iPhone Duo

Yes, those are the loose parts. They still have to be assembled correctly for everything to work as expected and every app does it a bit differently (there is effectively no endorsed "correct" way to assemble them). This means that Google cannot extend them with new functionality later without breaking some if not most usages of those parts in the future.

Compare that to UITabController in UIKit, which has been present since very early on and got extended recently. If the dev adopts iOS 18 revisions, configuring that single view controller gets you more or less correct presentation and navigation across all sizes and orientations of normal iPhone, iPad, desktop, and now iPhone Duo and implementation is close to identical between apps.

> …and then complain about Android that literally had to pave the way and today works on phones that can unfold three times, phones like the galaxy Z Flip that have instead half screens, etc.

That's fair, but users can't reasonably expect any kind of meaningful adoption of new oddball form factors like that until the platform vendor (Google) rolls out standardized APIs to streamline the process (which Google has partially done, but won't commit to a unified solution for).

> Apple will tell you they can't back port dynamic islands on last year's release, while latest Compose is happily running on devices from 10 years ago.

That is an advantage, but iOS users tend to stay much more up to date so it's something of a moot point. The userbase of versions just three major releases behind is typically below 5% and anything older is fractional at best, so unless you're a Google-scale giant you're probably fine only supporting the newest 2-3 versions of iOS. That's pretty nice since I don't need to keep a drawer full of prehistoric phones running ancient versions of Android to test adequately (so I don't find out about some weird behavior that only occurs under Android 11 in prod)…

Google seems extremely reticent to have anything resembling strong opinions in Android’s API design and so there are still many corners in which well-supported, fully fleshed out “correct” options are absent.

In theory the client can do literally anything (for example, someone could be using an ancient version or have some features voluntarily disabled) and you have to decide which things you're going to handle

This is ignoring the fact that developers who choose these cross-platform frameworks don't seem to care much about quality and general polish.

It actually comes right from Apple. Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple employee, has claimed it was originally said in 1981 by another employee, Bud Tribble, to describe Steve Jobs. It was supposedly a reference to Star Trek.

Hard disagree. It was a great phone. The only disadvantage was battery life, if you were a heavy phone user you needed to charge it to get through the day, but as a phone itself (phoning/messaging people) it was delightful!

Look at the clip here of Steve scrolling through contacts like it is butter and the awe of the audience: On other phones large contact lists were cumbersome.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9kahkr/11_years_ago_...

Than visual voicemail! On other phones you called into voicemail and had to hear sequentially through all. With At&t Apple had the unique feature that one can scroll selectively through voice mails.

Of course the second iPhone 3G with the wjooshing sounding light saber app and the app were a beer is poured out made it cultural viral. And then Apple noticed withe the 4/4S that a good camera in your pocket was THE must have killer feature (especially for the women and newborn parent demographics). But the first model was a great tool for just phoning people.

No, it was the touchscreen and new UI paradigms.

The area where all the other existing foldable phones are dead in the water is the OS software integration with the hardware and unlike the first time around, they are competing with Apple that has four other ecosystems that can interface with the new phone seamlessly.

And more importantly, all the developers who bothered to follow most of the rules will have most of their stuff running on that new phone on day one.

That's 800 Euro less and Samsung will mostly decrease prices further while Apple will barely.

The screen real estate is bigger than the numbers indicate, as the more square a display is, the larger its area is compared to its diagonal.

For iOS 27, apps are automatically automatically opted in to resizability. Apple was clear at WWDC that apps need to dynamically adjust to any available scene size at runtime, not just for iPhone Duo, but also for iPad windowing and iPhone Mirroring on Mac. There may be a grace period, but Apple hasn't shared one AFAIK.

I'm not trying to discount the efforts involved here, just pointing out that they aren't starting from scratch. And much of the required features to support a dual-screen (triple-?) phone has been in the works for a while.

Apple employees get to claim very little ownership over their work (even in the context of a large tech company), so having all those speaker slots is one way they can provide that ego boost that is so crucial for long term employee morale & retention

You see it a lot on YouTube videos where people are talking to the camera and they're waving their hands around all over the place and pointing for no discernible reason. It doesn't change the information they're presenting, nor does it add to it. In fact, it just distracts you with someone waving their hands around.

So the same applies to presentations from a company. If you watched two people talking in a park, you wouldn't see this many gestures.

Of course, these days a three or four or more year old phone is often still perfectly usable even for a tech enthusiast.

I'm still rocking my iPhone 12 mini but am planning on getting an 18 when the normal one is released :-)

People have been leasing and renting phones since the 1930's. I guess you missed out on the Ma Bell century.

I just buy more shares of blue chip companies and let them pay in the future for anything I want to buy.

No problem buying it either, though it’s about 2x the price of letter. (I go through about 100-200 sheets per year mostly due to my daughter drawing on it.)

I don’t actually store any printed paper since anything gets scanned and shredded, so no comment on long term filing.

(Due to this experience I recently partially switched to B5 paper, which is a nice size compromise instead of A5 which would be too small. Anything A4 will print to it without scaling issues of course, just takes up a bit less space.)

Speaking of which, when will it be in the stores to play with?

If someone truly can't tolerate their phone screen being in any way perceptibly different from a single flat pane of glass, then they shouldn't buy foldables. It's something you have to get used to or ignore, with any brand. Especially over time as you bend and unbend the phone repeatedly and the crease deepens.

Apple doesn’t need astroturfing; their fans do it for them.

