“What was better than I realized was the iPhone Duo,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, in a video posted on X. “This is the first time in 10 years that Apple has come out with a product that people are excited about… Apple has got its device design mojo back and I think we’re gonna see it in the numbers.”
Other analysts believed Apple would make sizable gains in the nascent market for foldable smartphones. “Apple [is] going to sell all the iPhone Duos they can make,” Ben Bajarin, CEO of Creative Strategies, a market research firm, wrote on X. “ Will be supply chain limited but in 2026 we think they easily get 20-25% of the foldable market in 2026 and increasing to 35-40% in 2027.”
Investors appeared to be receiving Apple’s new products with optimism. On Thursday afternoon, Apple was trading at roughly $323 per share, up 2.5% from the day before.
Apple’s Big Fold
Apple’s foldable iPhone isn’t staking out unexplored territory. Other smartphone makers introduced their own versions of foldable phones, starting with Samsung’s debut of the Galaxy Fold in 2019. Google and Motorola also jumped in with foldable models of their own.
It didn’t escape the notice of Apple’s competitors that a new player is entering the foldable smartphone market.
“Let us know when you’re done reheating our leftovers,” the US account for Samsung Mobile posted on Wednesday with a winking emoji. Samsung is projected to lead the foldable smartphone market with a 32% market share this year, according to a July analysis from market-research firm Counterpoint Research. Apple will capture a quarter of the market with its foldable iPhone, the analysis note said.
The iPhone now accounts for half of Apple’s annual revenue at $200 billion. The company will have to sway price-sensitive consumers grappling with inflation into buying the newest product line, only months after hiking the cost of Macbooks and iPads due to the scarcity of memory and storage components.
What to know about Apple’s newest iPhone
The iPhone Duo will fold like a book and comes in two colors: star white and night sky. NBC News compared its size to that of a pop-tart. It can be preordered starting Oct. 16 and goes on sale a week later on Oct. 23.
There will be trade-offs: Observers noted the foldable iPhone is bulkier compared to its sleeker predecessors, so it may not fit as snugly into your pocket particularly when folded. Bendable screens are more fragile and tend to have shorter lifespans as a result.
But the battery life is lengthy. Apple claims the iPhone Duo will possess between 31 and 44 hours of battery life depending on the screen that’s used. And storage options will range between 256 GB and 2TB.
Joseph Zeballos-Roig is a policy and politics journalist based in Washington D.C with a focus on economics. He is experienced in connecting the significance of events in the capital to the lives of everyday Americans whether its taxes, tariffs, interest rates or federal programs.
