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Reviews are in: iPhone Duo mostly good, kinda odd

Display and battery life are standouts, but some newbie-like flaws weigh the phone down.

Based on early reactions, Apple’s first foldable phone, released in limited supply today, seems like your initial attempt at a new recipe: exciting, fit for consumption, but not totally satisfying.

The $1,999 Duo is being called “one of Apple’s messiest first-generation products in a long time,” per The Verge (which gave it a 7/10); the “most interesting iPhone since the first one,” per Mashable; and an expensive, inconvenient “freaky little thing” that the Strategist’s reviewer still loved.

According to tech critics…

Display and battery life are standouts

The crease: Foldable phones usually have an annoying center wrinkle, but the Duo looks like a Botoxed forehead (though mere weeks of use could change that). Its crease is borderline invisible because of a matte-finish inner screen that reduces glare, making reading “a delight,” per CNET, which gave the device an 8.7/10.

The juice: The Duo often had 30%–40% of charge left by bedtime. It also outperformed its competitors—the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Pixel 11 Pro Fold—in CNET’s 45-minute stress test of streaming, scrolling, and other activities.

Other good stuff: Split-screen multitasking is reportedly easy. Wired said the phone is “a viable emergency workstation” when paired with a portable keyboard, and the camera is almost as good as that of the iPhone 18 Pro—though there’s no telephoto camera for extra-sharp zooms.

What weighs the Duo down

For starters, its weight. Apple’s bouncing baby phone is 254 grams—slightly more than the iPhone 18 Pro Max and about a golf ball heavier than the Galaxy Z Fold 8. It can tip over when attached to MagSafe Stands unfolded.

Other cons: It lacks Face ID, it can get physically hot, the front screen is too small to comfortably doomscroll (which could also be considered a positive), and it has some newbie quirks (e.g., MagSafe wallets hang over the phone’s edge).

But the biggest issue of all: Many apps appear with black bars because they’re not yet optimized for the Duo, so some reviewers recommend waiting to buy it. Amid tight supply, you may not have a choice.—ML

NYC bans horse-drawn carriages after 160 years

Animal rights advocates are celebrating the measure, while carriage workers have threatened to sue the city.

Seeing horses in Central Park will soon mean you’re probably watching Home Alone 2. The New York City Council voted yesterday to ban hired horse-drawn carriages in the city by June 2028, ending the 160-year tourist tradition.

Tragedy inspired the measure: The law instituting the ban is named after Romanch Mahajan, an 18-year-old tourist who died in Central Park this spring after falling from a carriage drawn by an uncontrollably galloping horse. It comes after years of advocacy by animal rights activists, who argued that the horses are overworked and stressed by the hectic urban environment, endangering humans.

Not just horses out of work

The union representing 200 carriage industry workers said it will sue the city over the ban, noting that Mahajan’s tragic death was the first fatality involving a Central Park horse:

• Drivers say it decimates their livelihoods and annuls the value of the city-issued carriage medallion permits, which reportedly trade for as much as $400,000 on the secondary market.
• Coachmen also worry about what to do with the horses, as the bill forbids their sale for slaughter or carriage work elsewhere.

Looking ahead: The city said it will come up with a plan to help carriage workers switch careers and explore ways to compensate medallion owners.—SK

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Answer to today's trivia question:  The Richter Scale

William Menke, a seismologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, explains.

The Richter scale was developed in 1935 by American seismologist Charles Richter (1891-1989) as a way of quantifying the magnitude, or strength, of earthquakes. Richter, who was studying earthquakes in California at the time, needed a simple way to precisely express what is qualitatively obvious: some earthquakes are small and others are large.

An earthquake is a violent shaking of the ground that is usually caused by sudden motion on a geological fault. For example, the magnitude 6.9 1994 Northridge earthquake, which resulted in severe damage in the Los Angeles, area, was caused by between two and four meters of slip on a fault measuring about 12 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide, 10 kilometers beneath the city's northern suburbs. Today, earthquakes and fault motion are inextricably linked in the minds of seismologists--so much so that upon hearing that an earthquake has occurred, we immediately ask about the fault that caused it. Richter's focus, in contrast, was on the ground vibration itself, which he could easily monitor using seismometers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). To Richter, a high-magnitude earthquake was one with strong ground vibration. Thus, for the Richter scale no direct connection is made to any of the properties of the causative fault.

Richter's scale was modeled on the stellar magnitude scale used by astronomers, which quantifies the amount of light emitted by stars (their luminosity). A star's luminosity is based on telescopic observations of its brightness that are corrected for the telescope's magnification and for the star's distance from Earth. But because luminosity varies over many factors of ten (Betelgeuse is 50,000 times more luminous than Alpha Centauri, for example), astronomers calculate a logarithm of the luminosity to produce the stellar magnitude: an easy-to-remember single-digit number.

Richter substituted measurements of the amount of ground vibration, as measured by a seismograph, for measurements of luminosity. Note that in both cases the sense of strength is quite abstract: stellar magnitude is not a measure of the physical size of a star (as might be quantified by its diameter), but rather of the amount of light that the star emits. Seismic magnitude is not a measure of the physical size of the earthquake fault (as might be quantified by its area or its slip) but rather of the amount of vibration that it emits.

In Richter's initial formulation, an earthquake 100 kilometers away that caused a one-millimeter amplitude signal on the Caltech seismometer's paper recorder was arbitrarily defined to be magnitude 3. (The magnification of Richter's seismometer was about 2,800, so one millimeter on the paper record corresponds to about 0.36 microns of actual ground motion). An earthquake at the same distance that produced a 10-millimeter amplitude recording was designated magnitude 4, a 100-millimeter amplitude was magnitude 5, and so forth. Richter then went on to devise correction tables that allowed magnitudes to be calculated regardless of the actual distance of the earthquake from the seismometer.

The appeal of the Richter magnitude scale is twofold. First, an earthquake is summarized by an easy-to-remember and easy-to-interpret single-digit number. A magnitude 3 is a tiny earthquake. A magnitude 6 is one that can cause substantial damage. A magnitude 9, like the one that caused December's deadly Indian Ocean tsunami, is capable of causing severe devastation. Second, the magnitude can easily be determined from measurements made by a seismometer, which need not be located particularly close to the fault. Indeed, modern seismometers can record earthquakes of magnitude 5 and above occurring anywhere in the world. The downside to the Richter scale is that magnitude is a single number, which cannot fully characterize a complicated phenomenon such as an earthquake. Earthquakes with the same magnitude can differ in many fundamental ways, including the directions of the vibrations, and their relative amplitude at different periods during the tremblor. These differences can lead to earthquakes with the same magnitude having significantly different levels of destructiveness.�

Beginning in the mid-1960's, seismologists developed a fairly complete understanding of how a slipping fault generates ground vibrations. An important quantity that characterizes the strength of the faulting is the seismic moment, the algebraic product of the fault area, the fault slip and the stiffness of the surrounding rock. Generally speaking, an earthquake with large magnitude corresponds to faulting with a large moment, with an increase in one magnitude unit corresponding to an increase of moment by about a factor of 30. But the relationship is inexact, and many cases occur where small faulting causes an unexpectedly large magnitude earthquake or vice versa.