The iPhone Duo isn’t just a folding phone

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. On Wednesday, Apple held its annual September product launch at its Steve Jobs Theater. The event will be remembered for two debuts. One was the long-awaited announcement of the company’s first folding phone, the iPhone Duo. The other was the first public appearance of its new CEO, John Ternus, who appeared briefly in person and at length in the prerecorded keynote presentation. I came to Cupertino looking forward to the time I’d get with the folding iPhone in Apple’s post-keynote demo area. Though hardly enough to render a firm verdict on the device, that hands-on experience left me impressed with the thinking that Apple has put into the device. But I also left mulling over Ternus’s unexpectedly intriguing framing of the role that iPhones—folding or otherwise—play in the AI era. First, let’s talk about the Duo. By any measure, Apple is an exceptionally late arrival to the folding-screen party. Unlike the 2007 iPhone, the Duo is not a ground-up reimagining of a product category. Instead, it sits squarely in the same class as existing folding phones from Samsung and other makers of Android phones. Even its distinctive, pas…