Apple’s first foldable, the $1,999 iPhone Duo, combines an iPhone and iPad Mini experience—but its size, weight and price come with compromises.
4 min
As I watched a Netflix show on Apple’s first foldable, the iPhone Duo, I had two surprising thoughts.
The first: Maybe I don’t need my iPad Mini anymore.
The second: Uh oh, am I about to spend $1,999 on a phone?
I didn’t think folding phones were for me. I’ve been testing Android versions from Samsung and Google since 2019, and those early editions came with too much screen and too many compromises.
Fast forward seven years, and the technology has come a long way. Apple—in its very Apple way—has also come up with some hardware and software trickery to make up for some shortcomings of the basic design. My desire for a folding phone before today was zero. After today, it’s a lot more than zero.
I’m not ready to recommend the Duo, which ships on Oct. 23, just yet. Not until I am able to test it more fully, so be on the lookout for that review in a few weeks. But from what I experienced at Apple Park on Wednesday, I could actually picture myself using this new half-phone, half-tablet hybrid.
For months, I’ve been using Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, a similarly squat, passport-shaped foldable that opens up to a larger screen. It’s impressively thin and can easily fit into the infuriatingly tiny pockets in women’s pants and dresses. Samsung did a lot of work to minimize the crease—the dip between the two halves of the big interior display—but it’s still clearly there.
When I held the iPhone Duo open, the crease was barely visible. As I slid my finger across the display, I could feel it, but it’s more subtle than Samsung’s. Most of the time, the screen looked as flat and smooth as the one on an iPad.
Apple employed both software and hardware techniques to camouflage the crease. The matte surface of the interior 7.6-inch screen minimizes reflections to hide it. (Samsung’s Fold 8 screen is shiny.)
And as you begin to open or close the iPhone Duo, the interface shifts the controls and content away from the center crease. If, say, you’re watching a video on the outer screen, you can open the Duo to switch to the bigger display within. A black fade marks the transition. You don’t see the video full screen until the phone is completely flat.
My second observation was that, when the Duo is closed, in phone mode, it was harder to use one-handed than I expected.
In the keynote trailer and press release, Apple touted how thin the Duo is. It’s marketed as the thinnest iPhone ever—when open.
But it’s actually thicker and heavier than most of its Android competitors. The Duo weighs 254 grams, and is 11.3 millimeters thick when closed. The Samsung Galaxy Fold 8 is just 201 grams, with a thickness of 9.7 millimeters. Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold is 239 grams and 10.1 millimeters.
Because the Duo is also wider than a standard iPhone, I found it quite a challenge to type.
I admit, I do have smaller-than-average hands. So I consulted my colleague Rolfe Winkler, who has a larger grip. He agreed the Duo feels big.
Apple rearranged the interface on the outer screen so it looks different than traditional iPhones. The dock and control center are off to the right to be more reachable. Committing to the Duo as your main device will require adjustments in your handling. You will have to learn a new way to use and type.
My most surprising takeaway? I feel a pull toward this device.
I always thought that combining an iPhone and an iPad would mean bigger compromises. The battery life is about the same as the 18 Pro (up to 24 hours of “regular use” on a single charge), though I’ll need to verify that in my real-world testing. And it’s also as durable, with the same IP68 dust- and water-resistance rating as the rest of the iPhone lineup.
There are trade-offs, for sure. Trying out the camera, I immediately missed the 8X zoom in my Pro model. The Duo has just 2X zoom, which wouldn’t cut it for the dozens of pictures I take of my kid every day.
But the dual screens unlock new photo functionality. You can see what your shot looks like from the outside screen. As someone who has tried tirelessly to self-direct a family photo—or a spouse—I am very eager to try this out more.
Foldables, I initially thought, were for classic mobile-warrior jet-setter types, who never sit at a desk and are always on calls. For that crowd, the Duo can run two apps side-by-side.
Me, I’m more of a bed binge-watcher and ebook reader. That’s what my beloved iPad Mini is for.
Watching videos on the Duo is a nice experience—nice enough that you forget the screen is 0.7 inches smaller than the iPad Mini’s. The main screen is also a 4:3 aspect ratio. Very similar, by the way, to the IMAX edition of the Odyssey.
Because I wasn’t able to snag a ticket to one of the sold-out screenings, I will be watching Christopher Nolan’s version of Homer’s epic on the Duo, just as the director intended. (Just kidding! Sort of.)
The Duo costs $800 more than an iPhone 18 Pro, and I’m not sure I want to spend that premium on a first-generation Apple device. But I’m not ruling out the idea that a Duo might one day be in my future. Stay tuned for my full review.
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Nurse turnover reached 18% last year, increasing pressure on hospitals, raising recruitment costs and potentially compromising patient safety. Healthcare leaders warn that the issue is not a shortage of qualified nurses, but a shortage of nurses willing to remain in increasingly strained working environments.
9 min
Paige Campbell became a nurse during the pandemic, wanting to make a difference. She landed a job after college working in the emergency department at a Fort Walton Beach, Fla., hospital.
