Don’t Expect the iPhone Duo Supply Crunch to Let Up This Year
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While it’s still not completely impossible to get your hands on an iPhone Duo if you stay on top of your local Apple Store, it doesn’t look like that’s going to get easier any time soon.
Apple’s new foldable may have set a record this year for the fastest sellout ever. When preorders opened on October 16, every single configuration — from the $1,999 256 GB model to the $3,199 2 TB capacity — hit 2027 shipping dates within minutes.
While that didn’t rule out picking one up at your local Apple Store when they hit shelves on October 23, initially retail staff were warning customers they might face disappointments. Still, while a few folks were fortunate enough to score an iPhone Duo on launch day, you had to get there pretty early in most locations.
This was all despite Apple reportedly sending 80% of its stock to its retail stores. That explained how online units sold out quickly, but it didn’t really answer why some customers were still camping outside Apple Stores a week later, hoping that they’d be first in line when the next one or two units came off the truck.
By the end of last week, Investing.com reported on an analysis by UBS Evidence Lab that iPhone Duo wait times had fallen by seven days after the first week of retail availability, but were still hovering at an unprecedented average of 89 days. The firm said this “aligns with expectations as Apple works to satisfy global demand from early adopters and premium feature-focused consumers.”
Some insiders, including Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, believe Apple jumped the gun, deciding upon an October launch to try to push more sales for its holiday quarter, despite knowing it didn’t have enough stock to go around.
Let me cut to the chase: Apple made a major mistake here. The company knew there would be severe supply constraints but went ahead with the launch anyway, apparently prioritizing a desire to get the device on the market early in its fiscal first quarter over satisfying demand.
Mark Gurman
In August, an unknown Chinese supply chain source suggested the iPhone Duo might initially be exclusive to the US, and Gurman confirmed this was considered, with the initial launch possibly also encompassing China — and possibly not until the end of November.
Sadly, newly minted Apple CEO John Ternus doesn’t appear to have any better news for us. During the company’s Q4 2026 earnings call on Monday, where it once again reported record-breaking revenue, Ternus said only “we are working hard to get iPhone Duo into customers’ hands as quickly as we can.”
When asked about when Apple can expect to “reach supply-demand balance on the Duo,” chief operating officer Sabih Khan could only say that it’s “constrained as of today,” echoing the same comment that “we’re working hard to get this revolutionary new product into the hands of our customers as quickly as possible,” and that “it’s really hard to predict when supply and demand will be in balance.”
Ternus later repeated essentially the same comment in an interview with Reuters:
Duo is constrained as of today. The ramp is going well… but at this point, we’re not able to predict when supply and demand will be in balance.
John Ternus
While we’ve heard similar boilerplate responses from former CEO Tim Cook several times in recent years on other iPhone models, none have seen shipping times pushed into the following year the way the iPhone Duo has. While Apple has reportedly upped its production orders by at least five million units, that’s for an entire 12-month period, which places the bulk of that increase into 2027.
This makes it a pretty safe bet that not much will change between now and the end of the year. In fact, some analysts, like Ming-Chi Kuo, saw this coming nearly a year ago, saying in December 2025 that “with limited supply and expected strong demand, the foldable iPhone could be facing shortages until at least the end of 2026.”
