Apple Cannot Say When Foldable iPhone Duo Will Restock

Apple sold out its $1,999 foldable iPhone Duo in just over a week, and the company says it cannot predict when supply will catch up with demand.

Chief operating officer Sabhi Kahn delivered that admission on Monday during a call with financial analysts discussing Apple's latest results. "At this time, it's really hard to predict when supply and demand will be in balance," Kahn said.

John Ternus, who took over as chief executive from Tim Cook in September, said he was "thrilled" at the early reaction to the phone. The Duo sells for £1,999 in the UK and went on sale toward the end of October.

What is wrong with the iPhone Duo?

The phone faces two separate problems. First, demand outran supply within days of launch. Second, some buyers have reported their screens cracking.

Apple executives did not mention any Duo issues on the analyst call. But last week the company said it would replace any phones affected by a fault that caused a "small number" of devices to crack along the inside fold.

The cracking problem has not cooled demand. Apple has no restock date to offer buyers waiting for the device.

How strong were Apple's wider sales?

Strong. Apple said on Monday that over the last year it sold more iPhones globally than ever before.

In the three months to 26 September, a period that excluded iPhone Duo sales, iPhone revenue rose 17% to $57bn. Mac sales grew 27% to $10.7bn, another record for the company.

The iPhone surge came despite Apple's repeated warnings that component shortages were weighing down sales across iPhones, Macs and iPads.

Not every product line performed. iPad sales fell 10%. Sales of wearables, including AirPods and the Apple Watch, fell 7%.

Overall revenue for the year rose 15% to $479bn.

Why can't Apple build enough devices?

The bottleneck is chips. Kahn said most Apple devices still face supply constraints, driven partly by difficulty sourcing enough microprocessors built on "advanced nodes" — the cutting-edge chip technology that lets devices run faster.

Most of those components are manufactured for Apple by TSMC, based in Taiwan.

Kahn said the constraints should continue into next year, hitting iPads and Macs hardest. Apple has repeatedly argued that "unexpected demand" for its products has made the shortage worse.

What about memory costs?

Ternus flagged a second cost pressure. Apple is still seeing "unprecedented" cost increases for memory, the storage that holds apps, photos and text messages on its devices.

The mechanism is straightforward. AI chatbots and platforms, including those built by OpenAI and Anthropic, have driven a boom in demand for data centre space. Memory storage runs heavily through those data centres, and as demand has grown, storage prices have risen for companies like Apple.

Tim Cook had a name for the spike earlier this year. He called the sudden rise in data centre costs a "thousand year flood."

What does this mean for prices?

Apple has already responded. The company has raised prices on essentially all of its hardware products by around 20%.

That price increase, combined with record iPhone and Mac revenue, explains how Apple grew total sales to $479bn despite supply limits. The open question is whether TSMC's advanced-node chips arrive fast enough in the new year to restock the Duo and ease the iPad and Mac shortages that Kahn expects to persist.