Paul 問答：iPhone Duo 是否值得選？（10 月 16 日）

Happy Friday! The iPhone Duo is here, RTX Spark is here, and we're all reeling from all the new. But let's slow down, kick off the weekend a bit early, and see what this week has wrought.
"Apple CEO John Ternus on Early Foldables: 'Kind of Cheap and Crappy"

So expensive and crappy is still better, right?
2️⃣ Duo, and/or hello
dremy1011 asks:

What are your thoughts on the iPhone Duo? Did you order one?

The iPhone Duo is in many ways a classic Apple product in that others innovated with this product type--Samsung released its first Galaxy Fold in early 2019, almost 8 years ago--Apple waited until the obvious kinks were worked out, and then it entered the market with a refined first-generation product. But the iPhone Duo is also in many ways not a classic Apple product. In the past this strategy also included coming to market with a product that was demonstrably better than what others were doing. The iPod, for example, was a marked improvement over other MP3 players, especially once Apple shifted to USB connectivity and added Windows support. But the Duo is just an Apple-branded foldable phone, a foldable for those who want that form factor but also want to stick in the Apple ecosystem. It's not meaningfully better than the Galaxy Fold8. In fact, they seem nearly identical, right down to the screen shapes and sizes.

That said ...

One might make the argument that iOS is already more refined than Android, and I'm onboard with that. One might also accurately point out that developers have always supported Apple's unique platforms in sophisticated ways, whereas those that develop for Android always lag, resulting in apps like Slack that don't in any way adapt to bigger screen sizes and different form factors. And that's definitely true. Also, I will point out that Apple customized the iOS user interface in very interesting ways for the iPhone Duo, so much so that I'm wondering why it doesn't warrant an iPadOS-style split from iOS.

I wrote about all this in Making Sense of the iPhone Duo ⭐ back in September right after the Duo was announced. And since then, I've been thinking aboutwhat makes the most sense for me. I have an iPhone 17 Pro Max, last year's model, and I typically upgrade to the next Pro Max model each year. But I've always been curious about the non-Pro iPhones and whether they could meet my minds. Unfortunately, one of those needs is a bigger screen given my eyesight. So I was seriously tempted by the iPhone 16 Plus, the last big non-Pro iPhone, and the iPhone Air, which has a "Goldilocks"-sized screen between the sizes of the Pro and non-Pro iPhones. In the end, I skipped the first Air because it only has a single camera lens, a single mono speaker, and other limitations. But I love that thin form factor and it's always been chipping away at the back of my brain. Perhaps the iPhone Air 2 will make sense.

I wrote about this somewhere--oh, right, it's here--but I have a timing issue here. We're going to Mexico...