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Nilay Patel
Editor-in-Chief; Host of Decoder and The Vergecast, The Verge

How we really feel about the iPhone Duo

📅 Oct 21, 2026 The Verge 65 MIN 19024 VIEWS 410 SEGMENTS · 4 SPEAKERS
iPhone Duo reviews are out today and... it's complicated. David Pierce, Nilay Patel and senior smart phone reviewer Allison Johnson talk through The Verge's review and answer your questions LIVE. Watch our iPhone Duo review here:    • iPhone Duo review (emotional)   Subscribe to The Verge: https://bit.ly/3FT6n5S Watch The Vergecast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/40RFRkg The Vergecast Podcast: https://bit.ly/3WQDexZ Decoder with Nilay Patel: http://apple.co/3v29nDc More about our podcasts: https://www.theverge.com/podcasts Read More: http://www.theverge.com Community guidelines: http://bit.ly...

What Nilay Patel said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Nilay Patel, reviewing the iPhone Duo with Allison Johnson and David Pierce, argued that Apple made the wrong trade-off on the outer display, which he found too small and heavy, leading him to keep the phone open constantly. He criticized the app ecosystem as 'vibe coded,' with many apps merely filling the screen without thoughtful redesign, and noted that Apple chose not to leverage the iPad's ecosystem, predicting the Duo and iPad will converge within two to three years. Patel highlighted hidden settings he found problematic, such as the Touch ID delay and auto-reorienting volume buttons. He discussed the camera downgrades, the $2,000 price, and the phone's early-adopter nature, saying most people should not buy it today. He also mentioned Bill Gates showing him a trifold phone and speculated that Apple might address structural issues by the iPhone's 20th anniversary next year.

Key takeaways

  1. Patel believes the Duo's outer display is too small and heavy, making the phone's trade-off wrong.
  2. He predicts the Duo and iPad will converge within two to three years, as the Duo wants to be an iPad.
  3. Patel criticized app updates as 'vibe coded,' with many apps not thoughtfully redesigned for the Duo.
  4. He noted the camera quality is several generations behind, a tough trade on a $2,000 phone.
  5. Patel said most people should not buy the Duo today, calling it a first-generation early-adopter device.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$2,000 Starting price of the iPhone Duo price 1:04:37
20th anniversary Next year marks the iPhone's 20th anniversary timeline 51:26
$3,500 Price of the Vision Pro, used as a comparison price 50:05

Chapters

  1. 0:00Reviewer expectations and initial reactions
  2. 4:03Outer display size and weight trade-offs
  3. 11:41App optimization and 'vibe coded' updates
  4. 17:25Comparison with iPad and future convergence
  5. 22:56Hidden settings and case design issues
  6. 34:32Camera quality and trade-offs
  7. 44:35Multitasking and picture-in-picture limitations
  8. 1:02:10Price and purchase recommendations
Unknown 0:18 ↗
Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat.
David Pierce 1:01 ↗
Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of nose typing. Everybody's doing it. It's the new revolutionary input mechanism for the iPod, the iPhone. I'm your friend David Pierce. I am here in the studio with two iPhone Duos and two iPhone Duo reviewers, Nilay Patel and Allison Johnson. Welcome, friends.
Allison Johnson 1:20 ↗
Hello. Nice to meet you.
Nilay Patel 1:21 ↗
Hello, David.
David Pierce 1:23 ↗
Nilay has become a nightmare in the course of reviewing phones.
Nilay Patel 1:27 ↗
So little.
David Pierce 1:28 ↗
It's good. It's going to be great. So the reviews are out. It's been a big day full of reviews. I'm actually curious. You've both reviewed a lot of phones over the years, and I think it's been a while, at least for me, since I've had so little idea what a bunch of reviewers were going to say going in. And I know one of the things as a reviewer that's weird is like, what if I'm the only one who shares this opinion? Has this been a weird thing over the last week or so? Like, new phone, big new ideas — what if I'm the only one who feels the way that I do?
Allison Johnson 1:56 ↗
I think so. I mean, and a foldable phone is so variable in how people are going to use it, how much you use the inner screen, what kinds of things you do that work on the inner screen. So, yeah, it was a real kind of wild card waking up this morning being like, 'Oh, what did everyone else think?' Yeah, we are lucky because we were talking to each other.
David Pierce 2:16 ↗
True.
Nilay Patel 2:17 ↗
Yeah. So, at least I knew we weren't nuts. Yeah. Like I had that one locked down.
Allison Johnson 2:22 ↗
A little bit of sanity check is helpful.
Nilay Patel 2:23 ↗
We're nuts in the right way. Yeah. You know, it's like we have the same angle as like five other reviewers. Like we have the same angle as Joanna. We have almost the same thumbnail and headline as Marquez. So I promise you we did not coordinate that. Yeah. Although I will say the A/B testing chose against me. The two headlines we chose were like the standard one, like 'messy, expensive,' whatever that headline is, whatever set of words, and then my preferred one, which was 'iPhone Duo review: emotional.'
