The Vergecast - How we really feel about the iPhone Duo | Livestream

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

iPhone Duo reviews are out today and... it's complicated. David Pierce, Nilay Patel and senior smart phone reviewer Allison Johnson talk through The Verge's review and answer your questions LIVE. Further reading: The iPhone Duo is a messy, expensive, good time iPhone Duo review: messy, expensive fun Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Ring. Whatever shows up around your home this holiday season, with Ring, you're protected. Ring makes it easier than ever to keep track of all those packages on your doorstep. With battery doorbell 2K Plus, featuring Retinal 2K Clarity and up to six times enhanced zoom. Get a closer look without sacrificing detail. The versatile, compact indoor cam makes it easy to check on the inside of your home and your pets when you're out. An outdoor cam plus lets you keep an eye on your yard and outdoor spaces right from your phone. With Ring, you're protected for the holidays.

Shop cameras, doorbells, and more at ring.com. The new Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid is the most fuel-efficient cross-track yet. That means less time filling your tank and more time filling your day. More court time. More ride time. More lake time. More camp time. More go time. The new 2027 Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid. Consumer Reports top-rated subcompact SUV. Stop by your local Subaru dealership or visit Subaru.ca to learn more.

Consumer Reports is not indoors products or services. At exactly 11.14 p.m., Kelsey DeMarco was not walking to buy chips and pop to power an all-nighter before her exam. So she did not break off the heel of her left boot, and she did not then stumble into trash bins, full of raccoons, only to be spotted by her ex-boyfriend Jean-Francois. Instead, Kelsey skipped it and with the Skip app had her chips and pop delivered, allowing her to study and totally rock her midterm. Yes! Smart move, Kels.

Skip to the good part. 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 of the iPhone Duo. I'm your friend David Pierce. I am here in the studio with two iPhone. and two iPhone duo reviewers, Neely Patel and Alison Johnson. Welcome friends. Hello. Nice to be here. Hello, David.

How are you? Eli has become a nightmare in the course of reviewing iPhone duo. I've slept so little. It's good. It's going to be great. So the reviews 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. 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 only one who feels the way that I do?

I think so. I mean, and a foldable phone is so variable and how people are going to use it. How much you use the inner screen? What kinds of things you do like that work on the inner screen? So yeah, it was a real kind of wildcard waking up this morning and be like, oh, what did everyone else think? Yeah, we are lucky because we were talking. to each other. True. Yeah. So at least I knew we weren't nuts. Yeah.

Like I had that one locked down. A little bit of sanity check is helpful. Or nuts in the right way. Yeah. I, 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 Marquez. I promise you we did not coordinate that.

Yeah. Although I will say the YouTube A-B testing chose against me. The two headlines we chose were like the standard one, like messy expense, whatever that have on it's 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 that's the real problem our it's you sobbing in the thumbnail yeah I had a 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 a foldable and it's really, it's like how you use it is just going to change the experience. I got drastically worse battery life than everyone else. Oh, interesting. And I think it's because I had it open all the time. Yeah. I mean, that A 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 Mac style, no. Yeah, but if you look at Marquez or you look at David Amel, they're like, we love the battery life on this thing.

Incredible, impressive battery 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 in everybody's minds. It's the main thing everybody's reckoning within all.

of these reviews. And I think the first question you are confronted by the minute you like 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, I want to dig into this. They went with the passport. 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 I like everybody else, you know, earlier this year, we started seeing like 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 date, by the way. Like it was the funniest thing everybody was like, that seems kind of. And then you hold it and it.

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. It is heavy. 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 stands 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. Not a little bit. No, I'm so sorry. My people, we can't know. The app ecosystem has left you behind. It's true. It is a heavy phone and Apple definitely had to make some sort of tradeoff

between size and weight. Yeah. It's too small. 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. Okay. 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. That's like you, this is the problem. You run this is, this is about as big as you can get before at some point in some orientation. Yeah. 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 it's you can use it I've been using the phone Sure, but if you are used to a portrait phone running big portrait phone apps. You're like well this is pretty tiny and 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. Yeah. There's one text in view, and it's like, okay, this just isn't enough space. Yeah, and we had a question in RMA that was like, here's this long list of things I want to do,

and I can separate them in two categories. And one is anything you're doing where you're doing input, can I make a quick note, can I reply to a text, can I change a setting? Oh, 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 so it's two slack messages it's I want to leave a comment on a Google Doc which

is the thing we wanted to do all week not happening yeah 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 iPad? They looked at their own tablet, their decade old tablet in 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 that's you're like, you want desperately to get rid of your phone or just use an Apple Watch,

which is like slightly insane. But then this is like, I think it was David Amel who was posting that this turned into a much more task-oriented device for him. He was like, I open it up, I do a thing, and then I close it. And there's 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 microdraudra. to save it. And this phone is going to kill that whole plan. There's so many micro drama apps on this. That's another story for another day. Watch out real short. The duo came to take your business away. That's right. What this phone is like.

Yeah. Not being a vertical video person, I think maybe kind of changed my experience with it. I do think I, 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 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 good. So you want a folding iPad mini without a cover screen?

Yes. Slightly different direction than what Apple went in. I look I I I found the experience of watching Instagram or TikTok on this thing just completely absurd sure 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 and it just like doesn't look right and doesn't work right and then you open it and you're scrolling Instagram on a tablet and whatever whatever shame you can feel about using an app on a smartphone you feel that shame you're like I shouldn't be doing it 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 of 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 are 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're you have the YouTube app open and you're on the 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 a cool you ready for this sure so there's there is not updated at all yeah which just looks like teeny tiny phone apps okay then there's updated for iOS 27 okay not the duo yeah and that gets you this 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. Okay. Right? Like just stuff starts happening. You're like, it's bigger now, but no one thought about this. And like YouTube. But for the most part, it just, it goes from not stretching correctly to stretching correctly. Yeah, but if you look at, I'm going to, 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, can you all see this? This is Gmail. and you would expect in landscape mode that it would look like any email app in landscape inbox on the left no message on the right just a big list yeah okay 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 right in ios 27 a little bit bigger do-o okay then there's the the big update updated for ios 27.1 where you get

the duo enhancements you'd stop you lose a black bar you move the controls over the side and there's a bunch of those that happened over the past week you watched Joanna's video she recorded her software section three times wow she was insanely frustrated by the amount of updates that were happening we had a whole section our video that was like look at how dumb Instagram is and then Instagram updated like yesterday Instagram is a good example though because it went from being super dumb to less dumb I would not say it perfectly uses the the screen it does not Instagram is maybe the most vibe coded update of all where like

it's very obvious that Claude was instructed to like figure it out and it And Claude made some decisions and like 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's going to do with its duo design language. can tell you for sure what Google's going to do, which is nothing. Right. All of Google's apps are sort of in the code. It gets into the duo. Look, Google's new model is very powerful.

