John Gruber's iPhone Duo review has landed, and it is already the most divisive Apple verdict in years. Writing on Daring Fireball, the veteran Apple commentator sums up his week with the device with a now heavily shared line: as a phone it is the worst iPhone Apple has ever made, and as a tablet it is the best he has ever used. Both halves, he insists, are true at the same time.
The iPhone Duo goes on sale on Friday, October 23, and pre-order demand has been strong enough to push delivery estimates into January in some cases, according to 9to5Mac. Apple has since said its stores will carry limited walk-in stock on launch day. That tension, huge interest against a sharply split review, is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
What John Gruber said about the iPhone Duo
Gruber is blunt about the folded experience. He describes the outer device as "a miserable fat little thing," awkward to slide in and out of a jeans pocket and heavy enough to notice all day. He also points out that the cover display's squat, rather than tall, layout changes controls in every app, and that the side buttons sit in the wrong place once the device is opened as a tablet.
The move back to Touch ID instead of Face ID is another repeated complaint, one that 9to5Mac's own reviewer Chance Miller called the hardest thing to get used to. Third-party apps that have not been updated for the Duo's unusual screens also suffer, Gruber notes. His conclusion is that these problems are real, some have been softened by clever engineering, and some may be impossible to fix in any foldable.
He uses a pop-culture comparison to make the point: like a Transformer toy, the Duo is compromised in both of its states. Folded up it is not a great phone; unfolded it is not quite a normal tablet. His verdict is that the Duo is not really a phone at all, but "a tablet in disguise."