David Pierce 2:50 ↗
I think the problem was it didn't say emotional in all caps.
Nilay Patel 2:54 ↗
That's the real problem.
David Pierce 2:56 ↗
You sobbing in the thumbnail, that...
Nilay Patel 2:58 ↗
Our head of video Kevin was like, 'But you're not emotional enough.' And I was like, 'This is as emotional as I get.'
Allison Johnson 3:03 ↗
It's a first generation product.
Nilay Patel 3:05 ↗
It would have done numbers, I'm just saying. But like everyone had that same, 'Oh, this is a really fun thing to play with.'
Allison Johnson 3:13 ↗
You should wait.
Nilay Patel 3:15 ↗
And that seems down the line where things are different, and because it's affordable and it's really — it's like how you use it is just going to change the experience. I got drastically worse battery life than everyone else.
David Pierce 3:28 ↗
Oh, interesting.
Nilay Patel 3:28 ↗
And I think it's because I had it open all the time.
David Pierce 3:31 ↗
Yeah. I mean, that a, makes logical sense, and b, is sort of a weird cautionary tale about this thing, that it's like more than most, like how you use it physically will change the experience of the battery all day. But neither of you got what I would call like good battery life, which is kind of a bummer.
Nilay Patel 3:48 ↗
Yeah. Not for a brand new iPhone out of the box, you know, like Pro Max style. No.
Allison Johnson 3:54 ↗
Yeah. But if you look at Marquez or you look at David ML, they're like, 'We love the battery life on this thing.'
Nilay Patel 4:00 ↗
Incredible, impressive in real life. I'm like, 'You had it closed.'
David Pierce 4:03 ↗
I know what happened here. You used a little bitty phone. It's the open versus closed that we most need to talk about. This has been like the number one thing on everybody's minds. It's the main thing everybody's reckoning with in all of these reviews. And I think the first question you are confronted by the minute you pick up this thing and hold it is, is this thing the right size? And I actually feel like you two might slightly differ on this one, so I want to dig into this. They went with the passport, the passport size. We're doing the wide fold thing. It's like almost the size of the Samsung Z Fold 8, which everybody has really liked. Allison, what do you make of the actual size and shape of this thing? Did Apple do this correctly?
Allison Johnson 4:39 ↗
I think I'm on board with the Passport shape now. Like I, like everybody else, you know, earlier this year we started seeing like renders of these, and it was like, 'That looks goofy. That looks like a goofy phone.' And then you pick it up and you're like, 'No, actually this makes a lot of sense. It's pretty nice.' So I'm on board with that.
David Pierce 4:58 ↗
That was everyone's reaction to the Z Fold 8, by the way. Like it was the funniest thing. Everybody was like, 'That seems kind of...' And then you hold it, it's like, 'Oh, you really do go through the stages of grief or something.'
Allison Johnson 5:08 ↗
So I'm on board with that. This phone in particular is heavy, and it's a little thicker than the Z Fold 8.
Nilay Patel 5:16 ↗
It is heavy.
Allison Johnson 5:17 ↗
Like, it looks heavy, so it doesn't sort of read as heavy when you pick up, but it is.
Nilay Patel 5:21 ↗
This is a light, thin tablet. I guess you close it, you're like, 'This is heavy. It's a heavy phone.' Yeah, I got a lot of questions from the iPhone mini crew. Shout out to my people. You know, is this like — it's a small screen phone, and it is not — I can't say that enough or loud enough. It is a heavy phone with a tiny screen.
Allison Johnson 5:47 ↗
There was definitely a contingent of iPhone mini fans who were like, 'Maybe I can get everything I want out of this phone.' And like, I'm so sorry to tell all of you.
Nilay Patel 5:54 ↗
The world has left you behind. Not a little bit. No. I'm so sorry, my people. We can't. No. The app ecosystem has left you behind. It is a heavy phone, and Apple definitely had to make some sort of trade-off between size and weight. Yeah. It's too small.
David Pierce 6:07 ↗
And yeah, your argument is they made the wrong trade-off.
Nilay Patel 6:09 ↗
They made the wrong trade-off. I don't think this outer screen is useful enough. And that means — this is why I had it open all the time. I was constantly like, 'Well, I can't read this whole email, so I'm going to open the phone.'
David Pierce 6:20 ↗
Would you stretch it in both dimensions? Wider and taller?
Nilay Patel 6:24 ↗
I think.
David Pierce 6:24 ↗
Because now we got a big ass phone. It's like, this is the problem. This is about as big as you can get before, at some point, in some orientation, you're going to be like, 'This thing is preposterous.'
