Tag Archives: Apple

An S-Pen for the iPhone Duo? Yes please!

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I’ll give Apple its props by saying that it’s genuinely remarkable they built Apple Pencil compatibility into the iPhone Duo. Yes, it’s a welcome move because it’s a step above what Samsung did by nuking S-Pen support for their Galaxy Z Fold8 series, but it’s also sort of stupid that they didn’t build the compatibility in right away. The iPhone Duo is announced to be compatible with the Pencil on a future date. It’s something Apple announced you’ll get, but in the words of MKBHD, don’t ever buy a product on a promise of future upgrades.

I appreciate Apple trying though, but there’s one problem Apple never accounted for – the Apple Pencil is longer than the iPhone Duo. Unlike the S-Pen, which is mobile-sized, the Apple Pencil measures 6.43″ long. That’s almost 2 inches taller than the iPhone Duo which sits at 4.64″ in height. There’s no realistic universe in which anybody is carrying an Apple Pencil along with the iPhone Duo – they might be compatible but they’re not built to be a cohesive design solution… so Eslam Mohammed invented one. Meet the Pencil Duo – a stylus specially designed to be the iPhone Duo’s loyal sidekick.

Designer: Eslam Mohammed

The regular Apple Pencil’s design was informed by the device it was supposed to pair with. A simple all-white design, a circular grip, and one single chamfered edge to let the Pencil snap to the edge of the iPad to charge. The Pencil was also sized to just about fit the iPad mini, showing how much Apple had thought about the integration between the two products. So when Mohammed built the Duo, he basically approached it from the ground-up. No chamfer, no awkwardly long stylus.

The Pencil Duo is a perfectly cylindrical stylus, albeit with a silver detail running along its edge. Inspired by the iPhone Duo’s silver hinge which punctuates its design, the Pencil Duo sports that running metallic detail too, paired with a button that works just the way the button on the S-Pen does with Samsung’s phones. Mohammed doesn’t explicitly detail what the button does, but one can assume it helps with highlighting text, opening shortcuts, working as a shutter button, etc.

No snapping to the iPhone’s edge means there’s no chamfer. This gives the Pencil Duo a design that feels a lot cleaner in my opinion. The reason why snapping wouldn’t work is because it would prevent you from being able to open your phone. Instead, the Pencil Duo sits at the back of the phone, thanks to a special case that lets you dock the pencil.

The pencil neatly tucks into the back, occupying the empty space left behind by the camera bump, which doesn’t extend all the way to the end (the way the Pixel Fold did in the past). It’s a neat arrangement, and I’m sure Molly Anderson would approve. Who’s Molly Anderson, you ask? Well just the VP of Industrial Design, but Apple’s never really had a design lead in the limelight after Jony I’ve left.

The Pencil Duo measures roughly 4.3 inches in length, and a tad bit narrower than its predecessor. Sort of just like how the iPhone Duo is so much slimmer than its other counterparts. There’s no mention of how this pencil would charge, although I’m sure wireless charging is on the table. You’d probably need a special cradle to charge the device, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to invent one.

Mohammed has, however, detailed a few other things, like the Pencil Duo having haptic feedback, the Hover Preview feature, and obviously angle and pressure sensitivity. The only real problem here is that this entire stylus is conceptual… but I wouldn’t put it past third party designers from making iPhone Duo styluses that work using capacitive touch and have Bluetooth pairing so that the button on the stylus actually packs a few features. Maybe long-press for Apple Intelligence too!

The post An S-Pen for the iPhone Duo? Yes please! first appeared on Yanko Design.

Would you pay $14,000 for an iPhone Duo without any cameras?

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Imagine sitting at a table with friends and whipping your phone out. Your friends see it’s a foldable… then as you unfold it, the animation looks suspiciously like the iPhone Duo. Your friends are impressed, they designate you as the group photo taker… and you tell them regrettably that your iPhone Duo has no cameras. Then you add… not only does it not sport any cameras, it also costs fourteen grand.

To be honest, that scenario is entirely imaginary. Mainly for a bunch of key reasons. Caviar built this version of the iPhone Duo for privacy, championing what they call “Privacy, Minimalism, and a Refined Masculine Style.” Someone who sees truth in that ethos isn’t designated photographer material. And if they were, shelling 14k on a phone means you probably have a few extra grand to hire a photographer wherever you go. The only reason someone buys this hare-brained version of the iPhone Duo is because they can. Plain and simple.

Designer: Caviar Global

Removing the camera stack from the back of the iPhone Duo does something unexpected: the phone becomes genuinely beautiful. That rear panel, normally dominated by the triple-lens module, turns into a single flat sheet of satin-finished black titanium. No bumps, no rings, no glass circles competing for visual real estate, just one uninterrupted surface that shifts character depending on the light hitting it. Caviar calls the inspiration “supersonic aviation aesthetics,” which sounds like marketing speak until you actually look at the product photos. A blacked-out Apple logo sits flush in the titanium, the Caviar crown marks the opposite panel in a swept fabric-like texture, and the whole thing looks less like a phone and more like a prop from a very expensive spy film.

Apple’s decision to use Touch ID for the iPhone Duo, abandoning Face ID, turns out to be what makes Caviar’s camera-free execution actually hold up. A Face ID phone needs its front camera array to function as a biometric sensor, so pulling that out would mean a very pretty device that cannot unlock. Touch ID lives in the frame rather than behind the screen, so Caviar could strip the entire camera stack, front hole-punch and rear module both, without breaking anything fundamental. Based on product images, the inner display on the Ultimate appears completely clean, no hole-punch interrupting the screen, which makes the inside as seamless as the outside. Two separate design decisions from two separate companies ended up fitting together better than either could have planned.

Caviar made 19 of these total. Each unit ships in a custom lockable black luxury box, presented the way a jeweler presents a watch rather than the way Apple ships a phone. A smaller gold-colored wooden case inside holds what appears to be a gold-plated commemorative coin, the kind of object that exists purely to make the unboxing feel like a ceremony. The side of the phone is engraved with a serial number too, for exclusivity. Caviar knows exactly who they are selling to, and made sure the packaging matches the energy.

Caviar has been doing this for years, taking flagship Apple hardware somewhere Apple would never go, for clients who appreciate the gesture. The formula is consistent: start with the most premium Apple product on the market, make it rarer, make it more dramatic, and let the price be the final statement. We have covered their gold-plated and titanium iPhone builds here before, and none of them committed this hard to stripping features as a form of self-expression. At $13,990 for 19 units (mind you, that’s just the 512GB variant), the Ultimate is the purest version of the Caviar argument: a phone that costs seven times its base price because it does less, and somehow makes that sound like the point.

The post Would you pay $14,000 for an iPhone Duo without any cameras? first appeared on Yanko Design.