Back in 2007, Steve Jobs stood on stage and famously mocked the entire smartphone industry’s reliance on styluses, saying that if a company shipped a phone with a stylus, it meant the company had gotten the design wrong. That line became something close to gospel inside Apple for the better part of two decades. So it is genuinely notable that the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable phone, ships with full Apple Pencil support right out of the gate.
This interview was originally conducted by Tom’s Guide, where Apple CEO John Ternus and marketing chief Greg Joswiak sat down for an exclusive conversation about the iPhone Duo.
How Apple Squares This With Its Own History
When asked directly whether the iPhone Duo breaks one of Apple’s oldest and most repeated design principles, Apple CEO John Ternus pushed back gently on the framing itself. He explained that he never really viewed it as a hard rule to begin with, pointing out that the original iPad launched without any pencil support at all, and it was only later that Apple recognized just how much a stylus could unlock on a larger display for tasks that genuinely benefit from more precision.
That distinction matters a lot here, because the iPhone Duo is not really being marketed as a phone with a stylus attached. It is being positioned as a device that functions as both an iPhone and a compact iPad in one body, thanks to its 7.6 inch unfolded display. Once you think about the Duo in those terms, Apple Pencil support stops looking like a contradiction of the Jobs era stylus rule and starts looking like a natural extension of what the iPad has offered for years.
Not Required, But Clearly Intentional
Ternus was careful to frame Apple Pencil support as optional rather than essential to the core iPhone Duo experience. Most people are going to use the device exactly like a normal iPhone the vast majority of the time, folding it shut and carrying it in a pocket without ever touching a stylus. But for the smaller group of users who want to sketch, annotate a document, or take handwritten notes on the larger unfolded screen, Apple wanted that option to genuinely exist rather than feel like an afterthought.
What This Means for the Future of iPhone
The bigger story here might be less about the iPhone Duo specifically and more about what it signals for how Apple thinks about phone and tablet functionality blending together going forward. As screens get larger and foldable technology becomes more mature across the entire smartphone industry, the old boundaries between what a phone does and what a tablet does are only going to keep blurring.
Apple Pencil support on the iPhone Duo is a pretty clear early example of that blending in action, and honestly, it fits a broader pattern of Apple quietly retiring its own old rules whenever the underlying hardware finally catches up to justify it. The stylus joke from 2007 made sense for the phones people were using at the time. Nearly two decades and one seven point six inch foldable screen later, it clearly does not apply the same way anymore.
