Missed the
iPhone Duo launch?

The full narration of the video.

Apple has all that money. So why can't it make enough foldables? At 8 p.m. on October 16, the iPhone Duo opened for orders. Within half an hour, home delivery had slipped to late January. Launch-day store pickup was gone in minutes.

Don't call a scalper just yet. Let's follow one Duo from the factory to your hand, and see where it gets stuck. A normal phone screen is one flat slab. The Duo's screen folds in half, held up by a hinge in the middle. That hinge has to open and close every day for years, and leave no deep crease in the middle of the screen.

Reports say it holds more than a hundred tiny parts. Making it is a bit like the hardest dish in a noodle shop: hand-pulled dragon-beard noodles. Out of ten pulls, three or four snap. The broken ones go in the bin, and you start again.

The factory is much the same. Supply-chain reports say only about six in ten early units pass Apple's checks. That ratio has a name: yield. When the news says yield is sixty percent, it means only sixty out of a hundred phones can be sold. The snapped noodles are the phones that fail inspection: they get reworked or taken apart.

Money can't make you pull faster. The cook's hands get better one pull at a time, and so does the production line. A noodle shop can hire another cook by tomorrow. A factory adding a line has to build the machines first, then tune them slowly. Slow on one side, crowds on the other. On one shopping site alone, over two million people signed up, so the first batch never stood a chance.

So how long until it reaches you? Look at last time. In 2017, the iPhone X was also a hard new design: within minutes, the wait hit five or six weeks. About a month later, the factory had got the hang of it, and orders arrived in two or three days.

This hinge is harder than that, so nobody can say how long. For now, Apple's site says late January. What about scalpers? On resale sites, markups run from over a thousand yuan to ten thousand. All that extra money buys you is getting it a few months sooner.

And it comes with risk. Proxy buyers want your account and ID, and some take a deposit they won't refund. As stock builds up, the markup falls, and whoever paid the most loses the most. The safest move is to order on Apple's site today and hold your place. Before it ships, you can still cancel.

Apple says it will restock in batches. Check store pickup every few days, and you might get lucky. What's the hardest thing you've ever had to fight to buy?