The iPhone Duo: theater, not specs

An Office Hours question asked by Fred S., September 11, 2026.

Q: One theme about the iPhone Duo seems underreported: pleasure, prestige, the pride of ownership. It's always been there with Apple products, but being the first to get a foldable, after everyone's been talking about it for so long, might be a bigger driver than the practical aspects. Do you agree?

Absolutely. The skeptics are the ones who haven't been able to be there, and seeing is believing. I called it having a sense of theater about it. It took what was a two-dimensional experience into three dimensions. As the demos show, it's always in motion. It's not just opening it as a book, though even the book nature of it matters. It can be held at a slightly open angle to resemble a book. It will be an alarm clock, a television, a keyboard and screen, and with the Apple Pencil it will be a notebook. The configurations they've demonstrated suggest that it has a presence, a satisfaction you get from using it in a tactile way. It is not a simple sheet of glass. That has its own attraction; we've always been sold on the thing as a piece of glass. But now it's suddenly an origami, a moving object.

I'll give my own story. When I was at Nokia we believed in the so-called monoblock, a single phone that didn't have any moving parts, for many practical reasons. It was more durable. It had a longer battery, because you could put a big battery in it. It was cheaper to manufacture. And yet, at the same time, in the US and in Japan the flip phone was catching on big. Everyone in Finland was scratching their heads and asking why anybody would do this, as a user or as a builder of phones. One of the things people argued with us about was that there's a sense of action when you open and answer, and a sense of closure when you end the call by closing the phone. In Japan they had antennas that pulled out, so you opened it and had all these activities you would do to initiate a call. It's not just for the person doing it, but for the person watching. There are all kinds of secondary and tertiary effects to this form and the way it feels.

On top of that, I think there's an element of attraction that, without saying it's only women, I think women are going to feel more: that this is more stylish. My wife has a case that opens this way, because she likes to put cards in it, and she likes the physical cover because the phone sits in a purse. There are all these reasons why you want a folding form factor. We don't think logically about this. We think this is a waste of energy, a waste of time, but it's extremely important to understand. I haven't seen the research or the data. Perhaps no one has; perhaps it's all secret. But I think Apple has seen what people do with things that move.

Remember, even Jony Ive said people like to fidget. If you have a pen, you're always clicking it. If you have a pen where you can select different colors of ink, you're always messing with it. Physically moving objects have a natural attraction. The folding competitors may have known this already, but Apple just didn't think the technology or the quality was there until now. Apple doesn't do it just because you can. It only does it when it can meet their criteria to be sufficiently good.

So the product is going to be a big hit, even though it's a niche, and many people, maybe most, would argue they don't need it. It'll be a bigger hit than we anticipate. Initially the market reaction was very muted. The stock closed flat. But since then it's risen quite a bit, and on the second and third day we've seen the realization, also by the media who were out there, that this has resonance with audiences. It's not about specs. It never is, with Apple, but in this case in particular there's a mystery to it, a mystery as to why it's going to be successful, and a charm. I always said Apple really sells hormones. Here we have people who are going to have the flushed cheeks and the dilated pupils, an emotional, hormonal response. And if you see another person with it, it's going to be contagious. This is why stores exist. The Apple Store exists precisely for this product. Steve even said the Apple Store exists for the Watch, because once you see it and touch it, you'll be persuaded. Once people see it in the stores, it'll be a huge driver.

Q (follow-up): In jobs-to-be-done theory there are three hotspots: emotional, social and functional. You've covered the first two. On the functional side, anyone who uses an iPad regularly and has an iPhone is going to want one of these. It replaces the iPad mini and gives the iPad a pocket.

A lot of people are going to discuss the utility. I've been reading many comments since the event, and people are discussing exactly this: pencil use, could I replace my iPad, what size is it, all the possible measurements. The whole point I'm making is to work at another level, away from utility, which gets less coverage because it is so much harder to talk about. The decisions to buy it are much more emotional than rational, because frankly that's how it came across to me. It's a product of dazzling dimensions of attraction, not just utility. I bring up metaphors: high heels, fashion, jewelry. Why do people buy jewelry at all? It's extremely non-functional, but it signals between people. Especially as a gift, it signals love, it signals desire, and people like to receive those symbols. Why do we not think this should apply to devices that happen to do other things as well, especially highly utilitarian things?

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