Nothing's CEO Calls the $1,999 iPhone Duo 'a Waste of Money'

By Maya Krishnan, Senior Technology Correspondent | October 13, 2026

Carl Pei thinks you are about to waste $1,999. The co-founder and CEO of Nothing — the London phone company that has built its entire brand on trolling the smartphone establishment — posted a reel on Instagram on Monday calling Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, "a waste of money," four days before preorders open on October 16. His charge sheet is short and brutal: no Face ID, no telephoto camera, and a worse selfie camera than the phone that costs $800 less.

It is the kind of attack that would be easy to dismiss as marketing theatre, except for one problem. On the facts, Pei is essentially right.

The timing is not accidental. Apple starts taking Duo preorders on Friday, with the device reaching stores on October 23, priced from $1,999 in the US. Pei's reel is a preemptive strike — a rival CEO telling Apple customers to keep their wallets shut while there is still time. We cross-referenced every hardware claim in his reel against Apple's published Duo specifications and the coverage from five independent outlets, and each of his technical complaints checks out. What is debatable is the verdict, not the evidence.

Photo: Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO of Nothing, on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019. The file photo predates the Instagram reel and shows Pei before his company entered the smartphone business. (TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

No Face ID on a $1,999 phone

Pei's sharpest objection is the one most likely to land with ordinary buyers. The Duo unlocks with Touch ID in the side button, not Face ID — a first for Apple's premium iPhone line since facial recognition arrived with the iPhone X in 2017. For a device sitting at the very top of Apple's price ladder, that is a genuine step backwards in day-to-day use, and Pei knows it.

There is a plausible engineering explanation, and it is worth being fair about. The Duo is reportedly just 5.2mm thick when unfolded, which leaves precious little room for the TrueDepth sensor array that Face ID requires. And because a foldable must work both open and closed, Apple would theoretically have needed two Face ID systems — one for the inner display, one for the outer — which would have thickened the whole device. Apple has not confirmed any of this, and the trade-off explanation does not have to mean the trade-off is worth it at this price.

How long will buyers wait for the missing pieces? Reporting attributed to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman suggests Face ID and a telephoto camera may not arrive until as late as a third-generation Duo — a timeline Apple has not confirmed. If that holds, the first Duo is not a stepping stone; it is a fork, and early adopters would be buying into the compromised branch.

Apple's own launch coverage, including our breakdown of the Duo's unveiling last month, flagged the biometric downgrade as the device's most controversial call. Pei has simply weaponised it.

The camera cuts sting the most

iPhone Duo preorders: what Pei's attack means for buyers

Should I preorder the iPhone Duo on October 16? That depends on which part of Carl Pei's charge sheet bothers you. Apple's first foldable opens preorders on Friday, October 16, reaches stores October 23, and starts at $1,999 in the US. We fact-checked every hardware claim in Pei's reel against Apple's published specs and five independent outlets — his technical complaints check out, even if his verdict is debatable.

Does the Duo really lack Face ID? Yes. It unlocks with Touch ID in the side button — a first for Apple's premium iPhone line since Face ID arrived with the iPhone X in 2017. The plausible explanation is engineering: the Duo is reportedly 5.2mm thick when unfolded, leaving little room for the TrueDepth array, and a foldable would theoretically need two Face ID systems. Apple has not confirmed this, and an excuse is not the same as a justification at $1,999.

Is the camera worse than the iPhone 18 Pro? On paper, yes: wide plus ultrawide with no dedicated telephoto (Apple says the main sensor gives 2x "optical quality"), a 12MP inner selfie camera against the 18 Pro's 18MP, no LiDAR, and no Pro camera controls. For a phone costing $800 more than the 18 Pro, Pei's arithmetic is hard to argue with.

When does Duo 3 fix the specs? Reporting attributed to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman suggests Face ID and a telephoto may not arrive until a third-generation Duo — a timeline Apple has not confirmed. Against that, Apple raised Duo production ~30% after early demand signals, and cut iPhone 18 Pro orders — the market, so far, is voting with Pei's wallet, not his mouth. This is the same autumn in which the $299 HomeView drew the same criticism — and customers kept paying anyway.

It is the cameras where Pei's argument gets harder for Apple to answer. The Duo ships with two rear cameras — wide and ultrawide — and no dedicated telephoto lens. Apple's answer is that the main sensor delivers up to 2x zoom of "optical quality," which is a fair point in the Duo's favour and probably true in good light. But it is still a software-assisted crop where a $1,199 iPhone 18 Pro has real glass, and buyers spending two grand know the difference.

The selfie camera is the more embarrassing comparison. The inner display camera is 12 megapixels against the 18 Pro's 18 — on a phone that costs $800 more. There is no LiDAR scanner for night photography and depth, and the Duo misses the Pro camera controls, like shutter-speed and aperture adjustment, that Apple reserves for its Pro line. Line them up side by side and Pei's arithmetic is difficult to argue with: the more expensive phone has the inferior camera system.