Nilay Patel 6:35 ↗
Apple's very proud of the aspect ratio and the fact that it's like a piece of A4 paper, and it opens and it's exactly the same. And all of this is very clever, and in practical reality, the cleverness of the aspect ratios matching does not overcome the uselessness of the outer display. And I say useless, that's like too mean. You can use it. I've been using the phone. But if you are used to a portrait phone running big portrait phone apps, you're like, 'Well, this is pretty tiny and not very...'
David Pierce 7:05 ↗
The shot in the review video that got me was the Messages app, where you open up the Messages app, it pops up the keyboard and the Chrome at the top, and you can see a text. There's one text in view, and it's like, okay, this just isn't enough space.
Nilay Patel 7:17 ↗
Yeah. And we had a question in our AMA that was like, here's this long list of things I want to do, and you can separate them into two categories. And one is anything you're doing where you do an input. Can I make a quick note? Can I reply to a text? Can I change a setting? All that's fine on this display. The keyboard is a fine size, and you're like, make a note, send a text. Anything where you need to read and react or consume any information, you're like, this screen is too small.
Allison Johnson 7:43 ↗
Especially if you're trying to do that interactively, right? So it's two Slack messages. It's I want to leave a comment on a Google doc, which is a thing that we wanted to do all week.
Nilay Patel 7:52 ↗
Not happening on this display. So then you open it, and now you're like, I'm holding a tablet with two hands, and I'm having that whole experience. And this tablet is not an iPad, which is the single biggest thing I think everyone needs to understand about this. Apple looked at the iPad and said, 'No.'
David Pierce 8:06 ↗
Which brings me to a game we're going to play later on in this episode called, 'Should this have been an iPad?'
Allison Johnson 8:12 ↗
It's amazing. For the second Apple product in a row, the question is, should this have been an iPhone?
Nilay Patel 8:16 ↗
Looked at their own tablet, their decade-old tablet, and its whole ecosystem, and went, 'No.'
David Pierce 8:23 ↗
I think that is bananas, just to spoil that. But before we get to that, I think one of the things that has come up a lot in comments — it came up in the AMA, and you have both sort of alluded to it in your testing — is the idea of maybe a foldable in general, but particularly this foldable in this style, changing your relationship to your phone. And Allison, this is the thing you and I talk about all the time, right? Like, how do you change the shape of the device to change your relationship to it? And you want desperately to get rid of your phone and just use an Apple Watch, which is like slightly insane. But then this is like — I think it was David Al who was posting that this turned into a much more task-oriented device for him, that he's like, 'I open it up, I do a thing, and then I close it,' and there was something meaningful about it, and it's done. I think a lot of our audience actually really responds to that idea. Have you guys found that like you settle into this, like, 'I just don't use this phone quite the same way'?
Allison Johnson 9:11 ↗
I think you have to. For me, I would have to go in with that intention, because I did find like if I was in the back of an Uber scrolling on the outer screen, I was like, 'This is kind of uncomfortable. I don't like it,' and I put the phone away. If that's some kind of win for like my sanity, I don't know.
Nilay Patel 9:31 ↗
Hollywood is betting on vertical micro dramas to save it, and this phone is going to kill that whole plan.
Allison Johnson 9:37 ↗
There's so many micro drama apps on this phone. That's another story for another day.
David Pierce 9:43 ↗
Watch out, ReelShort. The Duo came to take your business away. That's like what this phone is like.
Allison Johnson 9:47 ↗
Yeah. And not being a vertical video person, I think maybe kind of changed my experience with it. I do think this would be a phone where I'm like, 'You know what? I'm going to leave it at home, and I'm going to go exist in the world with the cellular Apple Watch.' I'm not letting that dream die. And I think this is kind of ideal for it, where it's like you really get into it and open the screen, and you're doing two apps or PDFs or whatever you're doing, and when you're done, just shut it and just have your messages on your wrist and go. That's my TED talk.
David Pierce 10:22 ↗
I mean, it does sound... So you want a folding iPad mini without a cover screen?
Allison Johnson 10:26 ↗
Yes.
David Pierce 10:29 ↗
Slightly different direction than what Apple went in. Look, I found the experience of watching Instagram or TikTok on this thing just completely absurd. Because it's too small on the cover display, and it crops the video.
Allison Johnson 10:39 ↗
Sure. It makes the video, like Instagram will make the video more square.
David Pierce 10:46 ↗
TikTok is not optimized, so it just doesn't look right and doesn't work right. And then you open it, and you're scrolling Instagram on a tablet, and whatever shame you can feel about using an app on a smartphone, you feel that shame. You're like, 'I shouldn't be doing this.'
Nilay Patel 11:02 ↗
I see. Will it lead to a resurgence in landscape YouTube videos? Is the eight-minute mid-form YouTube video going to make a comeback, maybe because it opens from portrait to landscape? So the feeling of like, 'Oh, I got to dive deeper,' right? Immediately puts you into landscape, and maybe you're just going to watch video that way now.
