The iPhone Duo Sold Out in Hours, and Paying Now Buys You a Place in a Queue

Apple opened iPhone Duo preorders on 16 October at 8am Eastern. The store fell over minutes before it started. The first batch, the one that ships on 23 October, was gone almost immediately, and anyone ordering now is looking at delivery next year. Apple called the demand extraordinary, which is the kind of sentence a company writes when the answer to “when does mine arrive” is “we are not sure”. It starts at $1,999.

Here is my problem with the whole exercise, and it is not the phone. You hand over two thousand dollars today and you do not know whether the thing turns up in three weeks or in March. I do not pay for something I do not have. That is not a principle I invented for foldables, it is how I buy everything. Money leaves when the box arrives.

The queue is also the least interesting reason to skip this one. The interesting reason is that it is a first generation screen that folds.

I keep hardware for five to eight years. My home theater is past eight and still working because I repaired it myself. Apply that to a display with a hinge running through the middle of it and the question is not whether the Duo is good in October, it is what the panel looks like after four years of being bent twice a day. Nobody can tell you that yet, including the people who get theirs on 23 October. Every folding phone that came before this one answered that question badly for a while, and the answers got better with the second and third try.

So, do I buy it? I wait for the second one. Not because the first is bad, I have not touched it, but because the part most likely to fail is the part that is new, and in a year the people who paid $1,999 will have told us exactly how it held up. That information is worth more than being early.

If you are in the queue already, nothing here says you are wrong. Just know what you bought: a place in line, and a bet on a hinge.