New Delhi: Apple finally made a foldable phone, and true to form, it’s not cheap. The iPhone Duo starts at ₹2,99,900 for the base 256GB model in India just ₹100 short of the psychologically loaded ₹3 lakh mark, which honestly feels like a deliberate bit of pricing theatre. Go up to 2TB and you’re looking at ₹4,49,900. That’s more than most laptops. More than some bikes, even.
So does it deserve that number? Depends who you ask, and honestly, depends what you’re comparing it to.
So let’s, start with what you actually get after paying almost ₹3,00,000. iPhone Duo opens to a large 7.6-inch Super Retina XDR inner display, with a smaller 5.4-inch outer screen, both supporting ProMotion, Always-On, and up to 3,000 nits outdoor brightness. If we discuss about the build quality it leans hard into durability a Grade 5 titanium frame, Ceramic Shield, IP68 rating, and a hinge with more than 100 components. On paper, that’s a phone built to survive daily abuse, not just look pretty in a keynote video.
Then there’s the crease. Apple spent years being the company that supposedly wouldn’t ship a foldable until it “solved” the crease problem everyone mocks Samsung for. Well, it didn’t, not entirely. Hands-on videos from launch day show the crease is clearly visible from certain angles, even with Apple’s nano-texture finish designed to cut glare and reduce how noticeable the fold line looks. It’s better than a lot of what’s out there, apparently. But “better” isn’t “gone,” and Apple never actually claimed it was gone reviewers just projected that onto them because, well, it’s Apple.
Here’s the part that actually bugs me: Apple hasn’t published a fold-cycle rating anywhere, while Samsung’s Z Fold8 is rated for 500,000 folds. For a first-generation product at this price, that’s a strange thing to stay quiet about. Durability over two or three years of daily folding is exactly the question a ₹3 lakh purchase should be able to answer, and right now nobody outside Cupertino actually knows.
Compare that to the US price $1,999, which works out to roughly ₹1.9 lakh, over a lakh cheaper than the Indian price and the value math gets even messier. That gap isn’t unusual for Apple in India, import duties do that to every flagship, but at this price point the sting is a lot more real.
My honest take? It’s a genuinely impressive piece of engineering, and if money isn’t the constraint, it’s probably the best folding phone experience iOS users have ever had. But “deserves ₹3 lakh” is a different question than “is impressive,” and for most people, I think the answer’s no not yet, not until we know how it holds up a year in.