David Pierce 11:21 ↗
I think this is the thing that I most cannot figure out about this phone. So, like, you have the YouTube app open and you're on the outer screen, and it has this big black bar on the right side that takes up just a shocking amount of the real estate of this relatively small screen. This is, if I understand it correctly, a sign of an unoptimized app.
Nilay Patel 11:41 ↗
There's three categories. Are you ready for this?
David Pierce 11:45 ↗
Sure.
Nilay Patel 11:45 ↗
So, there's not updated at all, which just looks like teeny tiny phone apps.
David Pierce 11:50 ↗
Okay.
Nilay Patel 11:50 ↗
Then there's updated for iOS 27.
David Pierce 11:54 ↗
Okay. Not the Duo.
Nilay Patel 11:56 ↗
Yeah. And that gets you this, the black bar on the side and a slightly bigger auto layout, and the only way to describe these apps is vibe coded.
David Pierce 12:05 ↗
Okay.
Nilay Patel 12:06 ↗
Right. Like just stuff starts happening, and you're like, 'It's bigger now,' but no one thought about this. And like YouTube is...
David Pierce 12:11 ↗
But for the most part, it just goes from not stretching correctly to stretching correctly.
Nilay Patel 12:15 ↗
Yeah. But if you look at — I'm going to, I can't show people this, but if you look at Gmail, which got updated like in the unoptimized way. I'm just going to show my Gmail spam folder. Hang on. So this is... Can you guys, can you all see this? This is Gmail. And you would expect in landscape mode that it would look like any email app in landscape mode.
Inbox on the left, message on the right. Nope. It's just a big list.
David Pierce 12:38 ↗
Yeah. Okay.
Nilay Patel 12:39 ↗
And if you open any email, you just get a giant email, right? So this is optimized for iOS 27. So you get for free in iOS 27 a little bit bigger on the Duo. Then there's the big update.
David Pierce 12:53 ↗
Mhm.
Nilay Patel 12:53 ↗
Updated for iOS 27.1, where you get the Duo enhancements. You lose the black bar, you move the controls over to the side. And there's a bunch of those that happened over the past week. If you watch Joanna's video, she recorded her software section three times.
Allison Johnson 13:07 ↗
Wow. She was insanely frustrated by the amount of updates that were happening.
Nilay Patel 13:10 ↗
We had a whole section in our video that was like, 'Look at how dumb Instagram is.' And then Instagram updated like yesterday.
Allison Johnson 13:15 ↗
Instagram's a good example, though, because it went from being super dumb to less dumb. I would not say it perfectly uses the screen.
Nilay Patel 13:22 ↗
Instagram is maybe the most vibe-coded update of all, where it's very obvious that Claude was instructed to like figure it out, and Claude made some decisions, and like things are moved around, and many of those decisions don't make any sense. And on the cover display in particular, there's all kinds of interface elements overlapping with each other.
So this thing has been updated for the Duo. It fills the space, the controls are moved over, and open question whether Meta is going to keep refining that app or whether they're going to have checked the box and call it a day. And this is why, you know, our rule is you got to review what's in the box. I can't tell you what Meta is going to do with its Duo design language.
Allison Johnson 14:00 ↗
I can tell you for sure what Google's going to do, which is nothing, right? All of Google's apps are so... Google gets into the Duo.
Nilay Patel 14:06 ↗
Look, Google's new model is very powerful. Yeah, maybe Antigravity. I legitimately think the power of AI-assisted coding is going to help the Duo updates come faster, and that will feel like something meaningful, and then you'll actually use them. And it's going to be rough for a year, because yes, it will fill the screen. It won't be as silly as the little apps, but you can already see in this first wave they're checking the box. Yeah. They're not thoughtfully rethinking how their app should work. There are some apps that obviously do that, right? But the sort of like the big five, it's just vibe-coded city.
Allison Johnson 14:43 ↗
Yeah. Which I get, but is also a bummer, and it's actually a hard chicken-and-egg problem for anybody, like including Apple. Apple is better at arm-wrestling its developers to do what it wants than any other company.
Nilay Patel 14:56 ↗
They didn't lean on the iPad. It's right there. The iPad, it's right there. The whole ecosystem of apps.
David Pierce 15:02 ↗
Have either of you developed a theory for why this is? Because all the stuff you're describing — what it really is is most of the developers I've seen updating their apps to do Duo essentially land on sidebar on the left, thing on the right. And it's like, could you be more inventive than that? Sure. But that works. It fills the space. This is also what everybody does on Android, and Google has actually maybe done a better job of pulling the resolution targets in the right direction that way. Can either of you think of any reason Apple wouldn't have just pulled the iPad down onto the Duo in that way?
