Well, well, well. We are right back in Techtember. And today Apple had their annual fall event where they reveal all their new iPhones. Except they didn't unveil all the newest iPhones today... They had to make room for the big important folding thing. So with this event we just got the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max... and the new folding one. And so the new base iPhone and probably the new Air and the new SE are going to be early next year.

Honestly, welcome new cycle. So welcome to your hands-on and first look at the brand new Pro iPhones... and the long-awaited folding one. Now the 18 Pro, these are pretty easy because... they look the same. The designs and the sizes and all the fundamentals are still the same. And basically... everything new here on the inside is things that I think will require some testing to see if they're actually big difference makers or not.

Like there's a new A20 Pro chip in there, which is awesome. It's now a 2 nanometer chip and has 50% more memory bandwidth, which is also sick. Now how much of a performance increase will it translate to? Or how many efficiency gains will we actually see? That's yet to be determined. But there's a few bullet points from the keynote that are giving me hope, like these really big battery life boost claims. They're saying the new 18 Pro will have the same battery life as the 17 Pro Max, and the new 18 Pro Max will have the best battery life ever in an iPhone.

Which, you know, you'd hope it gets better year after year, but the capacities don't look all that different, so... that should be good. And then there's also a new variable aperture lens... on the main camera, which we'd heard the rumors about. So instead of just being locked wide open all the time, it can actually stop down with manual control. Which yes, before you type, your comment is just like what we saw eight years ago with the Samsung Galaxy S9, except that was two apertures that was wide open... or stopped down.

It was f/1.5 or f/2.4. This one in the camera app actually has four stops that you can cycle between... on demand. And yes, just like Samsung's phones from back in the day, you can actually see the physical aperture opening and closing with those blades with that manual control if you get enough light on it. And this is also... a much larger sensor than what Samsung was working with back in those S9 days. So there's potentially maybe more of a difference between wide open and stopped down.

But again, that's gonna require some testing. But I just, you know, I respect and appreciate new hardware features, so I am willing to give this a try... chance. The Dynamic Island at the top is 25% smaller, thanks to them specifically moving the Face ID infrared camera out. But it's now behind the display all the way in the left hand corner... So there's a slightly different pixel matrix up in the top left. You honestly cannot tell 99% of the time with the naked eye.

And now that smaller cutout in the middle means there's more room so you can have up to three Live Activities instead of just two... It's welcome. And then, yeah, pretty much the only other real new thing here is the new colors. So we can enjoy... the new Burgundy, which kind of seems to be the flagship color, but there's also... Glacier, which is a light blue. There's a new silver, which is kind of boring, but it's also a little more uniform than the last one, which had a different color for the glass versus the metal.

And then there's finally, finally, finally a fully matte black 18 Pro. And I think that's the one that's really calling my name. I think the logical thing to do right now is just to make sure you get subscribed so you can be the first to see the... the stuff that gets tested and see if it's actually good or not in the full reviews of these phones. So just hit the subscribe button down there. Just click that. Just click it.

Okay, great. So the new Pro phones are $1,199 to start, and the new Pro Maxes are $1,299 to start. So, yes, that is 100 bucks more again than last year... The price increases are hitting everyone, obviously. And Apple's also quietly increased the prices of older iPhones that they're still selling too. So 100 bucks more... for a 16 or a 17e. That stuff is all on their site. You can check it out. But it's not the top of the lineup anymore.

The new top of the lineup... is the one more thing that we all saw coming... The first genuinely... new form factor of the iPhone since we first saw it launch back in 2007. The first folding... iPhone. This is the iPhone... Duo. And, man, this phone is so interesting. So this is what I want to focus this video mostly on, since we'll cover all the rest of this stuff in more videos later. And it's funny, we knew what to expect.

We saw all the rumors. We knew this is what it would look like, but I was just still so excited to hold it and actually use it. And feel the crease and the weight and the shape and everything... So first of all, the fundamentals, right? This is a passport-shaped, book-style foldable. 5.4-inch display on the front, kind of on the small side, but high refresh rate, corner hole-punch cutout. The frame is titanium, and the rails are rounded to grip to open.

So that when you open it up, we have a 7.6- inch display. Also high refresh rate and plenty bright, uniform bezels all the way around. But this one has a few more interesting traits. So the way you can think of it basically is it's an iPhone when it's closed and it's like an iPad mini when it's open. Like that's the basic value prop, right? You can't, you can't take an iPad mini everywhere with you 'cause it doesn't fit in your pocket.

But what if it could? It folds in half... That's what this could look like. So yeah, when it's closed, more or less, it's a squat iPhone, but with some adjustments. It's obviously a bit thicker since it's a foldable. And I'll talk about the competition in a second. But there's also no Face ID, you'll notice. And that's because the power button on the right is also a Touch ID fingerprint reader on that right-hand rail.

