Linked List: October 24, 2026

Saturday, 24 October 2026

Nicole Nguyen’s Duo Review for the WSJ ★

Nicole Nguyen (also with a 5-minute video), writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Every time I used the Duo in phone mode, one-handed, I felt its heft. It’s wider and thicker than a Pro iPhone — and heavier, even compared with competing foldables. My hand actually hurts after using the Duo nonstop, straining to grip the device securely while trying to reach the far edge of the screen.

An Apple spokesman pointed to the Duo’s titanium frame for durability. Other folding models use a lighter aluminum. The company also moved the dock and common controls to the right to be more reachable (sorry, southpaws). Still, there were plenty of instances where my thumb found its limits: turning off the flash in the camera app, or typing the letter “A.”

There are people who can easily use two hands and won’t see this as a problem, including train commuters, frequent fliers or parents who wait around for kids to finish their activities. For me, I look forward to the day the Duo is lighter and thinner — maybe folding to the size of a deck of cards, like in the movie “Her.”

Interesting that she’d prefer a smaller Duo, not a bigger one, if Apple makes a second size. I agree that one-hand-ability is a problem with the Duo, but I also think the front screen is already too squat in terms of how much content it shows. I just think it’s the nature of foldables that they’re two-handed devices, even closed.

Her’s deck of cards foldable isn’t what I think we need to wait for. It’s Westworld’s super-thin trifolds — or even a bifold that’s more along those lines of thinness.

Reuters and the WSJ on the Duo Launch ★

Aditya Soni, Christine Chen, and Will Russell, reporting Friday for Reuters:

CEO Ternus played greeter at a store in Austin, Texas, throwing open the doors and high-fiving customers as they streamed in, a video posted on X by CBS Austin showed. A known car enthusiast, Ternus’s Austin visit coincides with this weekend’s Formula 1 US Grand Prix in the city, with Apple holding exclusive US broadcast and streaming rights to the racing series.

I was wondering why Ternus and retail chief Deirdre O’Brien were in Austin for the launch. Joz held down the fort and held court at the Fifth Avenue store.

Regarding reviews:

They also said the folded Duo is less handy for the quick tasks most users do daily and several prominent reviewers recommended against it for many Apple customers.

“It’s been a lot of fun trying the Duo out for a week, but it feels like I’ve gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype — not a finished product that I’d want to buy and carry,” wrote longtime Apple commentator John Gruber.

Tech commentator Marques Brownlee said in a YouTube review that for a regular person who mostly texts and browses, “it is probably a no. But if the $2,000 doesn’t mean much to you, and you like the idea, after the learning curve and getting used to not having facial identification, it is a really fun phone.”

In Berlin, YouTube content creator Patrick Wolter was impressed that the Duo works as a phone and an iPad in one.

Not sure Wolter set a high bar there.

Reporting for the WSJ (gift link), Rolfe Winkler quoted yours truly as well, with (IMO, and I feel I get to have an opinion here) a better line from my review:

“The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet,” wrote John Gruber, a well-known Apple blogger, in his review. “The decision of whether you might want to buy a Duo is not easy, because only one of its two selves is good.”

Marion Barry Meets the iPhone Duo ★

Jay Peters, The Verge:

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display.

This crack problem doesn’t seem to be widespread, but it’s seemingly more than a handful.

MKBHD’s Duo Review ★

Marques Brownlee thinks the lack of Face ID will be the biggest gripe. I agree. And I love his central framing for the review: that the Duo is extremely polished around the edges (figuratively, but also true literally) but rough in the middle.

But he spends more time griping about third-party apps that haven’t been optimized for the Duo than most other reviews, because he oddly seems to personally rely on a lot of apps from shitty iOS developers, like Discord and Google Calendar. I get it, Google Calendar is very popular. So too is Discord — it’s #6 in the App Store today for the “social networking” category. And I get it, Brownlee splits his time across iOS and Android. But Google is a notoriously terrible iOS developer. Every time there’s a major hardware display transition on iPhones that requires developer support, most of Google’s apps are late. And whatever the reasons for Discord’s popularity, it’s sure as shit not the quality of its app.

The best apps for the Duo are the best apps for iOS generally: ones that are exclusively for iOS. (And Brownlee sings the praises of several of them, too, like Carrot Weather.)

Tim Pan’s iPhone Duo Review ★

I hadn’t heard of Tim Pan or Mediastorm until running across his 24-minute video review of the Duo. It’s a good and fair review, but what struck me are the rather astonishing production values. Amongst other things, they stress-tested the hinge with an industrial robot by opening/closing it 10,000 times. (That’s less than one-third the folds tested by Joanna Stern’s Hingey, but still.) It’s an incredible piece of work, especially given the one-week time constraint. English is Pan’s second language, and there’s an entire alternate version of the whole review, under the Mediastorm channel, in Chinese. It’s not just a different soundtrack — it’s an entirely separate cut of the video, where all his on-camera shots are spoken in Chinese.

At about 7:30 in the (English) review, Pan mentions that they (he?) offer every employee in the company a new iPhone each year. This year’s choices, by employee count:

iPhone 18 Pro: 17
iPhone 18 Pro Max: 41
iPhone Duo: 140

The point of this in the review was to show how strong demand is for the Duo amongst Pan’s company’s Chinese employees. But what struck me is that the company has 198 employees. (Last year, he says, 150 chose the 17 Pro or Pro Max; only 1 chose the Air.) Pan’s YouTube channel includes interviews with Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer. I never heard of him before but he obviously didn’t come out of nowhere. (Perhaps this is only a function of how little YouTube content I watch.)

Pan only launched his X account this week. He posted the entire review video there, too, and it’s got 187,000 likes and 6,700 comments. As a promotion to launch his X account, he’s giving away 100 iPhone 18 Pros. Even if they’re base models purchased somewhere without sales tax, that’s $120,000.

Remarkable.

Apple Built a Photo-Realistic Functional Original iPod for Apple Music’s 404 Page ★

It seems like this amazing Easter egg only launched yesterday, to celebrate the original iPod’s 25th anniversary. Exquisitely well done. More like this, please.

Chan Karunamuni on the Duo’s Open/Close Translucent Transition ★

Chan Karunamuni, human interface designer at Apple, on X:

iPhone Duo is here! Excited to have worked on the design of our open/close transition. It’s designed to make the two displays feel like one seamless experience by perceptually bending the focal plane, not the content, so that it feels like opening a window onto a singular view.

Karunamuni thanks a few engineers by name, which is always good (and for Apple employees, far too rare) to see.

Johnnie Manzari, HI designer formerly of Apple, now at Google DeepMind, retweeting Karunamuni:

The second I saw that transition I thought “here’s the next ‘change the whole industry’ design from Chan”.

Previous such raise-the-bar designs that Karunamuni led or played a major hand in include the Dynamic Island in 2022, the “shockwave moment” when you put two iPhones together to initiate AirDrop or NameDrop in 2023, and iOS 18’s cool-ass Flashlight beam UI in 2024. He also gave Steve Lemay this full-throated public endorsement upon his promotion to lead all of Apple HI design upon Alan Dye’s departure for Meta last December.