Apple says demand for iPhone Duo has been "nothing short of extraordinary," and now analyst estimates are starting to put a rough number on what that could mean for the foldable's first months.
Apple's statement, first reported by MacRumors and attributed to the Financial Times, said the company is working hard to get the product into customers' hands as quickly as possible. Apple gave no unit figures and has not said how many iPhone Duo units it is producing.
The numbers that are circulating come from outside Apple. Cult of Mac points to a September forecast from Omdia, which expected Apple to ship more than six million iPhone Duo units by the end of 2026. Counterpoint analysts have reportedly cited a similar figure. Those are shipment projections made before pre-orders opened, not a count of orders taken, and neither firm's methodology was detailed in the coverage.
Cult of Mac's own view that sales could reach or exceed that level, and might approach 10 million, is the author's inference and does not come with a cited source. The piece argues that a pre-order sellout only shows demand relative to supply, and that because delivery estimates now run into late January, the available units are effectively spoken for.
For scale, the same report cites Omdia's estimate that about 18.2 million foldable phones shipped worldwide in 2025 (IDC puts the figure at 20.6 million), out of roughly 1.25 billion smartphones. GF Securities projects about 257 million iPhone shipments in 2026, so six million Duos would be a little over 2 percent of that total. A reader on the Cult of Mac article also questioned the share math, noting that the result depends on whether the Duo is included in the foldable market denominator.
The context is a launch that moved quickly. Pre-orders opened at 5 a.m. Pacific on October 16, with delivery estimates sliding from October 23 to November within minutes and to late January soon afterward. Pricing starts at $1,999 and rises to $3,199 for the 2TB configuration. Apple has confirmed in-store sales on October 23, though it has not published walk-in inventory.
Until Apple reports results, analyst forecasts remain the only public yardstick for Duo volumes, and they were set before the pre-order rush. Apple does not typically break out iPhone unit sales in its earnings reports, so a precise figure may never be confirmed.
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