And then the software interestingly weights a lot of these UI elements over to the right-hand... side for reachability. So I personally, I find the smaller display already mostly pretty reachable already. But they put a whole dock over here to the right-hand side... instead of the bottom. And then when you open it, it does this sweet animation, this, this kind of progressive fade-out of the screen that you're on... to the screen that you're switching to.

And then you're on this inside display, this big 7.6-inch screen. So you can kind of think of this as two of that outside screen stapled together side-by-side, and they're actually mirrored. So like a... other foldables, if you change your home screen layout on the outside screen, that also reflects on the inside screen. If you add pages to one, it adds pages to the other. And then this inside screen you'll actually notice is corner-to-corner seamless, because they have hidden the selfie camera... behind the glass.

It's up here in the middle of the right-hand side. And you mostly don't see it whenever there's anything on the screen, but it's there. And then the entire display has this nano-texture sort of matte coating on the top layer, which does a few things: it really effectively cuts down on reflections. Like, I can verify that just being in bright environments, no matter how I'm holding it, the lights never become an issue.

But also because it cuts reflections so much, it actually does a great job hiding the crease, which is already... pretty minimal... I honestly found this right around the same level as the Oppo Find N6... as basically the least crease... I've ever seen... on a folding phone. It's definitely not gone. But between this hinge design, which has, you know, carbon-fiber support plates... and the top layer of ultra-thin glass being pretty stiff, and the anti-glare finish, the only time you realistically perceive this crease is when you're really looking for it or running your finger over it, which doesn't really happen much.

The iPhone Duo also... does have MagSafe, does have the A20 Pro chip inside. It has a new C2 cellular modem, which is faster and adds 5G millimeter-wave... And it has dual cameras on the back: a new 48-megapixel primary, which... without any testing I have to assume is probably on the smaller side versus the flagships, and then actually the same ultrawide camera as the 18 Pro. And this software has a lot to it. I was first seeing it, just trying to figure out, like, is this iOS... or is it iPadOS, or neither, or both?

Like, what is it really? I think what I've landed on is it's like, it's like iOS plus a little, like with a little sauce. Obviously the reachability stuff and the dock on the side are new. Like, you won't find that on a regular iPhone. And then the continuity also between the inside screen and the outside screen, like, that's pretty standard stuff, but it's executed very smoothly. Like, this animation... is... so good... between open and closed.

It's obviously really cool-looking, but it also... opens really quickly to whatever's on the right-hand side of the interior screen... The apps, when you're using them open, are all... pretty much iPad apps. The way they behave with multiple columns... And then, of course, you can multitask a bit by throwing two apps side-by-side next to each other with some gestures that I'll dive more into... in the full review, but generally they're pretty intuitive and things flow the way you expect them to.

Now, the elephant in the room, at least in my world, is... this thing right here: the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8. This came out a few months ago, and it's been pretty hot... People love this thing. I love this thing. And it's basically... the same... idea as a product. It's a small, squat, passport-shaped foldable. It's got the dual cameras on the back, flagship chip, super-thin. So you're probably wondering, "All right, Marques, how do these compare?" And my take is: functionally- they're... very similar.

They're really not that different from each other. They both have dual cameras, like I said, one main and one ultrawide. They both have the flagship chip available to them. The- they both have... solid battery, despite being barely thicker than a USB Type-C port. They both have a fingerprint reader on the power button. But! just in my... scattered couple hours of using the iPhone Duo today, the iPhone... has a bunch... of... these tiny, frankly unnecessary, but also very awesome... quality-of-life things... that make it feel... like a more fun phone to use.

I forget the specs and numbers and like raw horsepower and megapixels and stuff, but just, just the... fit and finish and the little animations and stuff like that. And the... feel of it. I feel like the iPhone kind of mogs the Samsung. Like, it really all starts with that animation... switching between the inner and outer display. It's... really clean and it's fast. I'm used to having at least a tiny bit of delay when I slap a folding phone shut before the outside screen lights up...

But this one had no delay. This was exceptionally fast every single time. And even while doing that animation and all the other little animations, like when closing the camera app on the inner screen, where it goes from those blacked out pixels that the camera can see through... back to all the pixels from your wallpaper... That's so clean... Also expanding your quick settings on the right, they kind of fall out of the corner as you swipe down.

That also felt very nice. The interior display, this coating on it, like I said, it's really smart. It blocks reflections extremely well, so it hides the crease visually quite nicely... And it's also kind of smooth to the touch, kind of like the Oppo Find N6 was. So your finger just glides over it. And... somehow later this year it's going to support the USB Type-C Apple Pencil on both the inner and outer screens. The volume buttons, interestingly, are not on the side of the phone next to the power button.

