Samsung spent Wednesday roasting Apple’s first foldable phone, and the sharpest line was about leftovers.
Apple announced the iPhone Duo at its keynote, the company’s first phone that folds. It has a 7.6 inch screen on the inside and a 5.4 inch screen on the outside, both built to the same proportions so whatever you’re looking at resizes cleanly when you open it. Apple says it’s the thinnest iPhone it has ever made when unfolded. It starts at $1,999.
Samsung Mobile US posted through the whole event. It called the phone “a Sims sequel,” summed it up as “So far, so same,” and needled Apple for launching with only one folding shape by writing “Making us wait? Fine. We’ll be over here, folding 3 ways,” a reference to phones that fold twice instead of once. Then came the one everybody screenshotted. “Let us know when you’re done reheating our leftovers.” Samsung never said Apple or iPhone Duo in that post, but it went up minutes after the announcement, so nobody had to guess.
Hours before the keynote, Samsung had already run an ad showing the Galaxy Z Fold 8 from every angle and calling it the world’s lightest fold. That was the friendly version. The posts got meaner once Apple actually spoke.
Duolingo joined in, which is how you know a product launch has fully left the tech section. The language app posted that Apple named a phone after it and made it bend over, then added that at least there’s more screen for your lessons now. Samsung replied in mock sympathy, telling Duolingo it was sorry and that Apple copied them too. Duolingo turned around and called Samsung an ugly stranger, and the two brands kept going at each other in Apple’s replies for the rest of the afternoon.
The dunks land because Samsung has a real claim here. It has been selling folding phones since 2019, back when the first Galaxy Fold units were breaking in reviewers’ hands before launch. It ate years of jokes, warranty claims, and hinge failures while Apple sat out and watched. There’s a version of this where Samsung has earned every single one of these posts.
Here’s the part that complicates it. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 arrived in July with a form factor that walked away from the book style design Samsung had built its entire foldable line around. The shape it landed on looks a lot like the shape Apple just put on stage. Reporting at 9to5Google raised the obvious question, which is whether Samsung’s redesign was itself a reaction to Apple’s arrival, since Apple’s foldable had been leaking for well over a year and everyone in the industry knew roughly when and roughly what.
Nobody can prove which company moved first. Product cycles at this scale run years, and both companies were watching the same leaks and the same suppliers. But the timing is what it is. Samsung reshaped its flagship a few weeks before Apple showed up with something similar, and then went online to accuse Apple of serving reheated food.
The rest of it is a fight about who owns an idea, which in phones is usually a fight nobody wins. Apple did not invent the folding screen and is not pretending to. Samsung did not invent the phone. The iPhone Duo is Apple doing what Apple has always done, which is arrive late to a category, let everyone else absorb the cost of the early mistakes, and then ship the version it thinks is finished. That worked with the MP3 player and it worked with the smartwatch. Whether it works at two thousand dollars is a different question, and it’s the one that actually matters once the jokes stop trending.
For now Samsung is winning the afternoon. It got the quote, it got the screenshots, and it got a language learning app to fight Apple on its behalf. Whether it wins the year comes down to something no timeline can settle, which is which of these phones people are still carrying in eighteen months.
