iPhone Duo<\/a> set to hit stores on October 23, social media wasted little time reviving an annual tradition that arrived almost as reliably as the new iPhone itself: memes about our old phones suddenly becoming ancient, questionable spending decisions and the eternal question of whether we actually needed the upgrade in the first place.<\/p>\nThis time, however, Apple had given the internet something new to work with after launching the $1,999 passport-shaped foldable phone, called Duo.<\/p>\n
The iPhone Duo was the company\u2019s first iPhone designed to open in half, marking a major departure from the familiar smartphone design. Apple called it \u201cthe biggest change in iPhone history since the original model\u201d.<\/p>\n
And while Apple was busy presenting the device as the future, social media was asking some slightly less futuristic questions.<\/p>\n
One of the internet\u2019s favourite responses to the iPhone Duo was wonderfully low-tech: take two phones, put them together and, apparently, you had yourself a foldable iPhone.<\/p>\n
Other posts took aim at the phone\u2019s price, with memes comparing the cost of the iPhone Duo to a Royal Enfield Super Meteor motorcycle.<\/p>\n
At that price, the upgrade suddenly came with a very serious philosophical question: Do you want a new phone, or do you want to make a more worthy purchase?<\/p>\n
Then came the annual debate over our supposedly \u201cold\u201d phones.<\/p>\n
Every time a new iPhone arrived, social media filled with jokes about older models slowing down, batteries giving up and perfectly functional devices suddenly feeling like relics.<\/p>\n
But some users also turned the joke back on themselves, questioning whether their phones really needed replacing or whether the arrival of a newer model simply made the old one feel obsolete.<\/p>\n
After all, the phone that was perfectly good yesterday did not suddenly become terrible overnight.<\/p>\n
The marketing cycle just moved on.<\/p>\n
One post took the classic promise of futuristic technology and gave it a very 2026 twist.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the future, we’ll have flying cars,\u201d it read. The reality? We\u2019re watching TikTok and Instagram Reels at the same time on two separate halves of a phone.<\/p>\n
The memes also did not ignore one of the most practical problems with a phone that opened into a larger screen.<\/p>\n
One post featured Freddie from the Nickelodeon show iCarly struggling to pull a massive phone out of his pocket \u2014 an increasingly relatable scenario in a world where smartphones seemed determined to become everything except pocket-sized.<\/p>\n
But perhaps one of the strangest details to catch social media\u2019s attention was Apple\u2019s use of an unusually large hand model while showcasing the phone.<\/p>\n
The internet, being the internet, called them \u201calien hands\u201d.<\/p>\n
What was presumably just a creative choice in a product video quickly became another meme, with users joking that Apple had recruited extraterrestrials to help introduce the next generation of smartphones.<\/p>\n
For Apple, the iPhone Duo may represent the next big chapter in smartphone design. For the internet, however, it had already become something else: the latest canvas for jokes, comparisons and a little healthy scepticism.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that was the real tradition of every iPhone launch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From price jokes to ‘alien hands’, social media found plenty to meme about after Apple unveiled its foldable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":844888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[517,174,74],"class_list":["post-844887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-internet","tag-apple","tag-internet","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}