The iPhone Duo suffers because Apple mistook blind arrogance for fierce leadership

We all know that Apple has always had a whiff of superiority about it. You could say it was well-earned in some cases. But the level of arrogance Apple has shown recently may be unprecedented, and it's already hurting the company.

Why do I care? Only because Apple's arrogance might unnecessarily put foldable display technology at risk. Only because Apple's arrogance is casting a bad light on foldable technology as a whole when this is just Apple's mess.

As you likely know, Apple finally joined the foldable phone market seven years after Samsung.

The brand-new iPhone Duo foldable phone looks unique and interesting. But it's been heavily criticized — at least by those who don't blindly follow Apple — for an undercooked software experience, a nonsensical permanent dock, and, worst of all, a manufacturing defect that breaks the foldable screen.

Okay, so things don't always go according to plan. Why am I calling Apple arrogant? Is it because the company reportedly did Quality Assurance cost-cutting for the iPhone Duo?

It's actually a combination of things, so here's the timeline:

In other words, Apple doesn't care about those old, crappy things and neither should you because the “superior” iPhone Duo is finally here.

But ironically, Apple's expensive iPhone Duo shows downright embarrassing points of failure that other foldable OEMs fixed years ago.

One of the best examples is the dust caps Samsung has used in its Galaxy Fold devices since 2019.

The original Galaxy Fold, which Samsung wisely released in limited quantities unlike Apple, didn't have dust caps at the ends of the hinge. This oversight allowed debris to enter the device and damage the screen from the inside.

Samsung quickly learned from its mistakes, recalled the phone briefly, and added dust caps before releasing it again. You can see the T-shaped caps in the image below.

In other words, the company took responsibility, fixed the issue, and moved on. Then, it continued to improve the design every year.

Funnily enough, Apple's first iPhone Duo has its own dust caps, but it looks to me like Apple completely ignored the lesson Samsung learned.

The iPhone Duo's hinge dust caps look flatter when the phone is fully unfolded, which is aesthetically more pleasing. However, they seem to have a critical flaw: they expose internal components when the phone is partly folded, leaving enough room for alarmingly large objects to get into the device.

That IP68 rating is kind of meaningless, isn't it? Take a look at the X post below (via @adiicodess).

Arguably Apple hasn't really learned much from its competitors all these years. And that truly feels like arrogance, especially when you consider that those early foldable phones, which Mr. Ternus dismissed as “kind of cheap and crappy” in a TIME interview, had already solved some of the very design issues Apple is facing right now.

It almost seems like Apple ignored the lessons learned by its peers because it thought it could do better by default. As it turns out, the opposite has happened.

Ironically, the same interview in which John Ternus described early foldables as “kind of cheap and crappy” also discussed how Apple's new CEO gave the design team “the confidence to really push the boundaries of innovation and manufacturing.”

My question is how can Apple push the boundaries of innovation when it seems to have ignored most of the lessons others learned in the past? Does Apple really think it's above those early “cheap and crappy” attempts without even trying? That sounds more like blind arrogance than fierce leadership.

Considering how messy the iPhone Duo's launch is, we're lucky Apple wasn't the one to release the world's first foldable phone in 2019. It could've been an even bigger disaster, potentially bringing foldable phone development to a dead stop.

Samsung, meanwhile, developed the technology, made it happen as early as 2019, learned from its mistakes, improved the tech every year, all the while proving critics wrong. We're lucky that Samsung was the first.