Apple spent a good chunk of its keynote building up to the iPhone Duo, and it’s easy to see why: a foldable iPhone is a genuinely new category for the company, and the engineering on display is real. But once the initial “Apple finally made a foldable” excitement settles, it’s worth asking an important question: for most people, is the Duo actually the more exciting iPhone this year, or is it the iPhone 18 Pro?
Last year, the base iPhone 17 turned out to be the most exciting iPhone in the lineup, offering a few Pro-grade features that looked attractive on a Rs 80,000 iPhone. This time, we don’t get a base iPhone 18, so the default starting iPhone is the iPhone 18 Pro, which is roughly half the price of the iPhone Duo.
The price gap is hard to ignore
India is one of the most expensive countries to purchase an iPhone; that much is well known. We knew the iPhone Duo wouldn’t come cheap, but the actual selling price in India is eye-watering, to say the least.
The iPhone Duo starts at Rs 2,99,900, which is over Rs 1 lakh more than what it costs in the US ($1,999, or approx Rs 1.9 lakh). The iPhone 18 Pro starts at Rs 1,64,900, some Rs 1.35 lakh cheaper than the Duo. Both phones run the same A20 Pro chip. Both get the new S11-adjacent thermal design and Siri AI. The Duo’s premium is entirely about the folding format itself, the bigger inner display, the hinge engineering, the dual-battery system, none of which comes cheap, and fairly so given how genuinely difficult that engineering is.
The camera trade-off worth knowing about
The iPhone 18 Pro’s biggest camera story this year is variable aperture, a genuinely new piece of hardware Apple built specifically for it: six laser-cut blades adjusting the aperture automatically (or manually via Pro Controls) between wide-open low-light shots and narrower depth-of-field group shots. It’s the kind of feature that allows Apple to call it its “most advanced camera we’ve ever made.”
The Duo’s camera system is still capable, at least on paper. It gets the same 48MP Fusion Main and Fusion Ultra Wide sensors as the Pro line, sensor-shift stabilisation, all the AI-powered editing tools, but the specific hardware innovation Apple is proudest of this generation appears to live exclusively on the 18 Pro.
In exchange, the Duo gets camera experiences the Pro line simply can’t offer: Smart Take auto-capturing group photos, Duo Preview letting your subject see themselves on the outer display, Duo FaceTime letting someone join a call from outside the phone. Those are genuinely clever, foldable-specific ideas. They’re just a different kind of clever than a phone having great camera hardware.
Why iPhone 18 Pro might be the iPhone for most people
The most obvious reason the iPhone 18 Pro series will be the new iPhone for most people is how much cheaper it is than the Duo. “Cheaper” is relative here, since these iPhones are still extremely expensive, as are older iPhones, including last year’s iPhone 17, following Apple’s price hike.
None of this is really an argument against buying the Duo. If the appeal is the format itself, a genuinely pocketable device that opens into something closer to the iPad Mini, complete with Apple Pencil support and proper multitasking, nothing else in Apple’s lineup, or arguably in the market, does quite what it does. For that specific buyer, the price and the camera trade-off are probably worth it, and that might make people consider shelling out Rs 3 lakh on a phone.
It’s just that for anyone weighing the Duo against a regular iPhone rather than against a Samsung foldable, the honest comparison isn’t flattering. The 18 Pro is relatively cheaper; it has the more advanced camera hardware this generation, and it does everything the Duo does outside of folding. The Duo earns its price (at least in markets like the US) through the format, not through being a categorically better iPhone, and that’s a distinction worth making before anyone drops Rs 3 lakh chasing the novelty.