Allison Johnson 15:34 ↗
I think they're just precious about this is an iPhone, and that's such a core part of that company, and they are so loathed to break anything about it.
Nilay Patel 15:47 ↗
You know what they should have done is they should have just called this the Apple Duo.
David Pierce 15:50 ↗
Oo.
Nilay Patel 15:51 ↗
Let it live in the middle. Just blow everybody's mind.
David Pierce 15:53 ↗
Just ambiguous. Is it an iPhone?
Nilay Patel 15:55 ↗
Yeah. It's like, oh, you want an iPhone and a Duo and an iPad? You can do that.
Allison Johnson 15:58 ↗
It might have been too hard. I mean, you know, iPadOS is its own OS. It has a lot of baggage at this point. The app bundles are not the same.
David Pierce 16:06 ↗
Mhm. So we have a commenter pointing out that Netflix is one that did a good job of Duo support. Is that true? I think you guys mentioned that in the review.
Nilay Patel 16:13 ↗
I think that Netflix moves the player and the controls into the right place.
Allison Johnson 16:18 ↗
They did the trick with the reflections, you know, based on where the hinge is too. I watched British Bake Off on it. It was a lovely experience. I get to say that.
David Pierce 16:28 ↗
Love that. So, yeah, this is the sort of thing where I think we can probably safely assume that everyone will support iOS 27, right? So the ones you guys have where it's basically an iPhone app sort of floating in nothingness on the Duo — my assumption is most of those will be gone pretty fast.
Nilay Patel 16:43 ↗
Those are vanishing like by the day. It really was insane trying to review a thing that is changing every time you open it.
Allison Johnson 16:52 ↗
Okay. Yeah, this works. It's like the screen up at the top, and then I have the controls now. It's like I'm holding a Game Boy Advance. Like this works.
Nilay Patel 16:59 ↗
It's fine. Yeah. But you're just watching video on it, right? It's any app, you have to change your interaction paradigm.
Allison Johnson 17:05 ↗
But importantly, that is not a small amount of work. Like that is a thoughtful redesign of an app, not a button you can check in Xcode.
David Pierce 17:13 ↗
Yes.
Allison Johnson 17:13 ↗
Which is what a lot of these things have been, and kind of what Apple alluded to it being. So the easy path, it turns out, actually doesn't do that much. And if you want to do the good thing, it's going to be a fair amount of work for developers.
Nilay Patel 17:25 ↗
The message out of Apple, for whatever it's worth, is the iPhone and the iPad are different products. They have different ecosystems. And vastly more people have iPhones. Yeah. So you can't assume that they understand how an iPad works. So we're going to build a new thing. And I would bet over the next two to three years, one to two years, that the iPad and the Duo just run into each other, because there's no other outcome other than, okay, if you make the Duo tablet mode more useful, it becomes an iPad, right? And so Apple, in its very Apple way, was like, 'What if we threw out everything we ever knew about everything and we start it over and we like made an iPad from scratch?' And then eventually that will run into the iPad. The line I keep using is the Duo wants to be an iPad in exactly the same way the iPad wants to be a Mac.
David Pierce 18:13 ↗
Which is kind of a problem in both cases.
Allison Johnson 18:16 ↗
Yeah. I mean, every iPad review we've done for five years is like, just let it either give this its own identity or just shut up and make it a Mac.
David Pierce 18:25 ↗
And apparently we might get a touchscreen Mac. Like all of these things are just crashing into each other as fast as...
Nilay Patel 18:30 ↗
And somewhere in the middle of that is a home view that's like, it's CarPlay. And it's like Apple's software story is about to be as chaotic and confusing as it's ever been. I think that is fundamentally exciting. This is a very conservative company lately, and they're about to blow — they're just throwing bombs at everything, and it's going to be a mess. Yes. Just a pure mess. And this is why I keep saying this is like first-generation early-adopter stuff. If you are excited about a mess, and I'm pretty excited about a mess, this is going to be really fun. If you are just trying to use your phone, you're going to be like, 'I don't know what happened to me.'
Allison Johnson 19:02 ↗
Mhm. And this is — I think both of us had the experience of like we're reviewing this phone, but I need to just do something, and just pulling out a regular phone. Yeah. To be like, 'I'm just going to handle this business.' Yep. Because your regular phone is not nearly as chaotic as this thing.
Nilay Patel 19:15 ↗
And you get such a feeling of relief. Like we both experienced this. You pick up a regular phone, it's like the thing where you're used to picking up a toddler and you pick up a baby. You're like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm the strongest person in the world.' You get that little moment of like, 'Oh, okay. This is nice.' And yeah, it's just what is your pain tolerance for the heavy phone? How much do you really want to get out of the inner screen is what I keep coming back to forever.
