Comment by joshstrange
16 hours ago
$2K starting price is rough. I’ve upgraded my iPhone every year since my first phone, the 3GS. It’s one of a few “splurge”-type things I allow myself. It’s a hobby and just fun to play with the new hotness. This year might break the cycle.
I don’t care for the 18 Pro colors, I still love my orange 17 Pro, and I’m not sold on the Duo (functionality or price).
I might still end up with a Duo but I’m very much on the fence. I’ll tell myself it’s for development/testing reasons, or just to play with the newest offering but I’m just not sure. I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did. Yes, it’s very different from the AVP and SwiftUI will almost certainly make this process easier but I’m still not sure.
> I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did
Pretty sure that developer interest is not to be a problem. The Duo will sell more units in a month (or less) than every AVP ever sold.
Apple told developers in June at WWDC to not assume fixed screen sizes. Well-written apps will work on any screen size thanks to Apple's APIs.
Some apps will need to be tweaked to take advantage of some Duo features no doubt, but I suspect that's not going to be a deal breaker.
Agree - this is going to have pretty wide adoption.
I’m in the exact same situation. Been upgrading every year for a long time (via the Upgrade Programme, making doing so more or less “free”). I was absolutely jazzed they finally did an orange phone, and this is the first year in a while that…I just don’t care. The Duo is far more expensive than I could ever entertain (plus buying a first-gen Apple product has never been a good idea), and there is quite literally nothing in the 18 Pro that makes me want to upgrade.
I may be swayed by a second gen Air in the spring, as I would like a lighter phone that feels less of an imposition in my pocket and my life in general. But it almost certainly won’t have the zoom camera, which has unexpectedly become one of my favourite and most used features of the 17 Pro. Why the two-camera phones all come with the ultrawide instead of the telephoto is baffling to me. Perhaps I’m an anomaly, but I never use the ultrawide lens.
> making doing so more or less “free”
except for those monthly payments you never get to stop making, yeah it's free.
Why do you think I put “free” in quotes? Realistically I was never going to keep the phone longer than the two year finance term anyway, because back when I started doing it a two-year old phone would be really starting to show its age running newer software. So I could either pay monthly and get a phone every two years, or pay monthly and get a phone every year.
Of course, these days a three or four or more year old phone is often still perfectly usable even for a tech enthusiast.
Just checked the price in my home country (Brazil) and it's fantastic: the Duo starts at BRL 21999, which is roughly USD 4300.
Even in Canada, it starts at $3000
This is decent used car territory.
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> I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did
Apple can force iOS devs to do whatever they want. It may be basic support, but Apple devs will do whatever Apple tells them to do.
You could do the leasing route if you upgrade every year. Might pinch less.
If leasing a fucking phone isn't a sign of the times then I don't know what is.
People have been leasing phones since at least the mid naughties, they just did it via their carrier. I distinctly remember standing in the Alltel store in 2006-ish, before it got gobbled up by ATT, and wondering if I could afford the extra $15/mo that the new Nokia candybar phone would run me. The only thing that's new is that Apple is offering it directly.
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Most people are short-term thinkers if you talk to anyone around you at work, school or at home and if you merely suggest saving and controlling their spending briefly to buy something in the future good luck. I have given up.
I just buy more shares of blue chip companies and let them pay in the future for anything I want to buy.
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If leasing a fucking phone isn't a sign of the times then I don't know what is.
People have been leasing and renting phones since the 1930's. I guess you missed out on the Ma Bell century.
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Wait for 2nd gen, always
I don’t think it’ll face the developer interest problem. Devs go where the money is and consumers seem to love foldables.
I like that blue though.
It's high, but Apple's financing arm has it at $84/month, which is a bit more stomachable if you really want it.
I don't know, $1999 seems almost kinda reasonable considering how much an iPhone Pro costs and how utterly fucked the current memory prices are.
To get close to the same functionality as the Duo, you'd buy an iPhone 18 Pro ($1199) plus an iPad mini ($599); that gets you to $1,798. If you want more storage than the entry level iPhone 18 Pro or iPad mini, you're going to surpass $2000 pretty quickly.