Duo dollars a day, Duo cents an unlock

An Office Hours discussion, September 11, 2026.

Q: The Duo starts at $2,000. How should people think about that price?

I published this idea that the pricing of the product is about a dollar ninety a day at the starting point of the Duo. Let's round up to two, once you factor in taxes and whatnot. So you end up at two dollars a day, and that's about twice the historical average for the iPhone, or even the average Apple product. The median Apple product is a dollar a day. You can go and check this out: go to store.apple.com, price the product, and see what the lease price is. It'll be approximately $58 per month. Divide that by 365 over twelve and that gets you the daily price. I've done this for all the iPhone configurations, and for other products when they announced Apple Upgrade. Whenever someone says this is going to cost me my mortgage payment, that they can't afford it: you have the option to pay on a monthly basis, and it comes to two dollars a day.

And here's the killer: it's in use four hours a day. Maybe, because of the fold, it's going to be in use more, because people will find jobs to do with it. Entertainment is a huge time sink. People will sit and watch more video, not just short form but long form. Short is easy, that's swiping. Long form: open it up, start watching a movie. Much more comfortable on this device. Then you start to add up the hours and the number of interactions. The average number of unlocks of an iPhone was 80 many years ago. It's possible we're now at a hundred unlocks a day. So two dollars divided by a hundred unlocks is two cents every time you use the phone. If it gets more use, it becomes even cheaper.

I think people intuitively know this is the most useful product they own. It's the one they can't leave the house without. It's the one they panic over if they can't find it. I use my Watch to find my phone every other day. It's so important that you can't be without it for more than a few minutes, and you think about safety all the time: if I don't have my phone, I'm unsafe. If it's that important, two dollars a day. And by the way, the median across all the iPhone variants is a dollar forty right now. You can buy a used one for much less: a used iPhone 15 for $400 or $350, no problem. Even if it only lasts two years, that's less than 50 cents a day. The value is unbelievable.

Q: I did a similar calculation of cost versus daily use across everything I own. The cheapest per hour turned out to be the bed. The smartphone was second.

The bed goes with the house. That's the difference: the phone is always with you, even when you're not at home. I did this for cars, and cars are the worst. A luxury car that depreciates quickly could be over fifty dollars a day. The cost per mile is fifty to sixty cents nowadays, maybe seventy-five with inflation. I don't question the bed. You're in it for so long, and you should invest in a good mattress. I'm pointing out that the bigger objects in your life, washing machines or refrigerators, are super important and very low per unit. What I'm trying to convey is that there are things in life that are underpriced, in a way, because we use them much more than we think. And other times we're spending way too much. Cars are much too expensive for what they deliver. You spend one hour a day in a car and yet you spend tens of thousands for one.

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One of the questions asked in Asymco Office Hours. The full recording and transcript are available to Asymco One subscribers.

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