iPhone Duo: The Fact Sheet on Apple’s First Foldable — Hours Before the Keynote

The picture the leaks paint is remarkably consistent. The iPhone Duo is a book-style foldable: closed, you use a ~5.5″ OLED outer display; opened, it becomes a ~7.8″ panel in a nearly square, iPad-mini-like format. At roughly 4.5 mm unfolded it would be the thinnest iPhone ever built, closing to about 9 mm — with a liquid-metal hinge engineered to keep the crease barely visible.

• Silicon — the 2 nm A20 Pro, the same chip expected in the iPhone 18 Pro, reportedly with 12 GB of RAM.
• Authentication — Touch ID in the side button instead of Face ID; the housing is said to be too thin for the TrueDepth system.
• Cameras — Wide plus Ultra Wide on the back, usable folded or unfolded, plus a front camera on each display. No telephoto.
• Battery — two cells, one per half, with a combined 5,400–5,800 mAh and MagSafe charging.
• Price ladder — $2,000 for 256 GB at the bottom, roughly $3,000 for the top configuration. Euro prices land tonight.
• Timing — on sale “as early as October”, a few weeks after the iPhone 18 Pro models.

The Duo shares the evening with the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max: same A20 Pro chip, a more efficient LTPO+ display with a smaller Dynamic Island, a variable-aperture main camera rumored at least for the Pro Max — and new colors, with dark cherry and a light blue joining silver. Leakers also expect price increases of $100–300 over the 17 Pro generation. Pre-orders are expected for Saturday, September 12, with the launch on September 18.

Beyond the phones: Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 with a new continuous heart-rate feature, possibly AirPods 5 with the H3 chip, and a first smart-home display. Just as important is what is not on stage: the standard iPhone 18, the 18e and the Air 2 move to spring 2027 — the split launch we analyzed in the staggered iPhone 18 launch is becoming reality tonight.

For the trade, the Duo matters less as a product than as a price signal. A $2,000-to-$3,000 iPhone stretches the top of Apple’s price ladder by a full rung — and everything below it suddenly looks more reasonably priced. That effect reaches the used market with a delay: when the ceiling rises, residual values under it gain room. As used stock, the Duo itself will stay irrelevant for a while; first-generation foldables ship in small volumes, and meaningful quantities only reach the second-hand channel after the first upgrade cycles.

The commercially relevant event tonight is the iPhone 18 Pro launch. Every September keynote re-prices the entire used market within weeks — the outgoing 17 Pro generation steps down a rung, the 16 Pro follows, and buying windows open for anyone stocking B2B inventory. We described the mechanism in why every launch re-prices the used market; the calendar to watch is the weeks after September 18.

One detail worth knowing before you go looking: Apple has not published a single image of the device, and no working unit has ever been photographed. Every picture in circulation is either a CAD render or a photo of a plastic dummy built for case manufacturers — which is why the illustration above is drawn to scale from the leaked panel dimensions rather than borrowed from a leak. The first real photos arrive tonight.

The keynote streams tonight from 7 p.m. CEST (10 a.m. PT) on apple.com, in the Apple TV app and on YouTube. The leaked numbers above become official — or get corrected — the moment the stream starts. Either way, the confirmed Euro prices arrive tonight.