Yeah, maybe anti-gravity can fix this. 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 will actually use them. And it's going to be rough for a year. Because yes, it will fill the screen. It won't be a silly.

is the little apps, but you can already see in this first wave, they're checking the box. Yeah. They're not thoughtfully rethinking how they're actually work. There are some apps that obviously do that. Right. But sort of like the big five, it's just vibe coded city. Yeah. Which I get, but is also a bummer and is a weird, 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 would deal with. But it's crazy they ain'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 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 as an iPhone and that's such a core part of that company and they are so loath to break anything about it.

And what they should have done is they should have just called this the Apple Duo. Oh. Let it live in the middle, just blow everybody's minds. 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, iPad OS is its own OS. It has a lot of baggage at this point. The app bundles are not the same. So we have a comment for pointing out that Netflix is one that did a good job of duo support. Is that true? I think you guys mentioned that in a review. I think that Netflix like moves the player, move the player.

Yeah. And the controls into the right place. They did the trick with the reflections, you know, with it based on where the hinges too. I watched British Bake Off on it. It was a lovely experience. I could say that. Love that. So yeah, this is a sort of.

thing where I think I think we can probably safely assume that everyone will support iOS 27 right so the like 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 those are vanishing like by the day yeah it really was insane trying to review a thing that is changing every time you open it okay yeah the screen up at the top and then I have the the controls now it's like I'm holding a Game Boy Advance like yes this works it's fine Yeah, but you're just watching video on it, right?

It's any app, but also you have to change your interaction paradigm. But importantly, that is not a small amount of work. Like that, that is a thoughtful redesign of an app, not a button you can check in Xcode. Yes. 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.

have different ecosystems and vastly more people have iPhones. Yeah. So you can't assume that they understand how an iPad works, so we're going to build anything. 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,

it was like, what if we threw out everything we ever knew about everything? We started over, and we, like, 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, what is every iPad review we've done for five years is like, just let it be a Mac. Yeah, yeah. Either give this its own identity or just shut up and make it a Mac.

Yeah. And apparently we might get a touchscreen Mac like. All of these things are just crashing into each other as fast as possible. And somewhere in the middle of that is a home view that's like, it's car play. 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 and everything.

And it's going to be a mess. Yes. 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. 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. Yeah.

To be like, I'm just going to, I'm going to handle this business. Yep. Because the irregular phone is not nearly as chaotic as this thing. And you get such a feeling of relief. Yeah. Like we both experience 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 for everybody.

It does seem like the good news of all of this stuff, though, is that it is kind of, it's a lot of like small, little solvable things. Like there doesn't seem to be, unless you're on sort of team, Neely, this thing is 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 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 and give me the screen real estate back. Like you may have solved part of my problem with the teeny tiny phone screen. I'm worried that you don't understand how shapes work. What are you proposing here? I'm proposing. There's someone with an eight year old and a one year old. I've done shapes a lot.

I'm proposing that the the, the, the, The black bar that is always here on the right side and not be there on the right side anymore. So that 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. mind okay I've known you for a long time I think I think I understand this okay the neural I saw you can see everything last item I'm a broken person today the problem is that the camera is in the corner so the the reason you have the black bar is Apple like Samsung on a fold camera here they fix that right but they because it's the top so like Samsung to this this is maybe the most

interesting comparison of all is to the folding okay so Samsung is same basic size and shape it's a little lighter but Samsung is like this is just a phone and so there's a camera at the top and there's buttons on the bottom and they're just like it's a it's a phone but smaller right Apple was like we've reinvented the very concept of a phone Apple yep and so they're like the camera's off in the top right and that means all the status stuff is on the right and we're just taking that vertical strip in the camera will be it'll be dominated by the camera in the corner as opposed to what they do on on their

phones now which is the cameras at the top and you're not don't don't look at this right the whole dynamic island is like like don't look at this right like just assume it's not there you'll learn to ignore it this is like the camera dominates the entire interface because of that black bar and so if you give it back to me they they will have to make some other decision on the camera they'll have to do what they did on the iPad which is eventually relent and put it in the correct place yeah the middle where cameras go look a lot of this is like should the camera be in the middle is this the right aspect ratio

should it have face ID in the front half the reviewers are just it should just have face ID unlock on the front Yeah. Yeah, how did you guys feel about this? There are a lot of people who are really mad about touch ID instead of face ID. Did it, I think especially having spent a lot of time getting used to face unlock, the going back does take some adjustment. Yeah, the thing I kept doing was I would pull up the phone and just stare at it and wait

for the notifications to unfurl and I was like, oh, oh yeah, I got to use. To do something. Yeah, that was a little weird. There is that kind of lag of like, did it, did I get my thumb there? It's got. Okay, good. We're good. You can turn that off, apparently.

Okay. I learned this. So we had our own hidden settings and a lot of other reviewers found another hidden setting. Oh, wow. So there's a hidden setting to turn off touch ID delay. Oh. Which I did not know about. Okay.

Because why on earth would you ever know about this in a world of face ID? But there is a setting buried in the menus where right now, if you just put your thumb on it, I did it too fast. If you go like halfway, it'll unlock halfway and show you notifications. Yeah. to unlock. Oh, yeah. If you hold it there, it'll knock all the way. Can I say I enjoy it telling me to rest?