David Pierce 19:43 ↗
It does seem like the good news of all of this stuff though is that it is kind of — it's a lot of like small little solvable things. Like there doesn't seem to be — unless you're on sort of team Nilay, just fundamentally too small, which I think I disagree with you on actually. I think the reason I started this off in the first place is I think if you just get rid of that stupid bar on the side...
Nilay Patel 20:04 ↗
So you change the aspect ratio of your phone entirely.
David Pierce 20:08 ↗
No, just move it out of the way. You have to swipe Control Center in now. Just make me swipe Control Center in. Give me the screen real estate back.
Nilay Patel 20:14 ↗
Like you may have solved part of my problem with the teeny tiny... I'm worried that you don't understand how shapes work. What are you proposing here?
David Pierce 20:21 ↗
I'm proposing... as someone with an eight-year-old and a one-year-old, I've done shapes a lot. I'm proposing that the black bar that is always here on the right side not be there on the right side anymore.
Nilay Patel 20:29 ↗
So that it gets skinnier.
David Pierce 20:32 ↗
No, no, no. I'm saying on the screen. Don't change the hardware at all. Just give me the pixels back.
Nilay Patel 20:37 ↗
Yeah. You want it to like disappear and you call it back. Yes.
David Pierce 20:41 ↗
To use the buttons,
Nilay Patel 20:42 ↗
Which is how I would point out iPhones currently work.
David Pierce 20:45 ↗
Oh,
Nilay Patel 20:46 ↗
You know what's not there on the iPhone is a bunch of Wi-Fi controls taking up a bunch of space. So, the reason I can't do this — I think I understand what's going on in your mind. I've known you for a long time. I think I understand the neural...
David Pierce 21:01 ↗
I thought you could see everything less. I'm a broken person today.
Nilay Patel 21:04 ↗
The problem is that the camera is in the corner. So the reason you have the black bar is Apple, like Samsung on a fold, camera here. They fixed that, right? But because it's the top. So Samsung — this is maybe the most interesting comparison of all — is to the Fold 8. Okay. So Samsung is the same basic size and shape. It's a little lighter, but Samsung is like, 'This is just a phone.' And so there's a camera at the top, and there's buttons on the bottom, and they're just like, 'It's a phone but smaller,' right? Apple was like, 'We've reinvented the very concept of a phone.'
David Pierce 21:36 ↗
Apple. Yep.
Nilay Patel 21:37 ↗
And so they're like, 'The camera's off in the top right, and that means all the status stuff is on the right, and we're just taking that vertical strip, and the camera will be dominated by the camera in the corner,' as opposed to what they do on their phones now, which is the camera's at the top and you're not — don't look at this, right? The whole Dynamic Island is like, 'Don't look at this, right? Like just assume it's not there. You'll learn to ignore it.' This is like the camera dominates the entire interface because of that black bar. And so if you give it back to me, they will have to make some other decision on the camera.
Allison Johnson 22:09 ↗
They'll have to do what they did on the iPad, which is eventually relent and put it in the correct place.
Nilay Patel 22:13 ↗
Yeah. The middle where cameras go.
David Pierce 22:16 ↗
Look, a lot of this is like, should the camera be in the middle? Is this the right aspect ratio? Should it have Face ID in the front? Half the reviewers are just — it should just have Face ID unlock on the front. Yeah. How did you guys feel about this? There are a lot of people who are really mad about Touch ID instead of Face ID.
Allison Johnson 22:30 ↗
I think especially having spent a lot of time getting used to face unlock. Going back does take some adjustment.
Nilay Patel 22:38 ↗
Yeah. The thing I kept doing was I would pull up the phone and just stare at it, and then wait for the notifications to unfurl, and I was like, 'Oh, oh yeah, I got to use — I have to do something.'
Allison Johnson 22:48 ↗
Yeah, that was a little weird. There is that kind of lag of like, did I get my thumb there? It's got — okay, good. We're good.
Nilay Patel 22:56 ↗
You can turn that off, apparently. I learned this. So we had our own hidden settings, and a lot of other reviewers found another hidden setting.
David Pierce 23:03 ↗
Oh, wow.
Nilay Patel 23:03 ↗
So there's a hidden setting to turn off Touch ID delay.
David Pierce 23:08 ↗
Oh. Okay.
Nilay Patel 23:10 ↗
Which I did not know about. Because why on earth would you ever know about this in the world of Face ID? But there is a setting buried in the menus where right now if you just put your thumb on it gently, it'll unlock halfway and show you notifications, and it will say 'rest to unlock.' If you hold it there, it'll unlock all the way.
David Pierce 23:27 ↗
Can I say I enjoy it telling me to rest. That was nice.
Nilay Patel 23:32 ↗
Please take a beat while your phone unlocks. But you can turn that off, and it unlocks almost instantly. Okay, so that's one hidden setting that I think Apple got wrong. And the hidden setting I think Apple got wrong is so preposterously backwards. It is the least intuitive default setting Apple has ever created, where you can have the volume buttons auto-reorient themselves. So you open it, and then you always want to turn it clockwise, and the volume buttons end up on the bottom right.
