The rumor mill had the phone and not the name. Apple's first foldable is the iPhone Duo, announced at today's keynote, John Ternus's first as CEO, and it arrives with the shape everyone expected: a 5.4-inch cover screen, a 7.6-inch inner display, Touch ID in the side button, the A20 Pro, and a titanium frame. It does not arrive in September. Pre-orders open October 16 and it ships October 23, a month past the dates the week's rundowns were sure of.
Score the leaks and the shape wins. The hinge is an assembly of more than 100 parts with a magnet array built in, the display is laminated so its layers slide against each other like pages, and a nano-texture finish on the inner panel is there to hide the fold. The misses were the ones that mattered to buyers. MagSafe is in, with Qi2 fast charging to half in about 30 minutes, which settles the argument the last rundown started. There is no dedicated telephoto lens, but the 48-megapixel main camera carries a 2x optical crop, so the "no telephoto" line was half right. The inner selfie camera hides under the display, a first on an iPhone. The cover screen keeps its hole-punch.
Both panels run ProMotion and Always On at 3,000 nits peak, which is Pro-class on a hinge. The two batteries, one per half, are rated at up to 31 hours of video on the inner screen and 44 on the cover, and the phone is eSIM only everywhere it sells. It runs iOS 27.1 out of the box, comes in Star White and Night Sky, and starts at 256 GB with a 2 TB ceiling.
Ternus called it the most transformational change to iPhone since the original, which is the sentence any CEO would say about a folding phone. The truer claim is smaller: Apple shipped the boring parts of a foldable first, the hinge, the glass, an IP68 rating, and let everyone else's first-generation folds find out how those fail.
For anyone who read the week's leaks, the corrections are the story. Ultra was never the name, the leaked cases that pointed to MagSafe in last week's iPhone Ultra event preview were right, and the September pre-order date in the last Ultra rundown was off by five weeks. iPhoners who want one should treat October 16 at 5 a.m. Pacific as the real date; the Nikkei production numbers in the ranked iPhone Ultra leaks still argue for a sellout.
