[theqoo] IPHONE DUO NAMED ONE OF THE BEST INVENTIONS OF 2026 BY TIME MAGAZINE

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Virtually every one of Apple’s fellow Goliaths—Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and now Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic—have flung themselves into the AI arms race, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into training ever more intelligent thinking machines. While Apple trains its own models, it is nowhere near the technology’s frontier, leaving the company vulnerable to being left behind if super-smart AI transforms industry and society in the coming years. At the end of September, Apple was conspicuously absent when President Donald Trump hosted a luncheon for AI power players like SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai, who lobbied him on their visions for America’s tech future.

But Ternus and other Apple executives say they aren’t concerned. In the midst of a populist AI backlash, they contend that they are building a modest but personalized and privacy-preserving form of AI that will actually help ordinary people as opposed to merely dazzling Silicon Valley’s “lunatic fringe,” as Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, puts it. And besides, Ternus argues, even if other companies succeed in their mission of building super-intelligence, users will still want to talk to it on Apple devices.

“People want physical things,” he says a week later at the company’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City, wearing an amiable but guarded smile. He spent the morning greeting superfans who had lined up all night to get their hands on the iPhone 18. “They want to talk, to see images of loved ones, to take pictures. So I don’t see a scenario where all of a sudden, our devices disappear and we don’t have a need for an iPhone.”

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Many challenges stood in between the patent and the final product. The first attempts at a foldable smartphone in the 2010s from other companies tended to be fragile and not all that useful, with a big, ugly crease in the center interrupting the experience. “The other examples in the world felt kind of cheap and crappy,” Ternus says.

Across hardware and software teams, Apple engineers and designers got to work. With advancements in Apple silicon chips, they created a new display engine that facilitates seamless transitions between the inner and outer screens. They redesigned iOS to move the phone’s main controls from the bottom to the right side for easier thumb access.

Along the way, Ternus encouraged the team to invest more time and effort in the project, even as other foldables beat them to market. Dinh says that at one point, he asked Ternus whether his team should proceed with a top surface material similar to those of its competitors, which Dinh felt had flaws but was potentially good enough.

“And he was like, ‘Look, Rich, you’ll know when it’s the right thing.’ And that gave us the confidence to really push the boundaries on innovation and manufacturing, and fly worldwide to connect our suppliers together and come up with the nanotexture [a surface technology],” Dinh says. The result—a surface made from a custom polymer and built atop a hinge with more than 100 tiny interior precision components—has impressed its first users, who have said they can barely detect a crease at all.

CR: TIME

original post: here

1. Fore real, this is hilariousㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

2. No but, I use Apple products myself, but this is honestly just ridiculous... I saw some reviews for the Duo, and it looks like they've got cracks running all over them

3. White people really act like they're the only "humans" living in this world

4. What is this chin-heavy Westerner blabbering about?

5. Seriously so funnyㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

6. Look at them all hyping each other upㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

7. ???

8. They've invented a "technique" for buying other people’s technology and passing it off as "iPhone technology."

9. South Korea and China are already several generations ahead... I really thought that since they took so long to release it, it would be incredibly innovative, but it turned out to be an absolute, all-time disasterㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

10. But 45 percent of it consists of Samsung parts...

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