David Pierce 24:00 ↗
Right. Up should be up and down should be down.
Nilay Patel 24:02 ↗
So by default, the top button is volume down when it's this way, that way. And there's a button, buried in settings, auto-reorient volume buttons.
Allison Johnson 24:14 ↗
This is another thing Apple has solved already on.
Nilay Patel 24:16 ↗
So yeah, it's already there, and it's on by default. So to make the button do the right thing, you have to go find a hidden setting and turn it off.
Allison Johnson 24:25 ↗
And even just trying to write it in the review, I was like, 'Not this. I can't make these sentences make sense.'
Nilay Patel 24:31 ↗
That was an all-time high of getting comments from editors who were like, 'What are you saying? Like, I don't get this at all.' I'm like, 'No, there's on the other screen and this screen and this happens.' It's like, I'm sorry. You have to...
Allison Johnson 24:44 ↗
We also got a lot of comments from Jake and Todd, who are editing this. They were like, 'Maybe this will make sense when I see the video.' Like just sort of like plaintively, like, 'Maybe when I see it, it will make sense.'
David Pierce 24:54 ↗
Well, this was your whole thing about the way you instinctively rotate it being upside down. One of those things — you described this to me, I was like, 'None of what you just said is English words.' And then you hold it and pick it up and rotate it, and it's like, 'Oh, I do kind of flip it over.'
Nilay Patel 25:07 ↗
So in this case, the bumper case, which is ugly, but the only acceptable case. The other case is — I keep calling it the old lady case. So if you — I don't know if you all can see this, I hope you can see this. This is the top of this case, and it has a notch for the Touch ID button and the camera control button. And for all, like, everything you know about cases,
David Pierce 25:27 ↗
That's the bottom.
Nilay Patel 25:28 ↗
Yes. Because that's where you would plug in the charger, right? Like everything you know about everything suggests this is the bottom. So every time you open it, you're like, 'I'm going to put the bottom at the bottom,' but that's actually the top.
David Pierce 25:38 ↗
Yeah, that's silly.
Nilay Patel 25:39 ↗
And then the USB is on the side.
David Pierce 25:40 ↗
We got a lot of questions about cases, actually, because a thing I forget, as a person who proudly does not use a phone case, is that everyone uses phone cases. Are there literally just the two from Apple? Presumably there will be others, but I feel like foldable cases in general are hard to do well.
Nilay Patel 25:58 ↗
Apple's are particularly bad.
David Pierce 26:00 ↗
Yeah. Allison, can you give us a demo of the disaster zone over here?
Allison Johnson 26:04 ↗
Okay, the Karen case. It has a kickstand. I love a kickstand.
Nilay Patel 26:09 ↗
It just looks like you're in a restaurant. You're going to call the manager every time I see it.
Allison Johnson 26:12 ↗
Can we — yeah. So it covers the front display first of all, so you have to do a move to open it up. And it has — okay, here's the jump scare. It has this like elastic bit in the middle.
David Pierce 26:27 ↗
Because it has to stretch over.
Allison Johnson 26:29 ↗
It has to stretch over that. It's, I mean, kind of clever. But it...
Nilay Patel 26:33 ↗
Is it though?
Allison Johnson 26:34 ↗
It slides around to like an alarming degree, I think, and then it turns into a thing I'm fidgeting with.
David Pierce 26:40 ↗
That just looks like your case is falling off. And in fact, your case just fell off as you were doing that. It just fell off.
Allison Johnson 26:46 ↗
When you're like, 'I need to do the kickstand,' you're like, 'Am I peeling the case off of the phone?' There, I got it. But yeah, I don't love it. It does remind me of a pair of shoes at Nordstrom Rack. I love Nordstrom Rack.
Nilay Patel 27:05 ↗
It's funny. Everyone arrives at kind of the same insult, which is like, this is an irritating wine mom's case. Like just naturally, it's the way you look at it. Maybe that's — there was a whole genre of these in the early days.
Allison Johnson 27:17 ↗
There's a lot of those around.
David Pierce 27:18 ↗
And boy did we all learn better. All right, we have a bunch of other stuff to get into, but we should take a quick break, and then we're going to dig back in. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Couple more hardware things we should talk about. The crease comes up every time anybody talks about these things. I'm looking at Nilay's phone as he's scrolling on one of the stupid floating apps in space. I can see the crease. Like, it's there. I can see the crease. But both of you, I think, have said you don't — what is it, perceptively? Perceptually?
Nilay Patel 29:13 ↗
Perceptually flat.
David Pierce 29:14 ↗
That's such a great phrase.
Allison Johnson 29:15 ↗
It is. It's very good.