Photo: Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip foldables. Pei compared the Duo against Samsung's $1,900-range foldables in his reel; this photograph shows the rivals, not Apple's iPhone Duo. (Ka Kit Pang / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

"Just an animation"

Pei's Instagram caption, quoted by Phandroid, sums up the whole reel: "$2,000 is a lot for a bigger screen and a fancy animation." He argued that the online excitement around the Duo had fixated on the wrong thing — not the hinge engineering or the industrial design, but the UX of the folding animation, which he dismissed as "just an animation at the end of the day."

It was a deliberately deflating line, and he backed it with a cutting detail. Neowin reports that a version of the folding animation was "reportedly vibecoded in less than 24 hours" for Samsung's foldables after the Duo's announcement — implying that the most admired piece of Apple's software craft is trivially replicable. The claim is second-hand and unconfirmed, but it captures Pei's rhetorical strategy precisely: shrink the thing Apple is proudest of until it fits in a sentence.

And then, having torched the phone, Pei did something his competitors rarely bother with. He paid Apple a genuine compliment. Neowin's Usama Jawad reports that Pei ended the reel by acknowledging that Apple can charge the most precisely because it pays the most attention to detail — calling it a "legendary brand" when people notice those small details and appreciate them. It reads less like a retraction than a flex: I see exactly what you did here, and it still isn't worth two grand.

Pei is not a neutral referee

None of this should be read as consumer advice from a disinterested party. Pei runs a rival phone company that sells directly against Apple, and Nothing does not make a foldable — which means he gets to attack the category without defending his own version of it. Phandroid put it plainly: keep in mind that Pei isn't a neutral voice.

He also has history. Back in 2023, Pei claimed manufacturers were "pushing" foldable phones onto consumers who had not asked for them. Three years later, Apple has validated the category he dismissed — so part of what the reel really is, is a man trying to move the goalposts. The category can exist, he now concedes; it just isn't worth Apple's price.

There is a certain brass-necked entertainment in watching a CEO whose own phones trade on clever design lecture Apple about value. But entertainment is not the same as wrong, and on the spec sheet, Pei's facts survive contact with reality.

The demand story undercuts him

Here is the awkward part for Pei's thesis: the market appears not to care. PhoneArena reports that Apple has raised Duo production by roughly 30% — to close to 10 million units — after initially planning 6 to 7 million, and is flooding flagship stores with more than a hundred demo units, including New York's Fifth Avenue location, where buyers can even personalise the boot-up "Hello" greeting with their own name.

The analyst consensus is calmer but still healthy. Counterpoint Research forecasts Apple will sell around 6 million Duos before the end of 2026 — a niche number by iPhone standards, but roughly a quarter of the entire global foldable market from barely two months on sale. Counterpoint senior analyst Ivan Lam told Bloomberg the final figure will depend on how quickly Apple can ramp production of the new design. IDC, meanwhile, estimates the foldable segment will grow 13% to 22.9 million units this year with Apple's help — and would have shrunk without the Duo.

Do the crude maths: 6 million units at $1,999 is at least $12 billion in hardware revenue from a partial quarter. Pei can call it a waste of money; Wall Street will call it a product line.

Our take: Pei is half right, and the half matters

So is the Duo a waste of money? Here is where this gets uncomfortable for both sides. Pei's facts are essentially unimpeachable — the Face ID omission on a flagship in 2026 is genuinely shoddy, and charging $800 over the 18 Pro for weaker cameras is the kind of thing Apple used to get crucified for. The 5.2mm engineering excuse explains the compromise; it does not excuse the price. Apple is asking early adopters to fund its foldable learning curve while shipping them last year's biometrics and a cropped zoom.

But Pei's verdict confuses a bad value proposition with a bad product. Foldable buyers have never bought on a spec-per-dollar spreadsheet — Samsung has sold millions of Folds with visible creases, middling cameras and prices north of $1,700, because the form factor itself is the feature. The Duo's A20 Pro chip, 120Hz ProMotion displays, near-invisible crease and 7.6-inch unfolding canvas are real engineering, and the reported demand suggests buyers understand the trade they are making. This is an autumn in which Apple is already charging premium prices for questionable value — its $299 HomeView wall display drew the same criticism last week — and customers keep paying anyway.

The honest summary is this: Pei has correctly identified the Duo's weakest points, and Apple is betting, probably correctly, that they will not matter. Whether that bet holds past the first production run — and an autumn that already cost Apple a record $5.7 billion jury verdict — is the story to watch. If the Duo 3 really does restore Face ID and the telephoto, today's buyers will have paid $1,999 to beta-test the future. Pei's reel will age either as prophecy or as the loudest wrong call of the year. There is no middle ground, which is exactly why he posted it.

Sources: Neowin (Usama Jawad, Oct 12); PhoneArena (Oct 12–13); Phandroid (Oct 13); MacObserver (Oct 12); GSMDome; newsbytesapp (Oct 13); MacDailyNews / Counterpoint Research; Barchart; The Apple Post; IDC via MacDailyNews. Images: TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0); Ka Kit Pang / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

Maya Krishnan is TechPulse USA's Senior Technology Correspondent, covering Apple, smartphones and the business of consumer hardware. She has reviewed foldables from every major maker and still unfolds her phone like it's 2019.