I keep mentioning Apple’s 1992 groundbreaking PowerBook Duo series as a precedent of the iPhone Duo’s name. But of course in 2020, Apple released the MagSafe Duo Charger, a wonderful Lightning peripheral for charging an iPhone and Apple Watch at the same time. It even folded.

A brief note on the PowerBook Duo, while I’m at it. I got an email this month from a now-retired former Apple employee who help spearhead that project, and he emphasized that the internal motto was always “Best of Both Worlds”, abbreviated internally to just “BOBW”. At the time, laptops were just profoundly less powerful than desktop computers, but desktop computers of course were the opposite of “portable”. The Macintosh Duo was a terrific success, because it really did achieve that “best of both worlds” experience. Here’s a 2015 retrospective on the PowerBook Duo by Christopher Phin that captures and illustrates just how groundbreaking it was.

BOBW is exactly what the iPhone Duo needs to be. It needs to be a great iPhone on the outside, and a great mini tablet on the inside.