They're at the top, which is... maybe a little weird. At first I didn't know how to feel about that, but what I do know is it means that the volume always follows the direction of the buttons. Right to go up, left to go down, and the speakers, I would say, are objectively in the best spot they can be for a foldable. So at the top it's at the front and at the bottom it's on the back. So when you open it, you still have a speaker on the left and the right half.

So you can still do a solid stereo sound. And also unexpectedly, the whole thing is IP68... water and dust resistance rated. You can theoretically submerge it, pour water on it, it should be fine. I think the only other foldable that can say it does that is the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. So that's promising for durability. And then the ability to use the phone half open in a couple different ways, that's also nice. There are some foldables with too stiff of a spring weight, like Samsung's Fold 8 doesn't really do this so well.

But with the iPhone Duo, you can use it half open if you want. And a lot of apps are responsive enough to take advantage of this too. And you can even put it in standby mode by locking it while in tent mode, it'll show you a clock or your alarm. It'll wake you up with a soft, gentle glow... All these little super nice, clever things. So it's got, it's stacking up like a bunch of really, really nice, clever things. Neat animations, clean stuff.

But also I've reviewed a lot of other foldables on this channel. You might have watched a bunch of those other videos. And this thing also definitely has its downsides. I think the most obvious downside is... the visual one. At least I think so. The fact that this display on the cover screen is rounded on the right... and then squared up on the left. So totally asymmetrical, it doesn't functionally make a huge difference.

But some people are never gonna let that go. And you know, maybe that's why they call it Duo, because the screen looks like the letter D. I don't know. Maybe more functionally important though is that the phone basically has to be held in your right hand like a lot of other folds, but then doubly so since all the UI elements like the dock... move to the right-hand side, and I don't see any settings to move that stuff to the left.

And then speaking of that dock, only four items in the dock. I tried adding one, it didn't let me. I could take stuff out, but I couldn't add a fifth item to the dock. And then the under-screen selfie camera on that big screen. It's cool that it's hidden but we used to have these in the past and there's a reason why we don't have them anymore... It's just because they're bad. They just look really bad quality-wise...

Samsung had these on a bunch of their older folds for a couple of years and they stopped doing it because we basically learned that people much prefer to just have a better quality camera... And a little hole-punch cutout is actually fine. This is what video looks like that I took from the Duo I was playing with from that under-display selfie camera. And yeah, this is like decent lighting. It's just pretty bad quality video.

And then of course no silicon-carbon batteries, no ultrafast charging, no zoom camera. All the other downsides we already knew about that were obvious. So... yeah, I feel like my take on this is, it's, it's not perfect, but it's got a lot going for it. And I think this is gonna be a really fun phone for people to use who are thinking about maybe getting a folding one... But they were on the iPhone side of the fence so they couldn't get one before, but now they can.

And if you're watching this on YouTube thinking, who is that person who was even asking for this, who wants foldables? They're not so popular here, but in China they are popular. China actually bought more foldables than the entire rest of the world combined last year. So there are a lot of foldables out there. And Apple, of course, wants to play in that market and sell phones to those people too. Now there's an iPhone that folds. so it's $2,000.

Starting two bands is the cheapest that you can get. This phone, which is obviously expensive, but it's actually a little bit, a little bit less than I was expecting going into this... Just for perspective, the... Fold 8 starts at 1,800 bucks... and a lot of these other foldables are very expensive. So I could see, you know, with the Apple tax and Ramageddon and just generally new things being expensive, I could have seen this being more, so this is lower than I thought it could have been.

But it's coming out in October, so we got a couple more weeks to think about it before the pre-orders open up. I also just want to say it is objectively hilarious... now that Apple... in 2026 is the company that has a product named... the Neo... and the Duo. If you know, you know. Let me know what you guys want to see in the full review and what else you're curious about... Plus, Apple did also release a couple other products... alongside these phones today, like the new AirPods 5 with better noise cancellation and a couple more features from the Pros for 129 bucks... and the new Apple Watch Series 12 which has some really freaky-sounding, always-listening features that I have some conspiracy theories about.

So stay tuned for that. It's September, baby. Buckle up, get subscribed!... and shoutout to Ridge for sponsoring this video. So channel sponsor Ridge has a bunch of accessories that will really cleanly match the colors... of your iPhone, including the new iPhones. So their famous Power Bank offers five-in-one power delivery, so you can charge multiple items at once... and it's MagSafe compatible for easy charge-ups on the go...

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Also available... in Basecamp Orange and lastly, the Ridge Wallet. Of course, Ridge has reworked the MagSafe version to sit flush on your phone, and it's now stronger and more secure. And best of all, just like their Power Banks, they've got versions to color-match the new iPhones so everything looks sleek. Or if you're like me, I love the transparent versions like this one in Phantom. So check out everything by heading over to ridge.com/mkbhd thanks for watching!... and I'll catch you guys very soon... in the next one...

Peace!