Apple's iPhone Duo ships without Siri AI in China and the EU

Apple's first folding phone went on sale on 23 October in the United States and more than 70 other markets, with queues outside stores and nothing left to sell. Pre-orders had opened a week earlier at 5am Pacific on 16 October, and within the hour every colour and storage combination was quoting 25 January for delivery. That is 101 days of backlog built up in a morning.

The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 for 256GB and runs to $3,199 for 2TB, so the storage ladder alone adds 60% to the entry price. Apple opens it to a 7.58-inch inner screen, half again the area of an iPhone 18 Pro Max, with a 5.36-inch outer display, an A20 Pro chip, a dual-battery layout and an IP68 rating. Payment is where the number gets softer: a Klarna lease runs from $57.99 a month over 24 months, which totals $1,391.76 and leaves you owning nothing at the end of it.

The AI is off in China and late in the EU

The part that matters to anyone following AI regulation is in the footnotes rather than the keynote.

“Apple Intelligence features will not be available in China and will not be initially available in the EU.”

— Apple, iPhone Duo product page, 23 October 2026, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/open-up-to-new-possibilities-with-iphone-duo/

iOS 27 arrives on the Duo with a redesigned Siri built on Apple Intelligence, and Apple's own product page says those features will not be available in China and will not initially be available in the EU. They ship in beta, in English first. Much of the work runs as inference on the device itself rather than in a datacentre, which is what the A20 Pro and the dual-battery layout are partly there for, so the restriction is about where Apple is allowed to ship the feature rather than where it can compute it. The headline capability of a $1,999 phone is switched off in the largest smartphone market on earth and delayed in a bloc of 450 million people.

This is the second Apple launch in a row with that shape. We wrote in September that the iPhone 18 Pro shipped to 65 countries with its AI dark in the EU and China, and the Duo repeats it a month later on a more expensive device. The reasons are regulatory rather than technical, and they have not moved in either direction since.

Demand or scarcity

Supply is the other open question. Apple has not published a production figure, the constraint is reported as the hinge and the folding panel rather than the chip, and a January ship date on day one tells you the ceiling was low before demand showed up. Whether the queues were demand or scarcity is a question the next quarter answers, not this one.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any asset. Prices and ship dates are Apple's own, checked on 26 October 2026, and Apple has published no production or sales figures for the device.