Apple’s first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, went on sale today, 23 October, in a first group of more than 70 countries and regions that includes France and Germany, according to Apple’s announcement. Apple Stores in the Netherlands and Belgium were due to open at 8:00 for the launch, Sasha Koevoets reported for the Dutch site iCulture, and in Spain deliveries also start today, writes Noelia Hontoria of Xataka Móvil. A second wave of 28 countries and regions follows on 30 October, but Apple’s release does not say which.
It is the most expensive iPhone so far, and in the European Union it arrives incomplete. Siri AI, the rebuilt assistant Apple introduced this year, is not included for EU users, the result of a dispute between Apple and Brussels over the Digital Markets Act.
What the money buys
Opened, the iPhone Duo has a 7.6-inch screen; closed, it has a 5.4-inch outer screen that Apple says offers about 90 percent of the screen area of the iPhone 18 Pro. According to Apple’s press release, it runs on the same A20 Pro chip as the Pro models, has a titanium frame and is rated IP68 against dust and water. It unlocks with a fingerprint sensor in the side button rather than with Face ID, and it works only with an eSIM, a digital SIM card, everywhere in the world.
As Jakob Steinschaden of the Austrian site Trending Topics noted, it is also the first iPhone that can show two apps side by side, a feature Apple calls Split View. Netflix, Zoom and Slack have already adapted their apps to the new shape, he reports. The camera system has two lenses, a 48-megapixel main camera and a 48-megapixel ultra-wide, which is one camera fewer than the Pro models, Natalia Polo points out in WWWhat’s New.
Apple itself is not modest about the device. “iPhone Duo is the most transformational change to iPhone since the original,” said John Ternus, the company’s chief executive, in the launch announcement. That is a company’s claim about its own product, and reviews will have to test it.
Prices differ by country
The cheapest version, with 256 GB of storage, costs €2,299 in Germany and €2,319 in Austria, according to the prices Trending Topics took from Apple’s online stores. In the Netherlands it costs €2,339, iCulture reported, the same as in Spain. Apple’s Irish site lists a starting price of €2,369. The version with 2 TB of storage costs €3,839 in the Netherlands and Spain. The American starting price is $1,999, but that figure excludes sales tax, as Trending Topics notes, so a simple currency conversion says little about how much more Europeans pay.
Getting one may take a while. When pre-orders opened on 16 October, delivery times in the Netherlands stretched to the end of January 2027 within half an hour, according to iCulture. Apple speaks of limited availability in its stores today, and Xataka Móvil also expected stock in Spain to be limited.
The missing assistant
The small print of Apple’s own announcement is blunt: “Siri AI will not be initially available in the EU on iOS.” Elsewhere, the assistant is rolling out as a beta, in English first, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish due in October. In Spain, WWWhat’s New notes that Apple has not said when Siri AI will reach Europe.
Apple blames the Digital Markets Act, the EU law that sets extra rules for the largest platforms. As Trending Topics summarises, citing the German site ComputerBase, Apple argues that the law would force it to give rival AI systems overly broad access to the phone, and the European Commission rejected an alternative Apple proposed, a so-called Trusted System Agent. The Commission’s position is that keeping Siri AI out of the EU is Apple’s own choice, as we explained in our earlier article on the dispute.
There is a smaller European gap too. A new feature that lets users switch between two iPhones with the same phone number, iPhone Handoff, is available at launch with only two carriers worldwide, according to Apple: T-Mobile in the United States and Telekom in Germany.
A late entry into a shrinking market
Apple is arriving late. Samsung and Huawei launched their first foldables in 2019, and the category is not growing: about 3.4 million foldable phones were shipped worldwide in the second quarter of 2026, 2 percent fewer than a year earlier, according to PhoneArena figures cited by Trending Topics. Huawei held 48 percent of that market and Samsung 15 percent. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 starts at €1,999, a few hundred euros below the iPhone Duo.
The questions for the coming months are whether Apple’s name can revive a category that has stalled, and whether European buyers paying the highest iPhone prices yet will get the assistant that customers elsewhere are already testing.
