An iPhone 18 Pro is $1,199. An iPad is $449. If you want both—the iPhone as your primary device and the iPad to handle some work when you’re away from your desk—you’ll be spending a total dollar amount that’s pretty close to the $1,999 price of Apple’s first folding smartphone, the iPhone Duo.
So can the Duo’s 7.6-inch screen pull double duty as a phone and a workstation? Does it make sense to shell out a few hundred more dollars for a single gadget that can theoretically handle the workload of two devices?
I wrote my entire iPhone Duo review on Apple’s new handset. I used a note-taking app called Bear, which was mercifully optimized for the Duo’s larger screen. (Read my review and you’ll hear about how most apps aren’t optimized; it could take weeks or months for everything to look right.) But surprisingly, I didn’t hate the experience.
I have run this experiment before on Android foldables and even smart glasses with virtual workspaces, but iOS has its own unique hurdles. Notably, iOS doesn’t recognize a Bluetooth mouse or trackpad by default. Instead, you have to go to the phone’s accessibility settings and enable AssistiveTouch—then you’ll get an iPad-like cursor that lets you navigate the Duo’s interface and select text without constantly reaching for the touchscreen.
Even with the cursor, small tasks like pasting hyperlinks into a written piece or quickly Googling topics for additional research are slower and more cumbersome, so I left those for the end when I moved everything into WIRED’s content management system. Even then, I had to switch over to my desktop for the final touches.
Apple also imposes arbitrary multitasking restrictions in iOS because, well, Apple likes to control how people use its devices. For example, if you open two apps in split-screen mode, you can only view them in an equal 50-50 split. Unlike most operating systems that let you adjust how much of each app you can see by dragging the border in between the windows, iOS leaves you stuck with a view that gives both apps equal screen space. If you want to use the iPhone in portrait orientation and stack two apps vertically, one on the top part of the screen and the other on the bottom, you’re out of luck. In portrait mode, you can only pin video apps to the top with another app below.
One thing Apple did get right is app pairs. You can “pin” two apps together, and they will live in your Recents, ready when you need them. Say you always want to look at your email and calendar together; you can pair them and find them in Recents whenever you need them. (Tap the bar in the middle to lock and save the pair.)