Apple's foldable is not going to stay a one-off for long, and the name it launched with is the clearest sign of that. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman wrote in his September 13 Power On newsletter that the iPhone Duo branding was picked partly because it leaves room for more models and that plenty of people inside Apple had expected iPhone Ultra instead.
Inside Apple, the expectation was iPhone Ultra
Gurman reports that many people within the company thought Apple would go with the Ultra name, which is more or less what the rest of us expected too after months of reports pointing that way.
His read on why Duo won instead is that Apple wanted three letters to sit alongside Air and Pro, and a word that describes what the thing physically is. That part is his inference rather than anything Apple has said, though it does fit how the rest of the lineup is named.
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This is the forward-looking part. Gurman finds it easy to foresee an iPhone Duo Max with a larger display, or a Duo SE or Duo mini as either a stripped-down model or a clamshell, and he points out that an iPhone Ultra Max or an iPhone Ultra SE would not make much sense as names.
None of those are leaked products, to be clear. They are his read of what the branding allows, which is a different thing from a roadmap.
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Samsung is the useful comparison here, since it already sells a whole shelf of them: the wider Galaxy Z Fold 8, the taller Fold 8 Ultra and the Z Flip 8 clamshell. Apple has exactly one foldable and no answer whatsoever to the Flip.
Apple still has nothing to put against Samsung's clamshell. | Image by PhoneArena
A clamshell would be the most consequential of the models Gurman floats because that smaller and cheaper shape has done more than anything else to get regular buyers into foldables. It is the part of the market Apple currently sits out, and a suffix is a much easier way in than inventing another brand.
Which foldable iPhone would get your money?
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I think the family was the plan from the start
I went back through our naming coverage from the past year, and the whole Fold to Ultra to Duo run that ended on stage this month reads a little differently now.
Apple does not really name one phone at a time. Air, Pro and now Duo are three-letter platforms built to survive a decade of variants, so picking the one that takes a suffix suggests the second and third models were already sketched out somewhere.
What to watch for
The Duo does not even reach buyers until October 23, so a wider family is a plan-shaped guess for now. I would not be surprised to see a second shape turn up sooner than people expect, and if it is the clamshell I will be first in line to try it, since that is the foldable I keep recommending to anyone curious who is not ready to spend $2,000.
More on the foldable iPhone and how it got its name:
Johanna Romero is a Senior News Writer at PhoneArena, covering mobile technology news across Android, iOS, wearables, and the Google ecosystem she knows best. Drawing on 15 years in IT and tech support from 2007 to 2022, she brings a user-friendly eye for the practical features and lesser-known tricks readers care about. Google named her an official #TeamPixel member in 2022, and she also reviews the latest devices on her YouTube channel, JoJo the Techie.
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