Apple has sold out of the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, and has told financial analysts it does not know when more will be available.
The phone went on sale just over a week ago at $1,999 — £1,999 in the United Kingdom — and sold out immediately. John Ternus, who took over as chief executive from Tim Cook in September, said he was "thrilled" at the early reaction.
Asked when stock would return, chief operating officer Sabhi Kahn gave no date. "At this time, it’s really hard to predict when supply and demand will be in balance," he said on the analyst call.
Sold out, and cracking
The sell-out is not the only thing following the Duo around. Some buyers have reported screens cracking along the inside fold, and last week Apple said it would replace phones affected by an issue it described as hitting a "small number" of units. Executives did not raise the problem during Monday’s call.
A record year underneath it
The supply problem sits on top of unusually strong results. Apple said it sold more iPhones globally over the past year than ever before. In the three months to 26 September — a quarter that closed before the Duo went on sale — iPhone revenue rose 17% to $57bn. Mac sales grew 27% to $10.7bn, also a record. Annual sales across the company rose 15% to $479bn.
Not everything grew. iPad sales fell 10% and wearables, which includes the Watch and headphones, fell 7%.
Why there is a shortage in a record year
Kahn put most of the constraint down to difficulty securing enough microprocessors built on what the industry calls advanced nodes — the smaller, faster chip designs Apple mostly has manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan. Those constraints are expected to continue into next year, he said, hitting iPads and Macs particularly hard.
Memory is the sharper problem. Ternus described "unprecedented" cost increases for the storage that holds apps, photos and messages. Much of the world’s memory supply is being absorbed by data centres, where demand has surged as AI chatbots and platforms from companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have grown. As those buyers compete for the same chips, prices rise for everyone else — Cook earlier this year called the jump a "thousand year flood".
Apple has responded by raising prices across essentially its whole hardware range by around 20%.
What it means here
Bangladesh is not a launch market for the Duo, and grey-market pricing in Dhaka tracks international availability closely. A sold-out flagship with no restock date and a known screen fault is the combination that historically pushes local prices well above the official figure, while leaving buyers outside the replacement programme Apple is running in its own markets. Anyone being offered one locally in the next few weeks should establish where the handset was bought and whether that warranty travels before paying a premium for scarcity.
The part that affects everyone else
The memory squeeze is not an Apple problem. The same data-centre buildout is bidding for the same storage chips that go into every laptop, phone and television, and Apple is better placed than most to absorb the cost and secure supply. When the largest buyer in the consumer market says prices are rising at an unprecedented rate and has already put roughly a fifth onto its own hardware, the smaller brands that dominate shelves in Dhaka are facing the same input cost with far less leverage.
If that holds, the visible effect locally will not be a shortage. It will be quieter: the same price for less storage, or last year’s configuration staying on sale at this year’s price.