Nilay Patel 29:17 ↗
They had a meeting, like imagine, you know, you're in the spaceship, and Greg Joswiak is like, 'We're having a meeting,' and he puts like $10 million worth of Apple executives in a room, and he's like, 'How do we say you don't see it?' And he just like stood there on a whiteboard, and you're like, 'Almost invisible.' He's like, 'You're fired. Get out of here. Come back when you have a good idea.' And they got to 'perceptually flat,' which is just hilarious.
David Pierce 29:44 ↗
Sure. Somebody got a raise for that, and I'm excited for that person. Do you notice it? Like, is the fact that one screen is two screens at all part of the experience of using this phone?
Allison Johnson 29:54 ↗
It does not bother me. And even on previous foldables where it's more pronounced and you feel it, you see it more — at least I do — it sort of blends into the background for me. And when you're looking at the thing straight on, you know, it's not catching the light. So even if it is more pronounced, it hasn't bothered me. This is especially well hidden, I think.
Nilay Patel 30:20 ↗
There's something going on with your phone. We didn't put this in the review, and I noticed it last night, and I said this to Allison — she got really offended with me. Your phone is so greasy. It's so much greasier than mine. And from where I'm standing, it's starting to get to like Galaxy Fold levels of crease seeing.
Allison Johnson 30:38 ↗
Oh no.
Nilay Patel 30:39 ↗
Is it bothering you?
Allison Johnson 30:40 ↗
It's because it's like shiny, and you can see it. So the crease is there. And it's not less there than on the Z Fold.
Nilay Patel 30:48 ↗
Okay.
Allison Johnson 30:48 ↗
So the matte screen surface, which some people are saying is like a screen protector that's on top, just does an excellent job of diffusing the reflections of the screen. So it's perceptually flat.
Nilay Patel 31:01 ↗
Okay. Did you ever have the instinct to peel off the screen protector?
Allison Johnson 31:05 ↗
The second I — the day I opened it, I did.
Nilay Patel 31:07 ↗
Really?
Allison Johnson 31:08 ↗
Because it looks like one of those peelies on another screen, and I was like, 'Should I? Oh, I shouldn't do that.'
David Pierce 31:12 ↗
Yeah, been there.
Nilay Patel 31:13 ↗
First — remember the first Galaxy Fold reviews, just people breaking the phones. So I saw it when I was watching Vision Quest the other night, and just the way the light from the TV was reflecting in a dark room, it made this look shiny, and you can just see it. It's the same ripple, exactly the same ripple as a Z Fold 8. And what's happening to Allison's — I'm not saying this is you. So, our video team has greasy fingers. Someone was eating a pizza and then touched that screen, and it's greasier than the way mine is right now. And it is more visible. It's shinier.
David Pierce 31:46 ↗
I mean, I see it from here.
Nilay Patel 31:47 ↗
You do have to work at it. And I think we just need a little spritz, you know.
Allison Johnson 31:50 ↗
Yeah. So, there's something, you know, it's like, you can make a matte display. It's like, don't eat pizza with the phone. I don't know what to tell you. Like, you shouldn't do that anyway.
Nilay Patel 31:57 ↗
Strong disagree. What are you talking about? The whole beauty of my phone is I can hold it in one hand and eat pizza in the other hand. Understand?
David Pierce 32:04 ↗
Yeah, you got to unfold.
Nilay Patel 32:05 ↗
And I type with my nose. Look, the secret to perceptually flat is the matte screen, the nano-texture screen, and they're very proud of it. They're very proud of exactly how much it diffuses.
Allison Johnson 32:16 ↗
I think Mr. Mobile had a great video with the Apple team. I thoroughly enjoyed watching it. He did a great job. And they just talked a lot about, yeah, it's matte.
David Pierce 32:23 ↗
Why do you think it's not matte also on the outside? I was a little surprised by that.
Nilay Patel 32:23 ↗
Because they don't need to make the outside perceptually flat.
David Pierce 32:30 ↗
So you think it's purely the... because you could make the case that you want the nano-texture, the matte stuff on the inside, because the screen is larger, and the bigger the screen, the more opportunity you have to be ruined by glare and reflections. Yeah. But you have that on the inside, and so it's like, well, wouldn't it also be nice to have this lovely matte screen that Apple seems to agree is better, also on the outside?
Allison Johnson 32:52 ↗
But maybe it just doesn't matter that much.

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APA

Patel, N. (2026, October 21). How we really feel about the iPhone Duo [Interview transcript]. The Verge. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3107810/

MLA

Nilay Patel. "How we really feel about the iPhone Duo." The Verge, 21 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3107810/.

BibTeX
@misc{patel2026_3107810,
  author       = {Nilay Patel},
  title        = {How we really feel about the iPhone Duo},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Verge. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3107810/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}