That's every year since it's introduction

They let other tech companies break the ground, release something new and truly innovative and unique -- say a folding phone (it's basically a solidified meme amongst the IT crowd now - "Oh Apple will get all of samsungs features from 2 years ago finally!" -- not realizing that this is intentional), and they will let them front all the risk of whether or not it has staying power -- then they will come in and innovate at the margins and bring it into the Apple ecosystem, which is an advantage in of itself at this point.

Maybe the C suite doesn't understand how bad their current talks are.

Playing it safe with media-trained MBA-centric thinking to avoid volatility works on one level if that's the KPI you're monitoring but it doesn't track the invisible damage done to the brand. Apple is at real risk of becoming a stagnant, Microsoft-like behemoth to the very users that made it cool and that can turn into an exodus that pummels the stock by more than 5-15% for a few weeks and would be much harder to fix.

Ternus hasn't impressed me so far - he's a safe choice and the iPhone Duo is a safe level of innovation alongside the predictable spec bumps to the regular phones and watches. Macbook Neo devalued the brand permanently despite its popularity it kills hardware margins and shows Apple is looking to move all its customers to recurring revenue models using the cloud such that low margin hardware is no longer a problem as it provides a ramp for more customers to the cloud. However that model is now being pushed by Apple like cocaine yet the tech-savvy creatives and heavy weight tech users want something not that. Apple's success or failure medium to long term depends on them not losing relevance to those demographics or the brand value will drop way way way more than 15% for way longer.

I'd say a big part of the problem too is the culture that developed at Apple after they moved into their new Giant Ivory Sphincter HQ building. It's isolated the company from users and allows their internal culture to disconnect from the real world. Such a shame as the HQ could have really been awesome.

Don't charge me 2000-3800$ and insult my intelligence with stuff like this

Many office workers gets some MacBook and iPhone by their employees. Do they actually need both if the employer can just hand them something like a duo which transforms to a desktop computer via usb-c cable?

Ive said for years there is nothing technical hindering an iPhone to become a something that looks like macOS when connected to large display, its just ui transformation.

But then, apple can't sell you an iPhone, an iPad and a MacBook. This is why they don't go this route I think, and this is maybe the hinder that something like the iPhone duo won't reach the full potential it could have.

We can't mention that?

Obviously, if you have macbooks of different sizes, you would need to buy separate duos for each size. MacBook Air might have a 27" dock, incompatible with the rest.

On page 52 (57 of the PDF), there’s a letter dated December 18th 1978 (Carter administration, not Reagan) from the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing adopting 8.5”x11”, effective January 1st 1980 so departments & agencies could use up their 8.5”x10.5” stock.

I also found this article from Time from January 15th 1979 that this was actually slightly cheaper despite using more paper: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0%2C33009%2...

The government adopted 8.5”x10.5” to save money back in 1921 vs what was already the industry standard of 8.5”x11”, but this ended up backfiring and a General Services Administration report in 1972 recommended switching to 8.5”x11” would reduce by 5% the amount of times a secretary would need a second page. The Joint Committee of Printing estimated this change would save several million dollars.

> On hearing the news, one straight-faced bureaucrat in the Government Printing Office said of his colleagues' reaction to the news: "Some people think that this issue has been inadequately studied."

Apparently the American Forest & Paper Association is under the impression that it was the Reagan administration’s proclamation:

> Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120220192919/http://www.afandp...

I still think the broader point of there being design reasons to hit these ratios stands and is great. I just think the idea that it needed to be precisely twice the width so apps can fit full-sized doesn't hold too much because there isn't really a "full size" notion. Or if there is, the full-size is probably the double width one. If it wasn't exactly twice the width, most apps are already built to fit into varying iPhone/mobile screen widths.

    H/W = W/(H/2)       (halving long side H and flipping maintains aspect ratio)
        = 2W/H          (multiply numerator and denominator by 2)
    H²  = 2W²           (multiply both sides by HW)
    H   = √2·W ≈ 1.41 W (take the positive square root; H, W > 0)

If I were to guess, this does look like a new ratio to support, but at least it's just 1 instead of 2.

Speak to a carpenter or construction worker from any country with the metric system. Measure anything by simple powers of ten and simple decimal shifts makes life so much easier. Quick, what is half of a yard-length beam less 12 1/16"?

All scientific and engineering use should probably eschew the customary measurements, even in the news. For example, in aviation, they use °C now unless your airplane is very old. Unfortunately, in the US we still use inches of mercury for pressure, both knots and MPH but never km/h or m/s, etc.

Apple can force developers to use APIs that make the apps work correctly on the foldable even if they are not directly optimized.

2. Receipts: https://postimg.cc/8sDTTT0W

I think this was a first year project, and a small correction: mine want quite the same aspect ratio.

A whole market of 1990s/2000s folding devices in similar categories, clamshells, PDAs, microPCs, palmtops, subnotebooks, handheld PCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_PC

The word "refined" is doing a lot of work here. Just a few examples:

- The iMac had a design unlike any desktop computer before it.

- While a couple products had come before it, AirPort was the first affordable, mass-market consumer Wi-Fi router.

- The iPod was the first MP3 player to incorporate the then brand new 1.8" Toshiba hard drives that enabled it to have for the time incredible capacity for the package size. And Apple innovated with the click-wheel user interface.

All three of these products most people would see as much more than "refinements" but actually big innovations compared to what was already available in the market.

And I agree that work is probably not the main use case for this for most people. It's really just a convenient way to have a tablet with you at all times. There are certainly times I wish my phone had a bigger screen.

I'm sure most of us on HN use them for leisure, but for most people a computer is a device for work, not for play.