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 Duo reviewers, Nilay Patel and Allison Johnson. Welcome, friends.
Nilay has become a nightmare in the course of reviewing phones.
So little. 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 have had so little guess 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 the only one who feels the way that I do?
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.
So, at least I knew we weren't nuts.
Like I had that one locked down.
A little bit of sanity check is helpful.
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 Marques. So I promise you we did not coordinate that.
Although I will say the A/B testing chose against me. The two headlines we chose were like the standard one, like messy expense, whatever that headline is, whatever set of words, and then my preferred one, which was iPhone Duo review emotional.
I think the problem was it didn't say emotional in all caps.
Our head of video Kevin was like, but you're not emotional enough. And I was like, this is as emotional as I get.
It's a first generation product.
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. You should wait.
And that seems down the line where things are different, and because it's affordable and it's really like how you use it is just going to change the experience. I got drastically worse battery life than everyone else.
And I think it's because I had it open all the time.
Yeah. I mean that 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.
Yeah. Not for a brand new iPhone out of the box, you know, like Pro Max style. No.
Yeah. But if you look at Marques or you look at David ML, they're like, 'We love the battery life on this thing.' Incredible, impressive in real life. I'm like, you had it closed.
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 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?
I think I'm on board with the passport shape now. Like everybody else, you know, earlier this year, we started seeing 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. 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.' But so I'm on board with that. This phone in particular is heavy and it's a little thicker than the Z Fold 8.
So when you're like, it looks heavy so it doesn't sort of read as heavy when you pick up, but it is. This is a light, thin tablet. I guess you close it, you're like, 'This is heavy. It's a heavy phone.' So, 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 like it is not, I can't say that enough or like loud enough. It is a heavy phone with a tiny screen.
There was definitely a contingent of iPhone mini stans 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.
The world has left you behind.
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.
And yeah, your argument is they made the wrong trade-off.
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.'
Would you stretch it in both dimensions, wider and taller?
I think, because now we got a big ass phone. It's like you, this is the problem. You run 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.'
Apple's very proud of the aspect ratio and the fact that it's like in 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...'
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.
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.
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.
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.'
So which brings me to a game we're going to play later on in this episode called, 'Should this have been an iPad?'
It's amazing. For the second Apple product in a row, the question is, should this have been an iPhone? Looked at their own tablet, their decade-old tablet and its whole ecosystem and went, 'No.'
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're like, 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 ML 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?
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.
Hollywood is betting on vertical micro dramas to save it and this phone is going to kill that whole plan.
There's so many micro drama apps on this phone. That's another story for another day.
Watch out, ReelShort. The Duo came to take your business away. That's like what this phone is like.
Yeah. And yeah, 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.
I mean it does sound... So you want a folding iPad mini without a cover screen?
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.
It makes the video like Instagram will make the video more square.
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.
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 because the iPhone, like 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 what, maybe you're just going to watch video that way now.
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...
There's three categories. You got to... Are you ready for this?
So there's not updated at all.
Which just looks like teeny tiny phone apps.
Then there's updated for iOS 27.
Yeah. And that gets you the black bar on the side and a slightly bigger auto layout and everything. About the only way to describe these apps is vibe coded.
Right. Like just stuff starts happening and you're like, it's bigger now, but no one thought about this and like YouTube is...
But for the most part it goes from not stretching correctly to stretching correctly.
Yeah. But if you look at, 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 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. Nope. Message on the right.
And if you open any email, you just get a giant email, right? So this is optimized for iOS 27.
iOS 27. So you get for free in iOS 27 a little bit bigger on the Duo. Then there's the big update.
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.
She was insanely frustrated by the amount of updates that were happening.
We had a whole section in our video that was like, 'Look at how dumb Instagram is.' And then Instagram updated like yesterday.
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.
Instagram is maybe the most vibe-coded update of all, where it's very obvious that Claude was instructed to figure it out and Claude made some decisions and 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.
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.
Look, Google's new model is very powerful.
Yeah, maybe anti-gravity. 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.
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.
Yeah. Which I get, but is also a bummer and is weird that 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.
They didn't lean on the iPad. It's right there. The iPad, it's right there. The whole ecosystem of apps.
Have either of you developed a theory for why this is? Because all the stuff you're describing where like 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?
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 loath to break anything about it.
You know what they should have done is they should have just called this the Apple Duo.
Let it live in the middle. Just blow everybody's mind.
Just ambiguous. Is it an iPhone?
Yeah. It's like, oh, you want an iPhone and a Duo and an iPad? You can do that.
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.
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. I think that Netflix like moves the player and the controls into the right place.
They did the trick with the reflections, you know, with it based on where the hinge is too. I watched British Bake Off on it. It was a lovely experience. I get to say that.
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.
Those are vanishing like by the day. It really was insane trying to review a thing that is changing every time you open it.
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.
But you're just watching video on it, right? It's any app you have to change your interaction paradigm.
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.
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.
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.
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 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, which is kind of a problem in both cases.
Yeah. I mean, it's what is the 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.
And apparently we might get a touchscreen Mac. Like all of these things are just crashing into each other as fast as... 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.
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 like 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.
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.
To be like, I'm just gonna handle this business.
Because your regular phone is not nearly as chaotic as this thing.
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.
It does seem like the good news of all of this stuff though is that it is kind of 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 and...
So you change the aspect ratio of your phone entirely.
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.
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?
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.
So that it gets skinnier.
No, no, no. I'm saying on the screen. Don't change the hardware at all. Just give me the pixels back.
Yeah. You want it to like disappear and you call it back.
Yes. To use the buttons, which is how I would point out iPhones currently work.
Oh, 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...