Since then, she’s been kicked, spat on and shoved to the ground. Last year, after an emergency patient strangled her, she left for a role remotely monitoring patients. Front-line nurses are in high demand, but she needed a break.
“All I could think was, ‘I can’t breathe, I’m going to die here, and who’s going to tell my mom and dad?’” Campbell, 33, said. The incident unfolded after an ER patient she’d offered a blanket to became aggressive.
America’s nurses are more educated than ever and can command six-figure salaries. Most have their bachelor’s degree. Their income has boomed since the pandemic to a median $97,550 a year, and their hands-on work isn’t easily automated away. Nursing schools have seen their ranks swell, minting thousands of new graduates every year.
They’re also leaving the bedside in droves. Burnout and complaints about understaffing, verbal abuse and workplace violence are pushing many nurses off the front lines and into other careers where their skills are in high demand.
“There is no shortage of nurses in this country,” said Jeff Doucette, chief nursing officer at healthcare analytics firm Press Ganey. “There’s a shortage of nurses that want to work in the current environment.”
Fifteen years ago, bedside registered nurses had an 11% turnover rate, according to data from NSI Nursing Solutions, a nurse-placement firm. The percentage of nurses leaving their jobs every year began to tick up even before Covid, when it spiked further. In the pandemic’s aftermath, as more hospitals dangled salary increases, turnover eased. But last year, it rose again, hitting 18%.
One 2024 survey of 800,000 nurses found that roughly 40% said they planned to leave the workforce or retire in the next five years, with many citing stress, burnout and understaffing. In another survey this year, 43% said they were likely to leave bedside roles within the next year, up from 38% the prior year.
A recent University of Pennsylvania survey of 4,000 actively licensed nurses who’d left a job in the past five years found that while 56% are retired, 8% are working in other fields and the rest weren’t working.
The revolving door is driving up expenses for hospitals that spend millions to recruit staff and fill gaps, and increasing costs for patients.
Health executives say worker churn also jeopardizes patient safety, intensifying the risk of patient falls, medical errors and missed cues. Senior nurses, in particular, bring vast stores of clinical intuition and operational expertise that help ensure unit safety, mentor less-experienced staff and keep complex hospital floors running efficiently.
A decade ago when managing emergency departments, Dustin Bass said he was accustomed to tapping his most tenured nurses to run triage. With a decade or two on the job, they could look across a room and spot who was having a heart attack.
“Now you have nurses running massive emergency rooms with 133 care spaces, and they’ve only been working for two or three years,” said Bass, president of the Emergency Nurses Association.
The American hospital system has grown more efficient, both in terms of footprint and staffing. There are fewer hospital beds, and the ones that remain are occupied on a more continuous basis. Hospitals have adopted software tools to optimize staffing, with nurses more regularly covering shifts on floors where they aren’t usually assigned, to meet patient ebbs and flows.
It’s a boon for productivity, health executives say. It’s also a considerable strain on workers, whose days are more intense and less predictable.
A generation ago, nurses might have worked in a ward of patients recovering from routine surgeries. Today, more patients are seen outpatient, and those who remain tend to be sicker and more medically complex, requiring intensive monitoring. With the growth of clinical testing, nurses are also coordinating care with a bevy of specialists and inputting electronic health records—often on 12-hour shifts with no more than a 30-minute break.
And they’re bearing the brunt of the system’s strains. Fewer hospital beds can jam up emergency departments with patients—some who grow irate waiting for beds. Many hospital emergency departments, meanwhile, have become catch basins for people with unmet mental-health challenges in full-blown crises.
Across all floors, nurses describe a coarsening in attitudes among patients that often leads to friction, if not outright violence.
“The nurse is the face of the hospital, and we’re constantly blamed for things outside our control,” said Juliet Etienne, 29.
Since starting a job as an emergency department nurse in New Orleans last year, she’s been kicked and spat on and had a patient throw a full dinner tray at her. Still, she said she can understand why emergency patients sometimes boil over. On occasion, she’s seen them wait more than 30 hours for care.
An analysis of records from 1,500 hospitals by the University of Michigan Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston found ER wait times spiked during the pandemic and stayed high through 2024, the most recent data available. During the winter months, when hospitals are busiest, nearly 5% of patients wait over 24 hours for a hospital bed.
“You have people in their most vulnerable times of their life, and their call button’s not getting answered because the nurse is overworked, their loved one’s not being seen,” said Amy Stimpfel, associate professor at Villanova University’s M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing. “It’s bubbling up from a system that’s sort of broken.”
Press Ganey, which compiles reports from a large national hospital sample, found 2.4% of nursing staff were attacked in some manner last year. The rate is up 26% from 2017, the furthest back the survey data go, and amounts to well over 1,000 attacks a month.
This is likely an undercount, since many incidents are never reported, the company said. Assaults can run the gamut from common problems like getting shoved to, in rarer cases, severe attacks such as stabbings.
