Apple Thinks Its Folding Phone Is Good for Streaming

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Hold the phone … or don’t! The newly announced iPhone Duo’s foldability may have been the focus of Apple’s latest rollout event yesterday, but regardless of how subtle or not its middle crease will ultimately look on most units or whether the design will alienate lefties, its ability to collapse on itself is far from the only feature teased yesterday. One arena that CEO John Ternus’s new flagship device plainly aims to excel in is streaming video — so much so that the Apple Event and its press materials hailed it as “the best iPhone for enjoying movies, shows, and games.” And indeed, the company — valued at $4 trillion — seems to have done everything in its design power to emphasize that users can watch stuff better on this thing.

The foldability already adds a lot. When fully extended, it’s basically the size of an iPad Mini, with a titanium-framed 7.6-inch screen that can support a variety of orientations. You can watch in full screen in “Landscape” mode, bend it backward into a tent shape (“Standing”), bend it forward to make a displayed keyboard accessible as you watch (“Seated”), or snap it shut and watch just the front of the phone (“Closed”). You can shrink a video down and pin it at the top of a screen (“Portrait”) to multitask with another app as you watch, though that seems far less fun to me. The Duo’s speakers then apparently adapt with the various orientations to deliver audio more directionally depending on how you’re watching it. Under the hood, an A20 Pro chip and something called an “advanced thermal management system” will be backstopping the whole thing — a bet that users will probably want to pepper their phone’s AI with questions as they watch the latest episode of Pluribus.

Streaming apps, of course, will have to update themselves to match the new technology. Netflix snagged an early partnership with Apple to Duo-optimize its app, which Variety has the details on and which serves as an early benchmark of the Duo’s capabilities for streaming services: splashy interactive promo cards that make use of the whole screen’s real estate, a TikTok-style scrollable feed, and perhaps most notably a redesigned player interface that responds to whatever orientation you’re watching in. All these new axes and viewing options bring with them more coding and content-delivery quirks. Netflix, with its vast engineering resources, has the ability to refresh its app to suit the new technology, but it will be interesting to see what smaller or more niche services — like, say, the Criterion Channel or RetroCrush — look like on the iPhone Duo come release day.

It’s worth wondering what the implications of the new design will have on the streaming ecosystem at large. With all of these freshly trackable orientations and multitask options in the Apple ecosystem (which seems to be paying closer attention to you than ever), what sorts of new engagement data could the foldable design provide app developers with? Previous iterations of the iPhone helped redefine our relationship with our phones in the first quarter of the 21st century; could a freshly “Standable” mobile device have a similar effect on our relationship to TV or movies? And whatever happened to refreshing the Apple TV 4K? Ternus still has some explaining to do.