Popular Apple Features You Won’t Get with the iPhone Duo

Smartphone users considering the new iPhone Duo might be won over by its matte-finish interior foldable screen and nifty software redesigned around that experience. It’s certainly Apple’s most exciting device in a decade or more, but Apple’s first foldable phone isn’t without its compromises. On the Android side of the fence, foldable owners have spent years adapting to the sacrifices that come with a cutting-edge device, and it turns out that Apple hasn’t been able to completely overcome any of them. Sure, the Duo is less durable than the more traditional iPhone 18 Pro released at the same time, but that’s far from the only reason it fails. For some people, losing a few features in exchange for a foldable screen is worth it, but some of those losses will be a deal-breaker for others.

Apple’s current iPhone lineup is the most diverse in recent memory, and you shouldn’t feel pressured to buy the Duo when another model might be better suited to your needs. From cameras that can’t really compete with the lack of FaceID, here are the top iPhone features you’ll miss with an iPhone Duo.

The biggest loss you’ll feel when switching from a traditional iPhone to the Duo is the lack of FaceID matrix for facial recognition. You will only authenticate with your fingerprints or passwords. If you’ve gotten used to FaceID, which almost always works as long as your face is somewhere in front of the screen, losing that option could be a big blow. When you unlock your phone, make purchases, and log into apps, fiddling with a finicky fingerprint sensor each time can become aggravating.

On the other hand, some users still miss older iPhones with TouchID. Maybe your face doesn’t work well with FaceID for some reason. Maybe you just prefer the tactility of a fingerprint sensor. Apple placed the Duo’s TouchID sensor in the power button, a similar implementation to that found on foldables from Samsung and other vendors.

One feature that some can’t miss on the iPhone Duo is the camera control button found on the side rail of other iPhones. It’s a neat piece of kit, with a two-stage shutter and capacitive control that lets you change camera settings on the fly, but it seems to have been adopted by some users much like the infamous butterfly keyboard on MacBooks of the late 2010s. In other words, it’s innovative and cool from a technological standpoint, but often frustrating to use in practice.

However, if you’re one of those iPhone users who swear by the camera control button, this loss will sting. Combined with the Duo’s less capable cameras, the lack of a camera control button suggests that Apple views the Duo as a media consumption device rather than a creation tool (an impression further reinforced by the phone’s lack of true multi-window multitasking).

Other major losses can be found in the iPhone Duo’s camera department, ironic for a phone with so many cameras. There are three camera arrays on the iPhone Duo: the main pair of shooters on the back, the Dynamic Island selfie shooter on the front screen, and the under-screen camera on the flip-out interior display that Apple calls a FaceTime camera. Each of these systems is compromised in major ways compared to the iPhone 18 Pro’s camera innovations.

Starting with the main camera array, the Duo is conveniently equipped with two lenses on its rear platter. It carries both the 48-megapixel wide and ultra-wide modules found on its slab-shaped siblings, but it lacks the periscope telephoto lens they offer. And that incredibly cool mechanical aperture, the icing on the cake of the iPhone 18 Pro, won’t be found here, nor will its LiDAR scanner for better night photography. The selfie camera on the cover display is a 12-megapixel disappointment compared to the iPhone 18 Pro’s well-implemented 18-megapixel auto-shooter. As noted above, it also lacks the FaceID facial scanning network.

Even on the software side, the Duo is a camera downgrade. Apple has announced new Pro Controls for the iPhone 18 Pro. Users can adjust shutter speed, aperture and more, making the 18 Pro a more useful camera for professionals. These controls are absent on the Duo. The same goes for ProRAW shots which work best in professional photo editing software, as well as spatial photos and videos – it’s no big deal if you don’t own a VR headset, but Vision Pro owners may want to consider it.

Last but not least in terms of camera downgrades, the under-display FaceTime camera found on the inner display will almost certainly be a dog’s breakfast. Apple has refused to tell anyone how many megapixels it is, which is not a good sign. We need look no further than Cupertino’s biggest competitor, Samsung, which used under-screen cameras in the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and kept the feature across multiple generations.

The advantage of using under-screen technology was still a completely uninterrupted image, with no ugly “punch-hole” lens to spoil it, but this came at the cost of image quality. Not every phone with an under-display camera has managed to overcome the fact that you’re putting a layer of pixels between you and the lens, and the results have been predictably horrible. There’s no reason to believe Apple has fixed this problem, which is why they’re not calling it a selfie camera but rather a FaceTime camera.

For many users, none of these tradeoffs will be particularly difficult to manage. If you only take photos for personal use and social media, you’ll barely notice the absence of a periscope zoom lens or a few extra megapixels of resolution in your selfies, and you probably weren’t using the camera controls on your current iPhone to begin with. The lack of FaceID may be jarring at first, but you’ll quickly get used to pressing the power button to unlock your phone when you take it out of your pocket. But avid photographers and FaceID enthusiasts should think twice before spending at least $2,000 on a phone that will never satisfy.