The incomplete history of Duo devices

Apple announced the company’s today, the , but that’s where the firsts end. The Duo is not only far from the first foldable on the market thanks to the efforts of and , but it’s also not the first product to be called the Duo.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs popularized the saying “good artists copy, great artists steal,” but will the iPhone Duo’s folding screen, which features a custom nano-texture display material to help minimize the visibility of its crease, be enough to make us forget these other Duos that have come before it? Only time, or how aggressively Apple plans to market its Duo, will tell. Is there a Duo we missed?

Merging the functionality of the and the TurboGrafx-CD that added CD-ROM functionality, the NEC TurboDuo (later rebranded to just the Duo) launched in North America in 1993 after debuting in Japan a few years earlier as the PC Engine Duo.

First released in 2016 and in 2022, was the company’s proprietary VoIP service meant to compete with products like Skype or Zoom and replace Hangouts.

The iPhone Duo isn’t even Apple’s first Duo.

The predates by decades. It was an ultraportable laptop, and when Apple introduced it in 1992 it was the , but still weighed over 4 pounds. Apple managed to shrink the Duo using an approach it still uses today: omitting built-in ports and expansion features. If you wanted to connect peripherals and accessories you had to rely on optional docks.

Twenty-three years after the PowerBook Duo was discontinued, the company announced the that could wirelessly charge an iPhone and an Apple Watch at the same time.

However, it felt like a consolation prize for the , which was announced in 2017 but never materialized.

That’s right, the iPhone Duo isn’t even the first folding mobile device to be called the Duo.

and managed to get around the issues with early foldables like the , which debuted a year prior, by skipping flexible screen technology altogether. Microsoft’s Duo instead had a very visible hinge between its pair of 5.6-inch OLED screens.

Trade shows are the birthplace of weird laptops, but sometimes the prototypes that often debut just to make it into the mainstream.

The ROG Zephyrus Duo wasn’t Asus’ first attempt at creating a dual-screen laptop, or the first time it named a laptop a Duo.

The predates it by several years with a slightly different design. Beneath the ZenBook Pro Duo’s primary 15.6-inch OLED screen was a secondary 14-inch display located above the laptop’s keyboard.

After convincing Google to open-source the Pebble’s operating system last year, Eric Migicovsky, the creator of what was arguably one of the first truly successful and capable smartwatches, resurrected the wearable under a new company called Core Devices.

It’s still just a prototype and may never find its way into consumers’ homes, but at IFA 2026 in Berlin last week, .

The prototype includes a beefy mobile dock with clean and dirty water tanks and the most powerful floor-cleaning suction the company has ever made.

Mere hours before the iPhone Duo made its debut, it’s been teasing.

The Retroid Pocket Duo is a modernized version of the Nintendo DS with dual 120Hz OLED screens featuring a 16:9 aspect ratio on top and a 4:3 aspect ratio between its controls.

• Andrew Liszewski