iPhone Duo is the epitome of new Apple

Two-in-one, best of both.

Apple is starting the fiscal year off with a bang, releasing both new product categories and raising prices everywhere. It is not a great situation to be starting your CEO tenure at one of the biggest corporations in the world with, and yet, John Ternus is still coming out on top.

At Apple's Surprise and Shine event, Tim Cook handed the reins of the company over to John Ternus, who started with a Steve Jobs-like spiel about an intelligent personal hub, with features to make it up. It felt eerily similar to the way that Jobs introduced iPhone originally. Jobs said that Apple would announce a phone, touchscreen iPod, and internet communicator, when in reality, it was one device: iPhone. Ternus instead said that a personal AI hub would have great battery life, powerful processing, a great display, and more. This led into the announcement of the new and improved iPhone 18 Pro.

iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max look to be incremental upgrades over their predecessors, but there is a lot more under the hood. Upgrades to processing power with A20 Pro bring quicker performance and a refinement of what we saw with iPhone 17 Pro.

New silicon-carbon batteries allow Apple to use the same space as before with iPhone 17 Pro but increase capacity significantly. The new composition of the batteries is more efficient and increases capacity in a small space. While the increase day-to-day will not be groundbreaking, it will still surprise just about all of us.

The biggest update for iPhone 18 Pro is with the cameras. They now have a variable aperture on the main camera to better control how much light is being let in. This is a major step towards pro camera quality, and they even brought in new controls in addition in the Camera app. It has 4 stops, but that is better than a static aperture, and it seems like it is once again, a maturing and refining of the camera system on iPhone.

Then Apple moved onto Apple Watch (yup, no base iPhone 18! You'll have to wait until the spring for that), introducing Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. These updates are particularly necessary because of the mass purging of Apple Watch models from the new and improved watchOS 27. Watches up to Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Ultra 1 were removed from support this year, so new updates to the Watch lineup are needed.

As with every year, the Apple Watches got new sensors to more deeply understand your health and wellbeing. Apple touts that Series 12 delivers "the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable," which is a lofty claim to live up to, but one that Apple could. Rather than adding radically new features to the sensors on Apple Watch, it is clear that Apple spent time refining what we already had with existing Apple Watches to get them to be even more accurate.

I support the move, as Apple Watch already surveyed great amounts of data, often more than the average person needs. But ensuring that the data is trustworthy enough to see a specialist for issues found on Apple Watch is the most important factor. If Apple is able to live up to these claims, it could usher in a new era of health support and trustworthy tracking on Apple Watch.

Following the Apple Watches was Apple's classic "One more thing" moment, a first for Ternus in his new position. Ternus opened by continuing on the personal intelligent hub idea he mentioned earlier, and how this final product would be the hub people were looking for. Out comes iPhone Duo.

Up to this point, it's clear that the new pacing of Apple is one that adds a more whimsical and experimental expression to the mix. It still maintains the Apple polish that we know and expect, but even when the new updates were just refinements to older products, they still contained a vibe of magic and awe. It was bringing back the classic feeling of needing the new iPhone, not simply because it is an iPhone or because of the features, but because of the idea behind it.

The Steve Jobs era of Apple was so magical because with each product release it really felt like the whole world stopped to listen. It felt like idea of the product was reinvented with each new release and there was an unspoken love of how it was made. It was special, selective, and second to none.

John Ternus, being the product guy that he is, clearly brings that energy back. For a while, Apple has felt stale to a lot of people, myself included, because of it's lack of effort, seemingly. Every move was a safe bet, up until the MacBook Neo. This radical change of pace for Apple (introducing a budget laptop) clearly worked, and proved to Apple to keep going.

iPhone Duo looks to be the new idea of a phone or personal hub that Ternus was describing. The software looks magical and genuinely new, and it looks fundamentally different from anything we had seen before. The general look and feel of moving everything to the right hand side is not something Apple has done in the past, and that subtle difference causes the entire device to feel different. The open animation also looks stunning, combining the aspects of the physical with the digital.

The processor, A20 Pro, is the same as iPhone 18 Pro, and it looks to be a step up from last year. This device will need all the power it can get for AI and animation smoothness. Because of the increase in space (somewhat), the phone now has 2 batteries, which should offer all day battery life, so Apple says. It is hard to tell if this is true, but it certainly has the potential to wow.

It is clear that with this folding display, Apple wanted it to feel like the iPad, a magic sheet of glass. With such small bezels and an under display camera, along with the thinness, iPhone Duo is very close to this vision. It looks stunning, and the crease doesn't look visible because of the hardware tricks (carbon fiber plating, matte, nano-texture display coating) that Apple has implemented alongside the software improvements. Plus, we are getting Apple Pencil (USB-C) support for the first time on iPhone later this year on the Duo on both the front and inside screens! Big win there.

As Marques Brownlee says in his first impressions, the operating system looks to be "iOS plus," as in iOS with a "little sauce" on top. The split screen looks great (very iPad-like) and the UI tricks are very cool. It is hard to say what state the software will be in when it comes out, as the device doesn't even go on sale for pre-orders until early October, but I can imagine it will still be polished.

The cameras look interesting but not groundbreaking. Unlike the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone Duo does not have variable aperture, and it seems like the back camera quality is pretty good. Because of the thinness, it will not be on par with the iPhone 18 Pro, but it will still be good nonetheless.

The more worrying piece of camera news is the under-display camera on the inside of the screen. Apple has done a great job at hiding the camera when it is not in use, but that doesn't mean the camera quality is that great. As with any under-display camera, it is pretty fine, but not great.

Overall, iPhone Duo looks like a major step forward for Apple. The magic of Apple is not nearly what it once was with Steve Jobs, but it is evolved and matured in a way that brings light back to a more conserved, safe-bet company. We will have to wait and see what Apple does soon.