After years of watching Samsung, Google, Oppo and others experiment with foldable smartphones, Apple has finally entered the category with the iPhone Duo.
And naturally, Apple hasn’t exactly dipped its toes into the affordable end of the pool.
The iPhone Duo starts at ₹2,99,900 in India for 256GB of storage. The 512GB model climbs to ₹3,24,900, while the 1TB version costs ₹3,74,900. Go all the way to 2TB and you’re looking at an almost comical ₹4,49,900.
That’s used-car money. It’s also enough for a rather nice international holiday or a substantial home renovation.
Making matters worse, the Duo starts at $1,999 in the US, roughly ₹1.90 lakh at current exchange rates before applicable sales taxes. That leaves an enormous gap between the American and Indian sticker prices.
Still, there’s more to the Duo than an outrageous price tag. Apple’s first foldable packs some genuinely interesting hardware, and it looks like the company has spent its late arrival trying to iron out several traditional foldable compromises.
Apple has effectively given the Duo two different personalities.
Keep it folded and there’s a 5.4-inch Super Retina XDR outer display, which Apple says provides around 90% of the usable screen area of the iPhone 18 Pro. Unfold the device and a much larger 7.6-inch panel takes over.
Both displays support ProMotion, Always-On functionality and peak outdoor brightness of up to 3,000 nits.
The folding display is where Apple’s engineering flex becomes more apparent. There’s a nano-texture treatment designed to tackle reflections and make the crease less noticeable, while the display stack combines high-strength glass, custom adhesives, multiple layers and a titanium plate.
Then there’s the hinge, which alone comprises more than 100 individual components.
Apple has wrapped everything inside a Grade 5 titanium frame and somehow managed an IP68 rating, something particularly notable for a device with this many moving parts.
The Duo is also eSIM-only globally. Removing the physical SIM hardware gives Apple some precious extra room inside an already cramped foldable chassis.
Foldable or not, Apple isn’t treating the Duo as a performance downgrade.
It uses the same 2nm A20 Pro found inside the iPhone 18 Pro family, complete with a six-core CPU, seven-core GPU and Dual 16-core Neural Engine.
Apple has also fitted a custom vapour chamber for cooling and divided the battery between the two halves of the phone.
The company claims 24 hours of mixed use, while video playback is rated at 31 hours on the larger inner display and 44 hours when using the outer screen. Wired charging can apparently take the battery to 50% in around 20 minutes, with MagSafe and Qi2 doing it in approximately 30.
Cameras, however, are where the Duo differs considerably from Apple’s Pro flagships.
There’s a 48MP Fusion Main camera and a 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide, with the former providing a 2x optical-quality crop. There’s no elaborate Pro-style triple-camera arrangement here, which feels rather strange considering the Duo costs substantially more than an iPhone 18 Pro Max.
The fold itself does unlock some neat tricks, though. Duo Preview turns the outer display into a preview screen for your subject, while you can use the main cameras for higher-quality selfies. Smart Take can even recognise when everyone is posing and automatically capture the photograph.
Perhaps the biggest challenge Apple faced wasn’t building a folding iPhone. It was making iOS work properly on one.
iOS 27 has consequently been reworked specifically for the Duo.
Unfold it and two apps can finally run side by side on an iPhone. Users can create saved app pairs, launch multiple windows of the same application and seamlessly shift between the outer and inner displays.
Apple has even reconsidered familiar interface elements such as the Dock, Dynamic Island and status indicators for the larger canvas.
That software work might ultimately prove more important than the complicated hinge or titanium construction. Apple has had years to watch where other foldables work and where they become awkward.
At ₹2,99,900, none of this suddenly makes the iPhone Duo affordable. It remains an extraordinarily expensive smartphone, particularly in India.
But Apple clearly isn’t selling this as merely another iPhone with a folding screen. Between its display engineering, A20 Pro hardware and heavily redesigned software, the Duo represents Apple’s attempt to rethink the iPhone around an entirely different form factor.
Whether that rethink is worth ₹3 lakh is another matter.