The iPhone Duo (very happy it’s not “Ultra” btw) is now official, and we have a complete picture of Apple’s first foldable phone. I have to say, I like what I see. I’ve really loved my time with the Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 with its similar dimensions, and I expect I’ll like the Duo even more.

As expected, the inner display is roughly iPad mini-sized (7.6 inches vs. 8.3 inches) and it supports Split View, just like iPadOS. What was somewhat unexpected is that the Duo will have some level of Apple Pencil support. That support is limited to the USB-C Apple Pencil, which doesn’t support inductive charging of any kind. To me, that makes stylus support on the Duo pretty unappealing, but hey, to each their own.

As you might imagine, a narrative has formed that the iPhone Duo will have a big impact on iPad sales, especially the iPad Mini. And look, I’m not a fortune teller; who knows? That may be the case, but I like to remind people that folding phones running Android have been around for seven years, and Android tablets continue to exist 🤷‍♂️.

When I take a step back, of all the Apple products that are getting squeezed with recent devices and changes, it’s not really the iPad that’s feeling the heat, it’s MacBooks (not Macs in general). Between the iPhone Duo, iPadOS 26, and AI, I continue to think I’ve bought my last MacBook.

Phil Schiller’s Continuum of Apple Products

In the earlier years of Tim Cook’s time as Apple CEO, it seemed like the company was pushing Phil Schiller, formerly the SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, as the company’s public face. In a 2015 interview with Steven Levy for Backchannel (via Above Avalon), Schiller presented a vision of Apple products existing on something of a continuum.

The idea is that each product should continue to get more capable, to the point where it pushes the next device in the line to step up its game. Here’s the relevant section that comes to mind:

Apple Watch: “The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often.”

iPhone: “The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that.”

iPad: “The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things!”

MacBook: “The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, what’s its job?…”

iMac: “Its job is to challenge what we think a computer can do and do things that no computer has ever done before, be more and more powerful and capable so that we need a desktop because of its capabilities. Because if all it’s doing is competing with the notebook and being thinner and lighter, then it doesn’t need to be.”

Ten years later, that same question, what’s each device’s job, is being asked all over again.

When I look at the iPhone Duo, I see this philosophy being put into practice. Apple’s folding phones can do a number of iPad things to the point where some people understandably ask, “Why do I need an iPad?” How does the iPad need to change in response to this pressure?

Turns out, it already responded with iPadOS 26.

The iPhone Duo makes it pretty clear to me that a big reason for the massive windowing and multitasking changes in iPadOS 26 was to make sure the iPad continued to be more advanced than the iPhone, from a productivity perspective. And while those changes were somewhat contentious, and I still don’t agree with all of them, I think they largely work.

Most of the iPads I see in public (that aren’t in the hands of children) are in keyboard cases, be it the Magic Keyboard or something more affordable. So the desire to use the iPad as a laptop, at least part-time, is still very much alive and well.

As I write this post, I’m sitting on a beach in Mexico, typing comfortably with the Magic Keyboard with about five apps open, switching easily between them with CMD-tab. I have cellular, so I can look things up as needed, but when the connection sucks, I can use a local LLM like Qwen 3.5 or Gemma 4 for catching all of my typos or asking some question. The bright and beautiful 11-inch OLED display is easy to see in the sun. And when I’m done writing this, I’ll detach my iPad from the keyboard and go back to using it as an eReader, which is what I’ve mostly done on my vacation. No MacBook offers that kind of versatility.

The Best AI Experiences Are On Desktop

On the other end of this continuum of Apple products, there’s the Mac. For me, the only remaining “job-to-be-done” for the Mac has been writing code. These days that means running coding agents. I’m not going to debate AI-assisted coding or vibe-coding in this post; that ship has sailed, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

The end game for AI software development is pairing software developers with powerful, locally run, open-weight models. And the Mac is a great platform for running these models. But right now, you still need really beefy hardware and good thermals to run high-end AI models.

To me, that means one thing: a desktop.

There’s a reason that, despite astronomical price increases, Apple’s high-end Mac Mini and Mac Studio computers can be so hard to get. If I want to run powerful AI models locally they are the best options, if only because their thermals are better.

I get that Apple Silicon is amazingly efficient in laptops, but if I want a computer that’s going to offer me little-to-no throttling on AI intensive tasks over long periods of time, I want a Mac desktop, not a Mac notebook.

The iPad has long since picked up a lot of the everyday Mac tasks for me, leaving coding/agentic coding as the last thing I need a Mac for. If I want the best local AI experience, I’m going with a Mac desktop (once I can afford it). There’s not much else the Mac notebook can do for me, and I bet a few others feel that way as well.