That was nice. Please take a beat while your phone unlocked. But you can turn that off and it unlocks almost instantly. Okay. So that's one hidden setting that I think Apple got wrong. And the hidden setting I think Apple got wrong is so preposterously backwards. Like it is the least intuitive default setting Apple has ever created where if you can change, you can have the volume buttons auto reorient themselves.

reorient themselves so you open it and then you always want to turn it clockwise sure volume buttons end up on the bottom right right in that by default up should be up and down should be down so by default the top button is volume down oh no that's when it's this way that way and there's a button there's buried in settings auto reorient volume buttons this is another thing Apple has solved already oh yeah it's already there and it's on by default so to make the button do the right thing you have to go find a hidden setting and turn it off. And I like even just trying to like write it in the review I was like

not this I can't make these sentences make sense. That was it was an all-time high of getting comments from editors who are like what are you saying? I don't get this at all. I'm like no there's on the other screen and this screen and this happens it's like I'm sorry you have to look at we also got a lot of comments from from Jake and Todd who are editing this they're like maybe this will make sense when I see the video. Yeah yeah we got it just like sort of like plaintively like maybe when I see Well, this was your whole thing about the way you instinctively rotate it being upside down. Yeah.

One of those things you described this to me, I was like that, none of what you just said is English words. And then you hold it and pick it up and rotate it and it's like, oh, I do kind of flip it. So in this case, the bumper case, which is ugly, but the only acceptable case. The other case is I keep calling it the old lady case. So if you, I don't know if you all can see this, I hope you can see this. This is the top of this case and it has a notch for the touch ID button and the camera control button. And for all, like everything you know about cases, that's the bottom. Yes.

Because that's where you would plug in a charger. Yeah. Right? Like everything you know about everything suggests this is the bottom. So every time you open it, you're like, I'm going to put the bottom at the bottom. That's actually the top. Yeah, that's silly. And then the USB is on the side.

We got a lot of questions about cases, actually, because a thing I forget as a person who proudly does not use a phone case is that everyone uses phone cases. Yeah. Are there literally, there's just the two from Apple. presumably there will be others, but I feel like foldable cases in general are hard to do well. Apples are particularly bad. Yeah, Alison, can you give us a demo of the disaster zone over here? Okay. The Karen case.

It has a kickstand. I love a kickstand. It just looks like you're in a restaurant. You're going to call the manager every time I see it. Can we? Yeah. So it covers the front display, first of all. So you have to do a move to open it up.

And it has, okay, here's the jump. scare it has this like elastic bit in the middle because it has to oh yeah it has to stretch over that it's i mean kind of clever um but it is it though it slides around to like an alarming degree i think yeah and then it turns into a thing i'm fidgeting with that just looks like your case is falling off yeah and in fact your case just fell off as you were doing that it just fell off when you're like i need to do the kickstand you like am i peeling the case off of the phone you know like there I got there but yeah I don't I don't love it it does remind me of a pair of shoes at Nordstrom rack yeah it's funny everyone has like arrives at kind of the same insult which is like this is an

irritating wine mom's case yeah like it just naturally it's the way you look at it's fine and maybe there was a whole genre of these in the early days five there's a lot of those around and boy did we all learn better all right we have a bunch of other stuff to get into but we should take a quick break and then we're going to dig back in. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. If you want to create a website that looks great, feels handcrafted,

and comes together fast and seamlessly, then look no further than Framer. It's a complete website platform, not just a builder, so teams can launch and keep improving their sites in one place. It helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites

faster than ever while getting every detail right. You're able to prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. On Framer, agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale, while people bring taste, judgment, and control. And that all takes place in the same workspace where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed, and published. Thousands of businesses from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build

their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash Verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine for frontier technology. You can find multi-agent AI in every enterprise roadmap right now. But here's the problem everyone's facing. Agents can pass messages but can't think together. These systems silently underperform through cognitive failures,

misreadings, unfairified claims, false consensus, and conventional monitoring can't detect them. Outshift by Cisco is building the fix with their new comprehensive resource, the Internet of Cognition. It's an open source guide that's a foundation for building multi-agent systems from design to production. The goal is to give agents shared context, shared memory and guardrails,

all to drive the results we actually expect from AI. You can lean on this resource to understand agentic AI's evolution and how it's shifted from isolated agents to orchestrated superintelligence. You can gain insights for how to future-proof your business by tackling complex challenges with multi-agent systems. You can read the paper, experience a demo, grab the code from outshift.com.

That's O-U-T-S-H-I-F-T.com. The new Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid is the most fuel-efficient cross-trek yet. That means less time filling your tank and more time filling your day. More court time. More ride time. More lake time. More camp time. More go time.

The new 2027 Subaru Cross-Trek hybrid. Consumer Reports top-rated subcompact SUV. Stop by your local Subaru dealership or visit Subaru.ca to learn more. Consumer reports is not indoors products or services. All right, we're back. A couple more hardware things we should talk about. The crease comes up every time anybody talks about these things. I'm looking at Nealai's phone as he's scrolling on one of the stupid floating apps in space.

I can see the crease. Like, it's there. I can see the crease. Are you, but like both of you, I think, have said you don't. What is it perceptively? Perceptually flat. Yeah, that's stupid. It's such a great phrase.

It is. It's very good. Um, how do you notice? They had a meeting. Oh, like imagine that you know, you're in the spaceship and you know, Greg Jaws, where's like, we're going to, we're having a meeting and he puts like $10 million with the VAPL executives in a room and he's like, how do we say you don't see it? And he just like stood there on a whiteboard and you're like almost invisible.

He's like, you're fired. Yeah, get out of here. Come back when you have a good idea. And they got to perceptually flat, which is just hilarious. Sure. Somebody got a raise for that and I'm excited for that person. Do you notice it? Like is it is the is the fact that one screen is two screens at all part of the experience

of using this phone? It does not bother me. And even on previous foldables where it's more pronounced and you feel it, you see it more, you kind of, at least I do, it sort of blends into the background for me. And when you're looking at the thing straight on, you know, it's not catching the light. So even if it is more pronounced. It hasn't bothered me. This is especially well hidden, I think.

