Source: Marques Brownlee
MKBHD iPhone Duo review: What You Need to Know
THE TL;DW
- In the MKBHD iPhone Duo review, Marques Brownlee calls Apple’s first foldable “polished around the edges, but kind of rough in the middle.”
- He praises the hinge, nano-texture 7.6-inch inner display, battery life, and multitasking features, but dings the weight and camera quality as typical first-gen compromises.
- His biggest knock is software: major third-party apps like Spotify, Google Maps, Discord, and X still aren’t optimized for the folding screen.
The Jupiter Take
This is one of the first major reviews of Apple’s long-rumored foldable iPhone, a $1,999 device entering a market Samsung and Google have had to themselves for years. Brownlee’s verdict lines up with other early reviewers: gorgeous hardware, shaky software ecosystem — exactly the growing pains you’d expect from a first-generation Apple product.
Context
The iPhone Duo is Apple’s answer to years of speculation about a folding iPhone, officially unveiled in September 2026 alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup and hitting shelves October 23. It’s a book-style foldable with a 5.4-inch outer screen and a 7.6-inch inner OLED display, built around the same 2nm A20 Pro chip found in Apple’s flagship phones, and wrapped in a titanium-and-aluminum frame rated IP68 for water resistance — all starting at $1,999.
Marques Brownlee‘s take lands alongside a wave of other first reviews, including The Verge and Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern, who built a robot to fold the device over 32,000 times to test its hinge durability. The consensus across outlets is similar to what Brownlee found: the hardware — hinge, crease-hiding nano-texture display, battery efficiency — is genuinely impressive, but software hasn’t caught up, with many popular apps not yet redesigned for the dual-screen format. That software gap echoes a pattern JupiterFeed has tracked before, including in its recent coverage of Apple’s Welcome Home 2026 event, where several new hardware categories launched well ahead of a fully mature app ecosystem.
