Duo
Ten years ago, I was holding a grudge with Apple for having removed the headphone jack from recent iPhones in the fervent hope of selling more Bluetooth headphones. Then they came out with the iPhone X, which still didn't have any headphone jack, and was also tremendously expensive, all things considered.
What it had was a vision of a speedier, more fluid user interface, where movement from one point to another happened at the speed of the user and totally under their control. This was clearly better, and there were, all other things considered, people who tore up heaven and earth to establish these qualities in iOS. What's more, this was also setting a bar for the future, in that slowdown and jank would be so much more immediately noticeable with this user interface. I'm not going to say that five year old iPhones don't feel sluggish, just that by and large, I've never seen that aspect of it be anything less than buttery smooth. I saw that as a symbol of health, swallowed hard, and gave them my money even though I remained upset.
Since history doesn't repeat itself but does rhyme, all of this weighs on my mind when I consider the iPhone Duo.
There is no doubt that there have been difficult decisions made and taken to their conclusion. From what I've seen so far, I do not disagree that the focus on maintaining the same aspect ratio both inside and outside the sceen pays dividends, or that continuity from one screen to the next, or indeed one arrangement to the next, has been tackled as a much higher priority with results that look less like a hacky proof of concept.
Those aspects aside, the user interface changes annoy me. The closed form factor is asymmetric, lopsided and visually unpleasant, full of false centers and balances. The status bar has been killed off, replaced by an annoying charm, and the infantilizing Liquid Glass-ification of buttons now comes to the fore as probably being necessary if your goal is to shove buttons and choices by the wagonload into the sidebar.
I don't see a single improvement in actually using any of the apps in these user interfaces. I see some improvements in the general user experience in terms of putting up two things simultaneously, in a more accessible way than the iPad's ever-changing annual take on this concept, and I don't mean to pretend that it doesn't exist, but you have to have a lot of money for that to be worth it. I see a lot of change-for-change's sake, dropped on developer heads with the intention that everyone go out and adapt everything, in a way that is only slightly less insulting than the debacle of the Vision Pro launch, which assumed developer participation. (The Duo will sell better and be in more hands, and there will be more pressure for developers to adapt to it.)
When the iPhone X launched, and became available later than the other models that year, it was a shining star. What it offered just felt right, stupid notch aside. The iPhone Duo remains interesting, and is clearly a technical tour-de-force that is the outcome of deep thinking about what a foldable phone can be. But the things that sparkle in my mind when I consider it is just the details. They are very important details that yield a noticeably different product, but they are sprinkles on top of a downward slope in user interface design at Apple that does not care any longer about what users or developers want. All that's important is for this year's device to uproot fundamentals and demand that everyone conform to an arbitrary new intuition.
iPhone X made the whole phone easier and faster to use, and left you in control, while barely asking developers to make any concessions at all. iPhone Duo, in full seagull management style, asks everyone to reconsider everything, at tremendous cost, for a remarkably small improvement once the glitz has been accounted for.
There is an alternative foldable that makes different choices and produces a different result. I don't know if it's in development; I don't know if the Duo was chosen to go first because it makes the most impact (or because it is physically smaller and therefore somehow still less exorbitant). I will remain hopeful that future devices make different tradeoffs and go another way.