muscle memory that has been ingrained over the last 15 years of computing.

The central tension here is whether this ecosystem has enough gravitational pull to alter that established consumer behavior. You are essentially asking people to add physical friction to their day by requiring them to open a device just to perform complex tasks.

SPEAKER_5 (3:26)

The physical mechanics of how they built this, give us an idea of how they plan to overcome that friction. They decided to go with a passport style design. So you have this 5.4 inch outer display for when the phone is closed, which functions like a normal albeit slightly smaller phone.

SPEAKER_2 (3:41)

Right.

SPEAKER_5 (3:42)

Then it opens up to a 7.6 inch internal screen. That makes the internal screen the largest display ever put on an iPhone.

SPEAKER_2 (3:50)

When you think about a 7.6 inch diagonal measurement, you are dealing with an almost 8 inch squared device when it is fully unfolded.

I have to question the ergonomics of holding something with those dimensions. Human hands are accustomed to gripping a rectangle.

SPEAKER_5 (4:05)

Yeah, you wrap your hand around it.

SPEAKER_2 (4:07)

Exactly. A standard slab phone rests easily in the palm, usually supported by the pinky finger at the bottom acting as a shelf.