There's something going on with your phone. We didn't put this in review, and I noticed it last night. And I said this house, and she got really offended with me. Your phone is so greasy. It's so much greasier than mine. And from where I'm standing, it's starting to get to, like, galaxy fold levels of crease seeing. Oh, no. Is it bothering you?

It's because it's, like, shiny and you can see it. So the crease is there. Yeah. And it's not less. there than on the Z folding. Okay. So the matte screen surface, which some people are saying is like a screen protector that's on top, just does an excellent job of diffusing the reflections of the screen. So it's perceptually flat. Okay. Did you ever have the instincts to peel off the screen protector? The second, the day I opened it, I did. Really? Because it looks like, it looks like

one of those peleys on a other screen. And I was like, oh, shouldn't do that. Yeah, been there. First, remember the first Galaxy Fold reviews? Just people breaking the phones. So I saw it when I was watching Vision Quest the night, and just the way the light from the TV was reflecting in a dark room, it made this look shiny, and you can just see it. It's the same ripple, exactly the same ripple as Z-Fold 8. And what's happening to Allison's, I'm not saying this is easy.

So our video team has greasy fingers. Someone was eating a pizza and then touched that screen, and it's greasier than the way mine is right now. interesting and it is more vis it's shiny I mean I do I see it from here you do have to work at it and I think we just need a little sprits you know yeah so there's something that you know it's like you can make a mat display it's like don't eat pizza with the phone I don't tell you like you shouldn't do that anyway strong disagreeing the whole beauty of my phone is I can hold it in one end and eat

pizza in the other hand I understand you got to unfold my nose I mean that's like the the secret to perceptually flat is the matte screen is the nanotexture screen and They're very proud of it. They're very proud of exactly how much it diffuses. I think Mr. Mobile had a great video with like the Apple team. Thoroughly enjoyed watching it. He did a great job.

And they just talked a lot about it. Yeah, it's Matt. Why do you think it's not Matt also on the outside? I was a little surprised by that. Because they don't need to make the outside perceptually flat. So you think it's purely the, because you could make the case that you want the nanotexture, the matte stuff on the inside because just the screen is larger and the bigger the screen, the more opportunity you have to be ruined by glare and reflections.

Yeah. Yeah. But you have that on the inside. And so it's like, well, wouldn't it also be nice to have this lovely matte screen that Apple seems to agree is better also on the outside. But maybe it just doesn't matter that much. Put mat screens on all the phones is where I'm at. I've been radicalized.

I think it's great. I mean, I see definitely the stuff you open the phone up for like reading something, watching a video, you are by definition leaving your house with this device. You know, having that bigger screen, have the mat finish on it makes. tons of sense. I think like dovetails very conveniently with, uh, we're hiding a crease thing. Um, but as a, I don't know, a matte screen enjoyer, I sure put it on the front. I love it. Let's do it. I think a lot of people are curious whether that would be like a thing and to me it's not. It's I think having this screen, which is the exterior screen, which is going to naturally get dirtier,

be easier to clean is a good thing. Yeah. Sure. That's that's fair. And I think especially, Like I'm torn on the inside screen being something you feel like you have to protect because like we're also scarred by the early days of the galaxy foldables where if a Spec of dust got in there it would just shred the phone to bits from the inside Maybe less worry something definitely got right perceptually flat aside and I do love the phrase it's it's accurate in its way Yes Greg really ran that team to the finish line. You know I mean? The display feels vastly more soft than any of the other foldables, partially because it's matte. So it has texture and it doesn't really have a lot of give.

Like right in the middle it has some give because that's where the hinge is. But other foldables, even the ones that have glass, I think the Z-fold8 is a glass screen technically. It's a very thin, flexible glass. It still feels soft and plastic-y and this does not have any of that. Interesting. Okay. Fair enough. We're getting a lot of questions about the cameras, which I think is actually, I expected this to be a very simple camera story, which is just like it has less camera.

and they're worse. The end, these are the trades with foldables. But Allison, I feel like you ran into this is actually, there are real pros and cons to this camera situation. Yeah, I mean, the fun with the foldable is getting to use, like from a camera perspective, you know, using these as a selfie camera with a preview on the cover screen, you can do fun stuff like this is now a tripod

and you're taking a time lapse. There's the adorable stuff, Snoopy animations, get your kid to look at the camera kind of thing. So there are like things you just can't do with a regular slab style phone. And I was really braced for like worse news from the camera that it was going to be like not good. The main camera is a smaller sensor, which all things being equal will not be as good. It is really not terrible, comparing it to the 18 Pro, which is. exactly what you want to hear on your $2,000 phone.

It's not dot, duck, dot, terrible. Yeah, it's really for, the bottom line is that it looks like it's oversharpening to kind of compensate for a little bit more softness. I mean, that kind of makes sense. Apple's just like revved up its software pipeline a little more. A worse sensor and, yeah, put the A20 Pro behind it. And did more algorithms. And then the reality of that is, boy, the phone gets hot when you use a camera a lot

because they're just revving that A20 pro underneath that camera as hard as they can. Interesting. Yeah, this seems to be one of the things a lot of reviewers noticed is like this, when you use this phone hard, especially FaceTime and the cameras think it's hot. Yep. If you do all the camera features at once, so if you do Kid Q and Smart Take and, you know, it's like automatically taking shots, like this thing is just like roasting you. It's like, wow, that's like enough so that it throttles performance to try to recover. Can I just say, by the way, that you just said. said Kid Q and Smart Take and my immediate reaction was like, oh, that's some Samsung shit right there. Yep. Like they're doing Samsung stuff right there. Yeah, 100%.

Here's some wacky stuff happening on the screen. The first thing Allison said about this phone, like in the first day was this is some Android shit. Because that first few days when I was like messy and none of the apps are optimized. Yeah. This is the most Android experience I've ever had my entire life. We were messaging each other. More so than Android. We're like, how does this work?

Did you get to this weird place in this phone? Yeah. Apple being like we can make insane phones too. Yeah. What do you want to have a phone with a bunch of settings you can't find? Did you see the video? Tim Cook this past few weeks has been in China, just at events at like Chinese universities and like shaking hands and doing this. I think that's his job now. Yeah, that's his new job. He's Apple's chief diplomat. He just travels around the world and is like, I love what you're doing here. That's his job. Would you like to see my phone?