Surveys by nursing associations and unions peg rates significantly higher: A recent survey of 1,300 nurses by National Nurses United found 33% said they’d been slapped, punched or kicked in the past year, with another 12% reporting being groped or inappropriately touched.
Almost two out of five healthcare workers have considered leaving their jobs because of safety concerns, according to a Harris Poll survey last year commissioned by Verkada, a security-tech firm.
Holly Jazwinski, a 42-year-old emergency-room nurse in Danville, Pa., said she loves bedside nursing. But last summer, a patient punched her in the face, broke her glasses and attempted to stab her with them.
“Now I have this sense of anxiety every time I go to work,” Jazwinski said. “I started to feel a little defeated, like what am I even doing here?”
She’s currently getting her master’s in nursing, which will allow her to pursue other jobs, including in education.
Today’s bedside nurses have more career options than previous generations—an advantage for workers and a challenge for hospitals trying to keep them on the front lines.
Nurse practitioner roles, which require more advanced training and offer more pay, are mushrooming as more states have given them license to independently practice. Careers in virtual nursing and settings like urgent care are also growing.
One of its nurses recently quit to become a nurse practitioner, offering cosmetic treatments that patients often pay for in cash. “I can’t compete with that,” said Connolly.
The system is partnering with a local university to conduct research on why young nurses are leaving the profession early.
Christian Stone, a nurse in Washington, D.C., spent five years working in different emergency departments before leaving to join an urgent-care clinic. He said he wanted to help people and loved the department’s tempo, but he was routinely the target of screaming patients. One man bit him.
Wait times were often long and tempers short, he said, as patients without primary care showed up seeking help for minor ailments.
“I do miss it,” Stone said of bedside nursing. “But now I don’t hate coming to work every day.”
Part of the challenge in fighting turnover is that, on a spreadsheet, nurses can look like a costly line item, said Omid Razmpour, a former ICU nurse and a researcher at Emory University. And many hospitals already face severe financial pressure, including higher operational costs and rising ranks of uninsured patients who still require care.
Nursing unions often complain that management staffing and pay decisions are driving nurses off the front lines.
“If you talk to the C Suite, it’s easy to say, ‘Hey, give us resources for a physician,’ because they’re going to generate X amount of revenue,” Razmpour said.
But losing a nurse is extremely expensive. Razmpour analyzed turnover costs at Emory Healthcare and found it costs the Atlanta-based health system around $78,000 anytime a nurse leaves. Costs can pile up as hospitals fill gaps with more expensive, often contract, workers and try to recruit and train full-time replacements, he’s found.
Emory recently gave out $150 million in raises to its staff, mostly nurses. The effort cut turnover rates and ultimately saved the system money, said Sharon Pappas, who recently retired as chief nurse executive at Emory Healthcare and worked with Razmpour to analyze the cost of the system’s nursing turnover.
Some hospitals have fewer resources and big problems.
Rome Health, a safety-net hospital in upstate New York that serves many elderly and uninsured patients, has struggled with high nurse turnover for years, with 50% of its staff leaving every year as of 2019.
The problem persisted during the pandemic and its aftermath, as some nurses left for more lucrative careers such as travel nursing or work as nurse practitioners, at times because they felt overwhelmed or fed up, said Ashley Edwards, the health system’s chief nursing officer.
For help, the hospital appealed in 2024 to the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, last year winning a $5 million grant to help invest in its nursing workforce. It’s since used the money to support a residency program for new nurses and a coach who regularly meets one-on-one with nurses.
In one meeting with the foundation, Edwards recalled being asked how staff intended to carry out such programs, given the work they’d entail. “We were like, ‘We can’t afford not to,’” Edwards said. “It’s exhausting to the nurses to have that much turnover, not knowing what their day looks like. Are they going to come in three nurses short? Are they going to come in fully staffed? Are they going to come in with all new nurses?”
Rome Health still has a high turnover rate—28% as of last year—but the hospital said lowering that number is yielding results. Rates of falls and certain IV-associated infections have both declined.
Some hospitals have also boosted safety protocols to deal with the risk of serious violence. In some cases this means panic buttons and armed private security forces. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has added metal detectors across its 40 hospitals after a gunman shot multiple healthcare workers at its York, Pa., campus last year after a loved one died there.
“Everyone in the country is trying to roll these out as best and fast as they can,” said Maribeth McLaughlin, UPMC’s chief nurse executive.
Nurses say the safety measures are helpful but should be seen as one part of a tool kit, which also involves things like unit-specific safety plans and adequate staffing.
Campbell, the Florida nurse who was strangled, voted with fellow nurses last year to unionize over issues including safety and what they say is patient overcrowding. She’s currently serving as a nurse delegate in contract negotiations with the hospital, an HCA Healthcare facility. The company said workplace safety was a serious issue and that it is investing in security, technology and training to ensure the safety of its workers and patients.
Campbell is planning on returning to the emergency department later this year. While she has some trepidation, Campbell said she wants to keep caring for patients, as well as advocate for change and better safety.
“Everyone has a mom or dad or child they feel passionate about caring for,” she said. “I want to stay in the game.”
