The people at Microsoft who made the Surface Duo must be feeling pretty weird seeing this. The name, the aspect ratio, the way the UI works, the gestures for setting up split-screen, the "use it as a tiny laptop" mode... It's all things they pioneered.
Not that that's a bad thing. I absolutely loved the Surface Duo, it was my favorite phone until it stopped working correctly, and I hope other Android manufacturers take note of this, not just Samsung. It's just wild to see how similar this new Duo is to the original Duo.
Good design is inevitable.
In a completely clean room environment where a designer had never seen a folding phone, but had all the context of the iPhone and everything Apple had done, they would develop almost exactly the same design and features.
Designers have also been exploring the concept of foldable devices for literal decades, well before any reached the market. I have an industrial design and technology degree, we did a project in 2005 where we explored the designs around this, looking at the UI, the physical interaction, everything. My design had a similar aspect ratio and size, as I am sure half the student did my year and every other year they ran the project. (the iPhone Duo is about thousand times better than my design though!)
Thats not to say the Microsoft designers didn't do an incredible job, they did, but they were building on decades of design ideation from those that had experimented before them.
Microsoft did a really interesting job with the surface duo but it was a complete flop
because when doing whacky hardware you need to control the entire UI stack. Android can never deliver this because of the fragmentation and you get apps that don't work right and bug out constantly.
Apple can force developers to use APIs that make the apps work correctly on the foldable even if they are not directly optimized.
I find that story hard to believe. Your industrial design class designed folding iPhones 2 years before anyone had even seen the first iPhone? Sounds like a leap. That said, at the time, the most popular phone in the world was a folding phone, the Motorola Razr.
1. I didn't say we designed folding iPhones, I said devices.
2. Receipts: https://postimg.cc/8sDTTT0W
I think this was a first year project, and a small correction: mine want quite the same aspect ratio.
Best phone since 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator
A whole market of 1990s/2000s folding devices in similar categories, clamshells, PDAs, microPCs, palmtops, subnotebooks, handheld PCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_PC
> the "use it as a tiny laptop" mode... It's all things they pioneered.
This feature is also standard in existing folding phones. It's a pretty obvious feature tbh.
I thought the Pixel Fold didn't support this? No landscape keyboard?
Pixel Fold has had it for a few years, it's called "tabletop mode". Beyond just the keyboard "mini laptop" style, different apps also have special UIs for it, too. Like youtube puts playback controls on it.
Namewise, I feel like this is the original Duo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo
Microsoft also had Windows XP Tablets [1] and also WinCE/PocketPC many years before.
While the Duo is more subtle for some changes, it might show us the "new" Apple where the innovation comes from fine-tuning and getting a mature product to the market.
At least from their presentation, it looks like they sat on the fence and looked at pretty much any good or bad thing that happened during the past years.
Seeing some reviews on the Samsung Fold for example, mentioned the speakers feeling weird as the audio orientation is fixed to the speakers location. Those little details make a difference.
I really hope modern Apple would go back to the details and nuances.
[1] https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_XP_Tablet_PC_Edition
> the "new" Apple where the innovation comes from fine-tuning
That's actually the old Apple. Before the iPhone (and after Jobs' return) it was their standard operation procedure: the iMac was a refined workstation, the AirPort was a refined WiFi router, the Time Machine was a refined NAS, the iPod was a refined MP3 player...
Even after the iPad, they mostly cranked out middling stuff like the airPods, all the way to the Vision. They would take whatever good idea was floating around the hardware market, give it a careful polish, and sell it at twice the price. And there is nothing wrong with that - constantly chasing revolutions is risky (see the Vision).
> the iMac was a refined workstation, the AirPort was a refined WiFi router, the Time Machine was a refined NAS, the iPod was a refined MP3 player...
The word "refined" is doing a lot of work here. Just a few examples:
- The iMac had a design unlike any desktop computer before it.
- While a couple products had come before it, AirPort was the first affordable, mass-market consumer Wi-Fi router.
- The iPod was the first MP3 player to incorporate the then brand new 1.8" Toshiba hard drives that enabled it to have for the time incredible capacity for the package size. And Apple innovated with the click-wheel user interface.
All three of these products most people would see as much more than "refinements" but actually big innovations compared to what was already available in the market.
> The iMac had a design unlike any desktop computer before it.
Debatable, but it was still just a personal computer - sure, refined in exterior, but inside it was still just a workstation.
> AirPort was the first affordable, mass-market consumer Wi-Fi router.
Absolutely not. There were plenty already on the market. Was it the first one to have a name, rather than some crappy codename? Maybe. But mostly it was the polished version of an existing product.
> The iPod was the first MP3 player to incorporate the then brand new 1.8" Toshiba hard drives
It was still an MP3 player, there were already loads on the market - some even with similar capacity. It was refined in UI, yes.
> most people would see as much more than "refinements"
Most people with no knowledge of the market, maybe. Everyone in the space marvelled at the skills Apple displayed in taking existing products, refining them, and selling them like they were the first-ever products in those segments. That's when the "reality distortion field" was first described.
This is also why, multiple times, established players failed to understand these products would succeed - see the famous quips about the Zune and later the iPhone. Everyone knew those products existed already, they just did not grasp how Apple's knack for polishing (and marketing) could make such a big difference.
> Absolutely not. There were plenty already on the market. Was it the first one to have a name, rather than some crappy codename? Maybe. But mostly it was the polished version of an existing product.
Please tell us about the mass market, affordable, WiFi routers before AirPort. Links please. AirPort came out in July, 1999. Apple did deep negotiations with Lucent to get the price of the equipment down. And they also innovated with an incredibly easy to use software interface that set the standard for WiFi products to this day. I don't know what products you're talking about that came before it that similarly cost $100 for client and $300 for router.
And if you can't see why great product and user interface design can be a type of big innovation (re iMac, iPod) then you're blind.
And the original AirPort Express in 2004 had a headphone jack! Well, a speaker socket. And it showed up on your mac laptop so you could play music to it wirelessly with iTunes.
Utterly brilliant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Express
I'll criticize Apple with the best of them, but AirPods being "middling?"
These are just... obvious design choices that a foldable phone lends itself to. I'm not going to complain when Ford comes out with a new car that has a circle you turn when you want to turn the car. It's what works.
If they were "obvious design choices" we wouldn't first have 2 other different designs (long and narrow, clamshell).
They are good design choices, which is different.
Did we forget about the vaporware Courier?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmFM9l5RJSg
The Surface Duo was a great idea with mediocre software and essentially no developer support.
The curse of doing anything interesting with Android.
It certainly feels like another 10% of the total effort expended would have made this product viable. And I keep saying that about Microsoft releases. It feel like an enormous effect to get to product release then complete abandonment - no communication, no improvements, no additions, no bugfixes.
Apple continues to Microsoftify themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvX3laQlg14
Microsoft stole from Apple once before, so it's not like this hasn't been experienced in reverse.
The difference here is Microsoft didn't have to take the hardware and pivot a new OS onto it at the last minute.
Remember... the Duo was supposed to be a cursed Windows 10-esque device. They brought on Movial to do a pivot to Android, then bought out the porting team in early 2024 to keep working on what they should have released in preparation for the Duo 2 (which is what they actually NEEDED to sell as an Android device at the time, but flopped in doing so).
I returned mine in late 2023. It wasn't the best experience and I was missing out on things like NFC dearly.
Yeah, Microsoft and missing hardware opportunities goes perfectly together
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