Exactly. And he just had this quote where they asked him at the duo and he was like the market for foldables in China is second to none and we're excited to come and competed and you're like oh Apple likes to print and they showed up first and no one has ever had these ideas before but here's Tim Cook in China being like we know you like the crazy phones here's here's one interesting so our commenters are having an argument about the cameras as they are as they are want to do and I think they're making me realize something really interesting which is like normally we talk about these cameras and it's like okay well

yes they're a relatively iterative of improvement over the one that you bought or over the one that came out last year. They're a giant improvement over whatever phone you're using now, right? If you're shopping for a phone, your phone is probably somewhere between three and eight years old, it's going to be a huge improvement. The duo is weird in that it is geared at people who probably bought a phone last year. So like the path is not from like the 13 to the duo. Although shout out to our friend Kevin Ruse, who I know it did exactly that upgrade.

He was like, I'm holding out. for the foldable and I was like that's weird but here we are but this is a lot like this is an early adopter phone so presumably this is people who have not been sitting on really old phones and for them this might there might be real actual downgrades in the camera experience for me it's the telephoto like every time i went back to the 18 pro i would get the telephoto and be like oh this is nice i can take a picture of that i use it a lot with my kid um so that's i've been here uh not taking pictures of him for the past week, but that's going to be something I will miss.

Everyone's not telling me that they're upgrading from a 13 to a duo. Listen, 13 to duo people. I see you and we love you. But I think you're still for 13. I think you might still have a bigger sense around the 13. I'm not 100% sure. Interesting.

And so you're going to miss a bunch of, like if you have a 13 pro and you end up at an 18 pro, you will obviously see the difference. Maybe there'll be some huge step. I think you might not with the duo. Interesting. And I, calibrating exactly how far back in time you're going with the duo from an 18 Pro

is, will be just a fun adventure. Yeah. Like everyone's gonna take a bunch of photos. Like it's the same as a 14 or 15. But that's, in my estimation, that's the tradeoff here. You're getting the camera quality of several generations ago. Yeah, that makes sense. That's tough to stop on a $2,000 phone.

Like it is, it is the trade you have to make on pretty much all of these foldables. Although again, I think the Z-fold eight got much, much closer. Like it is, it is much closer to parity with other, The other Samsung foldable makes no camera compromises at all, right? Yeah, they went two directions. There's the one that's shaped like this and the cameras are okay. And then there's the book style, very thin one. That's the Z Fold8 Pro.

Ultra. The Ultra. Yes. Sorry. It's called Smart Take. It's a first take. When you use Smart Take on your Ultra. That's the one that's a TV remote.

That's how I think about that, that phone. No, I think, yeah, that set up. of trades is just hard and I get why it is necessary in a device like this I do want to say just for the record if you're gonna pick two cameras you do the normal one and the telephoto one not the normal one and the ultra wide one everyone wants regular and telephoto I don't know I don't know how no one has figured this out don't give me the you're super wrong I know I'm super I'm completely correct it's easier I'm gonna say this we're gonna we're gonna

let's get Nelai in trouble it's easier to get closer to something than farther away. Wow. That's a that's it. I'm going to need to sit with that for a while. Yep. I also don't agree at all because you yep you can just. See what I mean? This you got to now my sunset looks great. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I think there's a reason it's the ultra-oid because there was a generation of phones where it was a main and a telly. Yeah. And they all landed it in Maine and an Ultrude. And if you're supposed to take selfies with these two, you don't wanted telephoto up in. You can crop.

You cannot, allow you can generative AI the world around. Yeah. You're like, whatever. I saw the whole horizon. Just do that. It didn't even go outside. It took a picture for me. This, yeah, the commenters agree with me.

Don't read the comments. Don't worry about what they say. They're all 100% on my side. By the way, can I, this is, I think, a very important point. We didn't quite get to it in the review, because it's hard to test and it's hard to explain everything with the duo. Do you want 10 more minutes? more minutes on the concept of iPhone handoff but I know a lot of people myself

included our friend Casey Newton also thought this was gonna happen for him who assume that what they could do is keep their regular phone with a good camera and have that for the weekends and then seamlessly with the power of iPhone handoff use the duo at work or whatever and I this is my goal I'm gonna keep my 17 pro that's like the weekend phone when I just need to take a photo of the kids whatever and Apple will seamlessly hand the cell connection off between them. This only works with T-Mobile. It's going to cost you extra money.

Is it? It seems very likely that it's going to cost you extra money in all the carriers, but I think T-Mobile is actually charging you more money right now. It's like five bucks a month. It does not switch your Apple Watch. So your Apple Watch only remains paired to one device, which is a real bummer. Yeah.

And the actual experience of it is very smooth and very chill. but you have two active iPhones. So, like, one of them, it's just like things like Signal get very confused when you are doing this because they are built around you having one phone, right, and like pairing to one phone at a time. My whoop band is like furious that I have two phones right now because it's just built around one phone. So there's just like a whole universe of, and if you have AT&T, it's just like not even announced. Verizon is coming in the future. Okay.

Those of you with Project Gen.5s, sis, on the Dish network. You have it now for free. Welcome. It turns out you have one Motorola phone and an iPhone. So this is the dream, and I think Apple announced that feature, and they launched it, and launched their T-Mobile. They've got to re-architect how the watch works. They've got to make it so that having two active iPhones is a thing the entire iPhone ecosystem understands,

and they got to bring into all the carriers. So I know a lot of people have this dream, and I was like, should we put like a box in the review? And I was like, this box will be 2,000 words long just to begin explaining what's going. on here. Yeah. But even that a year from now when that is more refined, that might be the whole answer to this question. Interesting. I'm so mad that they've made me advocate for ESIM. I'm like, just switch your ESM. Like, solves it. It's free. If you're doing iPhone to iPhone works great. That is true. Yeah. Have you done an ESM switch? I tried to do it once in AT&T and Apple. In classic Apple fashion, they make it seem so scary. Yeah, right. They're like, this will deactivate your phone.

