Engadget urges Apple to scale the Duo's hinge into a flip phone and a folding iPad

Half as much as a large folding phone, applied to the Duo's $1,999, is about $1,000 ^[13]. $1,000 is ordinary flagship money. It is also the commercial argument for a flip, because at that price the folding phone competes with a normal one instead of sitting a tier above it. Engadget's column puts the small-foldable category at six years old and says those phones typically cost half what large folding smartphones do, and in many cases less ^[4].

The column's evidence for who owns them is a sighting count. The writer said he has anecdotally noticed many non-technical smartphone users carrying the Z Flip or Moto Razr, while he rarely sees the Z Fold in the hands of non-techies ^[5]. Sightings tell you which device is in a hand. The column does not include retention or usage figures for either shape.

For an app team the two hypothetical devices are two different pieces of work. Engadget's flip needs a small external display for glancing at notifications and handling basic tasks such as taking a selfie with the rear cameras ^[6]. That display is a control surface a few inches across, and supporting it means picking the one thing your app does while the phone is shut. The folding iPad in the same column is the other problem entirely: a YouTube video on the top half while the user moves between Slack and hand-written notes on the bottom ^[10]. ASUS and Lenovo both built their folding tablets on 16.3-inch OLED panels and both build for Windows ^[7].

The column is candid about the tablet's odds. "Figuring out the intricacies of a foldable iPad would likely take Apple years, and truthfully, there's not a huge demand for something like that just yet," it says ^[9]. The same piece argues that scaling smaller and larger should now be easier, because Apple has shown it can build an ultra-thin device around a sturdy hinge ^[15]. Both can be true at once. Apple's answer to the Galaxy Z Fold took nearly seven years by the column's count ^[3].

Any second-layout proposal has to clear two tests: the geometry exists in a device you can buy and test on, and folding changes what the user can do, not just where the controls sit. The Duo clears the first today. An iPhone Flip and a folding iPad fail both. Engadget builds its case on rival hardware and the author's own preference, and describes next year's 20th-anniversary iPhone redesign as rumored ^[12]. For most teams the work already done for the Duo is the ceiling until there is a second Apple hinge to test against, at a price other than $1,999 ^[1].