Apple has announced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone. The device will be available to preorder on October 16 and goes on sale on October 23, starting at $1,999 for 256GB of storage, with options up to 2TB. Like the iPhone Air, the Duo is eSIM-only worldwide.
iPhone Duo design and displays
The Duo folds to roughly the size and shape of a passport when closed, with a 5.4-inch outer display, and opens to a 7.6-inch inner panel — the largest display ever on an iPhone. Both screens share the same aspect ratio; Apple says the inner screen is 50 percent larger than the display on the iPhone 18 Pro Max and 80 percent larger than the iPhone Pro’s. Both panels support ProMotion, always-on display, and up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness. Apple also says Apple Pencil support is coming “later this year.”
Apple says it used a custom nano-texture display material that is “perceptually flat” to reduce glare and minimize the visibility of the crease, and a multilayer display stack with custom adhesives to let layers “glide” over each other when folding to reduce crease deepening and distortion over time.
The phone’s frame is primarily titanium reinforced with internal ceramic fibers. The rear uses toughened Ceramic Shield glass and the front uses Ceramic Shield 2. The Duo has an IP68 rating, will ship in star white and a dark blue called night sky, and measures 5.2mm thick when open and 11.3mm when closed, making it thicker than Samsung’s similar foldables and most recent Android models.
Cameras and foldable-specific features
The Duo has a dual rear camera system, both lenses using 48-megapixel sensors; the ultrawide uses the same camera found on the iPhone 18 Pro. It does not include the variable-aperture main camera or the pro controls of the 18 Pro phones, but benefits from the same Photographic Styles updates for adjusting textures and grain. Foldable-specific software features include the option to take a FaceTime call on both sides of the phone in group settings, using the outer screen to preview selfies taken with the main cameras, and a Smart Take feature that can automatically capture photos when it detects a pose.
A selfie camera is visible in the rounded corner of the front screen and supports Center Stage. The inner screen hides a selfie camera under the display. Instead of Face ID, the Duo uses Touch ID built into a side button, and Apple Watch users can unlock the phone with their watch.
Performance, battery and software
The Duo is powered by Apple’s A20 Pro chip and a C2 modem. The 2nm, six-core A20 Pro includes two “desktop class” super cores — which Sribalan Santhanam, Apple’s VP of silicon engineering, called “by far the fastest in any smartphone” — plus four performance cores, a seven-core GPU and a 32-core NPU that Apple describes as having two neural engines. A new vapor chamber, three times the size of the previous generation’s, is used to help sustain thermal performance.
Apple says the Duo’s dual-cell battery architecture delivers about 24 hours of regular use or up to 31 hours of video playback on the larger inner screen. Wired charging can restore 50 percent of the battery in 20 minutes; wireless charging reaches 50 percent in about 30 minutes, or with 25W MagSafe in 30 minutes.
The Duo ships with iOS 27 updates tailored for foldable hardware. Apps and content can expand and react as the device opens and closes, including an option for two-app multitasking, while core device controls remain consistent across orientations. Apple has moved the home screen dock to a vertical bar on the right-hand edge alongside app navigation controls and the Dynamic Island, and condensed the usual status bar into a small expandable circle in the top-right corner.
“iPhone Duo is the most transformational change to iPhone since the original. With an entirely new design and intuitive experiences, it shows what’s possible when hardware and software are engineered together and redefines what it means to use a foldable phone,” said John Ternus, Apple’s CEO, in a press release. “With the largest display ever on iPhone that still fits easily in your pocket, combined with the power of A20 Pro, iPhone Duo helps you stay more immersed and productive wherever you go, whether you’re enjoying content, multitasking across apps, or gaming.”
Rumors about a folding iPhone date back to at least 2017. Since then rival companies including Samsung, Google, Huawei, Oppo and Honor have released multiple foldable Android phones in various forms. The foldable segment remained small in 2025, accounting for about 1.6 percent of all smartphone sales. Recent reporting focused on a short, wide book-style foldable roughly the size of a passport when closed; that expectation coincided with Huawei, Samsung and Xiaomi releasing similar form factors this year.