And you're like, wait, that's what I want. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's, The goal is to deactivate this stuff. That's the goal. Yeah. That's what we're doing here. Talk to me about multitasking, which is a thing I think every foldable is trying to figure out. Like you brought up the Z Fold 8 Ultra. And the whole pitch for that device is you can run two apps side by side like a boss.

Like that's literally basically Samsung's tagline. This thing seems to have some slightly wacky ideas about how many apps you can run and in what ways. What have you guys found about the like doing a bunch of power user stuff on the duo? This is like babies first foldable. Honestly, you've got two apps side by side. That's it pretty much. You can't, you know, on Samsung phones, you can kind of slide and resize the windows to fill different space. Another thing the iPad does really well.

The iPad's side by side is really powerful now. Yeah. No, this is, it'll show you. It'll be like, look, you can scoot this and it goes right back. So you compare the two apps in that split view and kind of see. and kind of send that off into the app switcher and come back to it. Wait, can I ask a dumb question about that?

Yeah. So that's one of the things I really like about the way that says is you can pair two apps. For me, it's like I want my email and my calendar next to each other and I wanna be able to see them. But then if you go to open your email separately, will it let you open another instance of your email or does it go right to the split screen thing?

This is a thing the iPad has been reckoning with forever and finally solved where now you can have multiple instances of an app open at once. And it's vastly better. You can do that with Safari. You can't do it at most apps. Well, you can get to this state where you have two apps open and like Netflix playing in the corner.

Sure. But that's very iPad-y. Old iPad, yeah. Okay. This is like before iPad got weird ideas about Stage Manager, that was what you could do on the iPad. Oh, no, it brings up the pair. Okay.

Yeah. That's nice. I think that's fine. Yeah. It's not as like power user as I think some people might want, but it's probably the simpler version of this to understand. Yeah. Yeah.

I would say not a power user phone. The Z-Fold 8-1. was just playing with it and it's like you want three apps go for it you can you can do three apps you can resize this one and make it little and make it big um which is fun like i enjoy that i like putting Spotify in a little window and then an email in a big window or any of that um this is very much like on training wheels we don't want to overwhelm you or break anything two apps what you get okay nila you did show me the thing where you can have a video playing up top and then an app down below it and that I like a lot.

Easily the messiest thing to do on this one. If I wish to like, go figure it out. Go ahead. There's a YouTube icon. All right, I'm ready to do this now. There were a whole bunch of people who are like, we don't believe you guys that it'll do this because we tried it a bunch of times. Yeah. The video team was fully like, are you sure this?

You've already failed. One of the wildest things about Neelai is that Neelai has history turned off for his YouTube. So you open up YouTube and just no recommendations appear. It's amazing. Like it is it's probably the healthy correct way to live your life but it is alarming Okay, so that's gone. I don't know what just happened You've already failed the thing that you thought you were gonna do it was supposed to go to picture and picture To get YouTube play and I have YouTube premium I have all the stuff

YouTube is not optimized for the joy so it doesn't work so you can try it with a Netflix you you you You tricked me Patel I did trick you because the most obvious thing that you think you're gonna do is watch a YouTube video while doing anything else Yeah, so what you have to do is you have to find an app that supports this behavior which is again not YouTube for some reason it is YouTube TV so I've watched an infinite amount of broadcast television on YouTube TV nice so YouTube TV or Netflix or Apple TV they all support this feature so you open a video you start playing the video you close that app and then you get your PIP video that pit video will still not have the button that makes it play at the top in

portrait mode right so then you got to get the phone into portrait and keep in mind you were just in a video app so you almost certainly had the phone and landscape so yeah I rotate takes a portrait, then you got to open another app, and at that point, a button, the world's tiniest button will show up in the pit video, in the pit window, and then you can put a video at the top. Good Lord. And like, none of that is sensible.

No. It's clearly not how it's supposed to work. Yeah. It's like they have some pit window mechanics, and they just added a button to it. But what you really want to do is grab that window with your thumb and, like, pin it to the top. Yes. And they'll get there in a year. Yeah.

I mean, I think that's right. Again, the thing that is actually giving me hope about this phone is you have yet to describe a thing that feels fundamentally flawed about it. Like, again, unless you think it's just the wrong shape and size, which I don't. I think it's too small. That's it. That's the number one thing I have for you is fundamentally. I think it's too small.

To me, I think the small is a feature more than a bug in a lot of ways. But all of this stuff is stuff to be figured out. And Apple is good at generally looking at this stuff and figuring it out over time. And they will come out next year and be like, oh, all these dumb settings that were turned on, now they're off. And that'll be great. But I think part of what I'm so struck by with this phone, and I've been fighting with both of you about whether we like it or not all week, is there is some sort of expectation that comes

with it's an iPhone that Apple has just done over time. And if they had presented this more like this is a completely new kind of device that we've made, here is the very first one. Like, nobody expected the Vision Pro to be without its insanities. The Vision Pro before it launched was being framed as a prototype. Yes. This is a research project. Right.

And so I think you just, the level of expectation goes down, except for that it's $3,500. Maybe that's a bad example. But I think... $2,000 to start and $32. But with something like this, like people are going to buy this as their main phone. And you're going to get a lot of people who walk into an Apple store and this is on the list of things you might conceivably buy and I just feel like all the things you're describing are things that those people should not be required this is what again I'm gonna just come

back to the iPad I think every anybody who walks in an Apple store and sees this phone it's gonna make oh it's an iPhone when it's closed and it's an iPad when it's open right they will just make that assumption which is what so many people have been wanting for years it's just especially you put it next to an iPad mini they're the same size yeah so you have a decade of teaching people that the iPad exists more than a decade at this point I think And instead, something else is going to happen. And a bunch of apps need to get optimized for it.

