Apple spent years developing iPhone Duo behind closed doors, and company executives have now offered more insight into both the secrecy surrounding the project and the $1,999 starting price of Apple’s first foldable iPhone.
Speaking after this week’s unveiling, Apple executives described iPhone Duo as a long-running engineering project that required the company to rethink familiar parts of the iPhone. The finished device combines an outer display with a larger folding screen while remaining thin enough to work as an everyday phone.
The company also managed to keep much of the final product under wraps until relatively late in development, despite years of broader rumors that Apple was experimenting with foldable hardware.
Apple says iPhone Duo is a premium product
The $1,999 starting price makes iPhone Duo one of the most expensive iPhones Apple has ever sold. Apple has positioned that price around the complexity of the hardware rather than treating Duo as a replacement for the conventional iPhone lineup.
The folding display, hinge and internal packaging all introduce engineering requirements that do not exist to the same degree on an iPhone 18 Pro. Apple also made several deliberate compromises to achieve the final design, including using Touch ID rather than Face ID and omitting a dedicated telephoto camera.
Those choices underline that the first-generation Duo is not simply an iPhone 18 Pro that folds. It is a separate branch of the lineup aimed at buyers who value the larger folding display enough to accept a different balance of features.
Apple will begin taking iPhone Duo pre-orders on October 16, with availability beginning October 23. That gives the company a separate launch window from iPhone 18 Pro, which reaches customers in September.
As reported by MacRumors, Apple executives have discussed the development process, secrecy and thinking behind the product’s premium price following its unveiling.