Asymco Bulletin 031 – Sep 20, 2026

The Asymmetric Weekly, for the week ending Sunday, Sept 20th.

Research

The Dawn of Gestural Computing

The more one one thinks about the iPhone Duo the more the Duo branding appears to be signifying something beyond two screens. Perhaps Duo is marking iPhone 2.0, a new epoch in the history of Apple devices. Consider that the premise of folding the screen isn’t just to afford a larger surface, but physically transforming to form factors of a book, a mini laptop, a notebook (with Pencil!), a tablet, an alarm clock, a movie screen… →

Duo dollars a day, Duo cents an unlock

The Duo’s price range is $2000-$3200. How should we think about this? →

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Nota Bene

The iPhone Duo: pathos, not specs

One theme about the iPhone Duo seems underreported: pleasure, prestige, the pride of ownership. It’s always been there with Apple products, but being the first to get a foldable, after everyone’s been talking about it for so long, might be a bigger driver than the practical aspects. →

Stairway to the $3200 Heaven

The top price in the iPhone Stairway to Heaven chart is now $3,200. How does this affect iPhone ASP? →

What happens when smartphones become too good? → Katharine Sorensen of The Beiruter interviewed me on the shuttle bus to Apple’s September event, two days before the Duo existed. Her question was the more profound one: what happens when phones are good enough, when replacement cycles stretch to four years and the installed base grows regardless. The industry has spent its history persuading people the device in their pocket could be substantially better. Apple’s answer arrived that Wednesday with a hinge. →

Siri, not a companion, by design. → People have gotten used to AIs being wrong, so folding intelligence into the OS adds little brand risk as long as the experience is as expected. The product manager for Apple Intelligence told me Siri is built not to be a companion: an advisor and a concierge with a professional persona that keeps its emotional distance. The exposure Apple actually guards against is not hallucination but a violation of privacy or security, where a single leak brings lawsuits and regulators at once. Managing that risk is the cost of doing business. →

Refurbishing the Innovator’s Dilemma → Apple already sells refurbs, but at small scale, and refurbishment is a scale game. Lease returns change that: one and two year old phones taken back in volume, refurbished and resold at minimal profit, because the point is not profit but visibility into a secondary market Apple otherwise has to sample. The lowest priced new iPhone is now in the $800s, and the $400 slot belongs to the used market, just as only 12% of Americans can now afford a new car and the auto industry has dehydrated itself of visibility into everyone else. My advice to Apple is to not fall into the innovator’s dilemma: more profitability is not always the right answer. →

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Live Events

Asymco Office Hours Duo: The First Ternus Keynote – Sunnyvale Session Recording & Transcript, September 11, 2026 → Recording and transcript of the Sunnyvale session, held two days after Apple’s September event and the first keynote under John Ternus. Inside: the Duo as a pricing decision made seven years ago, the attraction of moving objects, two cents an unlock, the 1.2 billion puzzle of the iPhone ASP, why launch the iPhone 18 in spring, Siri designed not to be a companion, Apple’s unpretentious moonshot, and what follows the memory famine. Full recording and transcript for Asymco One subscribers. →

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