And Apple made that decision. They seem very set in that decision. And I, that is the one that I think will get litigated over the next year. Is, is this thing just going to have to be an iPad? And our app developer is going to make duo specific apps. And then they're going to realize that they've made apps that are perfect for the iPad Mini and then do that. And at some point, that is just a lot of apps to make and a lot of auto layout inside of code. What are we doing here? It is a lot of things. As Tedward in our comments just pointed out

next year is the 20th anniversary of the iPhone, which would be a terrific time to figure all of this out. We have one more break to take before we get out of here. Let's take it. We'll be back in just a sec. Then we're going to finish out. Be right back. The new Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid is the most fuel efficient cross-track yet. That means less time filling your tank and more time filling your day. More court time. More ride time. More lake time. Camp time. More go time. The new 2027 Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid. Consumer Reports top rated subcompact SUV.

Stop by your local Subaru dealership or visit Subaru.ca to learn more. Consumer Reports is not indoors products or services. At precisely 8.23 p.m. Roger Kwan was not waiting for a table outside his favorite restaurant with his girlfriend. So a passing sports coupe did not splash slush all over her, making her question why she was dating him. And a second car did not splash her again, confirming her belief. All because Roger skipped it, stayed in, and with the skip app, ordered the best chicken tika masala she'd ever had. Confirming Roger might just be the one.

Way to go, Raj. Skip to the good part. In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game. Ryan's style is really gunned and gold. And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high. Brian James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world.

I'm Michelle Shepard and from CBC Podcasts and the Toronto Star, The Most Wanted Olympian. The Most Wanted Olympian. Available now on Spotify. All right, we're back. I wish I could describe to both of you the FOMO that just happened when we went to Rake and you both picked up your duos and started goofing around them. I'm just sitting here like a loser with an iPhone 17. Yeah, your friend isn't told in half. This is awful.

So this is actually one of the things I think matters a lot about this phone is it looks different in a way that is sick and have you both gotten reactions to this phone? You've been like out in the world using it. It's a weird time being a reviewer because you're like sort of supposed to hide it, but also like our video is just both of you out in the world using this very obvious foldable phone that a lot of people are paying attention to. Have you, have you gotten double takes and reactions from people? Well, it's like we've been a little careful, you know, there's, we are. So no one from Apple is listening to this. Okay, you can tell us, you can tell us the truth, Allison. Yeah. No, I, okay, so I did bring it, like I was traveling with it as my primary phone. I got to the airport and I was a little bit like, well, the iPhone do. I got up to the counter to check my bag and I showed the lady my boarding pass.

He was like, what phone is that? I was like, oh my gosh. Don't worry about it. Right off the bat. No, I think there is, like, people are aware of folding phones and they're aware there's now going to be an Apple folding phone. And the mix is intriguing. And I don't know.

I was like, well, I got to use this thing. I'm going to live my life. So I put it on my tray table on the flight and watch TV on it and nobody put me on. TikTok or anything. Let me just. What about you, do you know? Can I just show you this?

Please. All the apps are going to get updated. Everything's going to be fine. Oh no, what just happened? I'm just like, I promise you that there is just vibe coded slop happening in this app situation. I just try to open a browser like a tech crunch link on threads and this is what it chose to do. Oh, that's not great.

We have a, we have an in-app browser on the left side that is truncated. And it's happening. It sort of opened on just nothing happening on the right. Emptiness on the right side. It's why I just, I just, I just, I promise you, like you have to acknowledge the reality in what you live and we live in the reality of vibe-coded slop.

And so all the apps will be updated and it's gonna happen right away is true because we live in the time of AI vibe-cloded slop. Sure. And then there's gonna be a lot of weird AI-vip-ed-cloded slop. Okay, so the best case scenario for others should be Apple's apps, which presumably have been duo-fied properly.

Are they shining examples of what you can do? Like, do you open up Apple's apps and it all suddenly sort of makes sense when you when you open the inner screen you're like this is beautiful I love this app oh no I don't know what you just pulled so it's just my Apple sent us they sent us Instagram edits which is like a great app yeah on this thing like it's fun to edit video on this thing here's Imovie huh Apple's forgotten app yep remember when Apple invented video editing and then the whole world became

video and Apple's like Instagram edits is fine that is pure first day of the iPad when they were like all the iPhone apps work and all they was just black rectangles did nothing. They updated pages and sheets in Keynote. Okay. So they're good. They are, they fill the screen. They're not, they're the iPad apps.

You know, I'm just gonna keep come back to this. Yeah. There is a solution and it looks like the iPad mini. And so if you can get there, you're fine. Instagram only just put out an iPad app. There's no one on Instagram that knows what to do. They just ask Claude. Like in the most obvious way,

they just ask Claude what to do. And Cloud was like, here's some Garber. My only assumption would be that there is some, and please commenters, if you know the answer to this better than I do, let me know. I would assume that it is somewhere between hard and impossible to run an iPad version of an app and an iPhone version of an app on the same device. Because they are not the same app. They are versions of an app. And Apple has universal app bundles and you don't want to overload everyone's phone by sending the binaries of 10 different things. Right. And I get it.

You are not loading all of the things every time you download. But if you, for example, built the most lucrative company in the history of the world on the back of total control of app distribution. Okay, so I'm in video. Let's see this. All right. No, Apple. I have a leather jacket. Apple services revenue.

The thing that made them the most richest company in the world for a long time is total rock solid control. Yes. Of the app store. You have solutions to this problem. Sure. And at the very least, you can bully developer. into playing your games. I do think I'm fascinated to see... You mean like bullying developers into supporting the Homeview by making sure their

carplay entitlements automatically. It's going to go great and then just telling them that they work whether you like or not. It's very funny that Apple was like we're going to be more of a bully about carplay at Home View than iPad apps on the duo. It is a little weird. Well part of me wonders I mean and Apple has said that the the demand for this was bigger than they expected and I think given how far out pre-orders have been that's clearly the case. Like Apple is Apple is not a company that couldn't have made more of them if they wanted to. So I think clearly demand is outstripped anybody's expectations, including apples. And maybe that means a bunch of people who I think have been burned by spending a lot of time

and energy updating to support every little Apple thing that they eventually stopped caring about, which there's been a lot of recently, maybe that is going to be impetus for more developers to get on board because actually this is a piece of hardware and thus a sort of screen size that is worth supporting. Like think of all the people who they were like, oh, do stuff with camera control. Sure. I think if you just asked 20 people on the street if their phone had camera control, most of them would be like, what is that? That's true. So here's the other, I mean, the other just concession to reality. The dynamic island. This is what I mean. There's just been a million things they've been asking developers to do kind of for nothing. And I've been hearing from developers

who are like, I spend every summer between April and September with my hair on fire, waiting to see what they're going to announce and then trying to develop it. And then no one uses it because nobody cares about the dynamic island. But maybe if the duo is a hit and it seems like it is a hit, it will bring everybody along. But you haven't had the experience of 10,000 apps launching the thirstiest live activities in the world. Whenever an Arsenal game starts, I get four live activities. The backers are playing.

