With the iPhone Duo, Apple has pulled off a familiar trick. It arrives into a mature Android foldable market with a handful of hardware features we’ve mostly already seen elsewhere, but paired with a level of software polish that makes a lot of them feel new again. It’s those software flourishes that have me excited to try the iPhone Duo when it launches next month, but I’m less convinced that its hardware will be anything special.

The iPhone Duo’s hardware doesn’t look special, but its software might be. Android foldables have done most of this before, but rarely looked so good doing it. If Apple had gotten there first, the Duo’s biggest surprise would have been its squat, wide, passport-inspired shape. But its slow-moving supply chain meant that Huawei, Samsung, and Xiaomi all managed to beat Apple to market with similarly sized rivals, so the unusual design already feels fairly familiar — helped by Samsung’s aggressive efforts to market its new design.

More has been made of Apple’s efforts to eliminate the foldable display’s crease, which seem to have been largely successful. Apple attributes it to a 100-component hinge, custom adhesives that allow the display layers to ‘glide’ over one another, and a matte finish that reduces glare and reflections to make the crease harder to spot. Trying the phone at Apple’s event yesterday, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel said that you can’t really see the crease, but ‘if you go looking for it, you can definitely feel one.’

It sounds, and looks, impressive, but Apple is far from the first to do it. Samsung made great strides in eliminating the crease on its Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra thanks to new titanium display layers. Before that, Oppo all but eliminated its Find N6 crease by using 3D printing to fill the minute gaps across the hinge. I’d have to see all those phones side by side to see which crease is subtlest, but even if Apple does win, it won’t be by much.

In other ways, the hardware even feels behind the competition. The Duo is the thickest of this new wave of wide foldables, though at 5.2mm when open it’s still thinner than the iPhone Air. The weight is a more obvious issue: The 254g Duo is 26 percent heavier than the Z Fold 8 — a 53g difference — which is going to be pretty noticeable. You have to go back to 2022’s Z Fold 4 to find a Samsung foldable that’s heavier, TriFold excluded.