It's definitely time for the Google search app to launch a live activity for some reason. All the microdramas that were hacked on this phone have lots of live activities. Yeah. It's like there's some stuff that makes sense for developers and others. And you got to open the phone. It's a different experience and they're all going to want to look good. I'm just saying there are easy routes. There is vibe coded slop.

There is just updating to 271. And then there's what will make the phone meaningfully different, which is a lot of thoughtful care and attention from developers. And that is going to take more time. Yes. And that's, I think that's fine. Like if you like me open to link and threads and saw it break and sort of like felt the thrill of excitement that I just felt,

Like, you're going to have the time of your life with this phone. Like, I really want to come back to that. Like, if you were a huge gadget nerd and you're like, I broke it. Amazing. Yeah. I want to tell my friends, you're going to have a good time. Yeah. And then if you're just like, this is what he's saying is a first generation of, early adopter device.

Can I tell you my story about someone seeing this phone? Sure. So Bill Gates is on Dakota tomorrow. And he was like, do you have it? And I was like, I don't know, man. And he was, he pulled out his trifles. Oh, my gosh. TRIFled user Bill Gates.

You brought a knife to a gunfight, baby. It's like, look at how big these web pages are. It's right. Wait, Bill Gates, like, earnestly has a trifle. It has trifle. Oh, my gosh. That rocks. Oh, boy.

I should shout out to Mystery Box 85 in the comments. He says, can I advocate for iOS and iPad OS becoming one OS again? There's a way to solve a bunch of problems all at once. I'm just saying 20th anniversary next year, Apple is not one to let things like this not be celebrated. We are expecting big iPhone fireworks next year. I would not be surprised to see a lot of these structural messes start to go away starting next year. It's just a theory that I have. What do we do about the price?

We have to come back to the fact this thing costs $2,000. I think we are resolute on if you are just a regular person who does not want to spend a lot of time thinking about their phone, don't buy this one. I think we're on a really exciting path towards like next year and the year after being plausible answers to like your next upgrade might be a duo. And that's cool and that's exciting. I don't think most people should buy this phone today. Does the existence of the $2,000 price dampen it even further? Or is that just the price of doing business for foldable phones right now?

Alison, what do you think? I think it's the price of the luxury, being the first person out in your friend group or out on the street with a duo and being like, wow, that's the duo. So it's you can buy everything that it does in multiple devices for a lot less. Yeah, you can buy an iPhone and an iPad for substantially less than a duo. Great iPhones and iPads. So that is, I think, I think it's expected, you know, like the price is shocking if you

just tell someone on a straight like, you want to buy a $2,000 phone, they would like laugh at you. But in this, for what Apple's doing here. It is the cost of doing business, of getting in early, of watching threads break on the inner screen. Yeah. And like I said, I find all this delightful. Yeah. How can I break your product as a real homework of the reverse review process?

And it has been very hard for iPhones for a very long time. Like purely from a, it's fun to do this job when products are weird perspective. It has been such a delight to see this thing come to life because like it gets harder and harder to review the iPhone every year because It's the same damn. There's a reason that every year we do like 45 minutes on the camera and the iPhone camera team literally opens like our conversations with we meet again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like, it's just the only thing. Like what new color is there?

Yeah. But this is like, as you've both been saying, this is full of new ideas. Some of them are very good. Some of them are very bad. And that is just on its face exciting. The story of this product is they did not lean on the iPad. And I'm fascinating choice. And there's no outcome other than that.

No outcome other than two years from now, this thing in the iPad will look substantially the same. I tend to think so too. Did either of you buy one? Nope. It's telling. Did you buy one? No.

I asked my wife, I was like, I knew I wasn't getting a review in it. And I was like, Anna, be real with me. If I get an iPhone duo, are we going to have problems? She goes, how much is it? And I was like, if you buy that phone, I'll kill it. So then I have this role moment of being like, okay, well, I've hidden new gadgets from Anna before. Oh no.

I can just. I've definitely played the like, oh, no, I have this one. I've had this for a long time, these new headphones that look brand new. I've had these before. But yeah, I was like, I don't think I can hide. I just now have a giant flip phone. That's what handoff is for, your secret phone. A year from now, we're all being going to hand it off phones left and right.

Looking forward to it. All right, anything else on yours mind before we get out of here? I think we've covered it. We've talked a lot about apps. I'm still mad about the right rail. Our commenters, once again, agree with me about the two cameras. We should get out of here. Thank you to everybody who has been watching and hanging out in the comments.

The AMA with the two of you on the website, I think is still up and going. So if you have more questions, go in there. We'll be in there answering questions. Thank you to our team for getting all this done. Thank you to our video team who has essentially worked every single second of the last week to get the video up. Go watch the video. It's like six and a half hours long. It's a terrific review.

You guys did a great job. I hope everybody gets some sleep. Thank you all. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll. We make Chevrolete vehicles. but what you do with them makes them so much more.

You make them mobile offices, your kids' personal taxi, a concert shuttle, your hockey equipment locker, your recording studio. We make a Chevrolet, but you make it a Chevy. Discover yours at Chevrolet.ca. For most of the history of professional sports, there was a wall between the game and gambling. Then suddenly it was everywhere. Ontario is all in on sports betting.

Make every moment. More with band do. But that wasn't supposed to include the players themselves. For records for, Jonté Porter is under NBA investigation. Athletes are the perfect gamblers. Understood. The Big Bet. Available now on Spotify.