iPhone Duo’s red carpet moment soured by internet screen jibes

Apple CEO John Ternus whipped out his iPhone Duo on the Emmys red carpet, to the delight of the press gaggle. The Internet immediately started whining, as it does.

The 78th Primetime Emmy Awards were a big success for Apple TV. As the new CEO of Apple, John Ternus was in attendance, and he used the opportunity of a red carpet interview to flash the iPhone Duo in front of the cameras.

In a clip posted by Deadline to X, Ternus reaches into his tuxedo, pulls out the iPhone Duo, and opens it up. After a squeal of delight from the reporter, the grinning Ternus folds the iPhone Duo up and puts it back in his pocket.

While the reporter was obviously happy to see the device in person, the Internet was not.

Internet peanut gallery

Comments below the post included a lot of discussion about Ternus, but quite a few about the iPhone Duo itself. Chiefly that it had a seemingly bad display.

“That matte screen is so bad it’s making me think about getting a Fold 8,” one person writes. “The quality of inner screen so suck” another bashes out along with emojis of a sad face.

Others touched on how you couldn’t see the crease because of the lack of brightness. “Borderline unusable in natural daylight” another declared.

Some believe it wasn’t his daily driver because it allegedly didn’t show any apps nor touch the screen itself. Except the clip shows him swiping up with his thumb and the screen moving.

A dim viewpoint

When it comes to answering the question of why the screen is not super-bright in the interview, there are quite a few possible reasons for it. Some more obvious than others.

For a start, the red carpet is the worst place to judge a display on a device. We’re talking about an area that is very brightly lit, with a different light characteristic than daylight, so that the stars can be filmed by the broadcast cameras.

This is a ton of light, and any consumer-grade device will have trouble competing with that situation. It also doesn’t help that the broadcast cameras are set up to use this light so that the humans it sees look great, not necessarily a light-emitting device like a smartphone screen.

The second and most obvious reason is that Ternus didn’t have the brightness turned up in the first place.

Whipping out the iPhone Duo in an off-the-cuff moment is different from a choreographed PR exercise which would’ve stuck the brightness as high as possible. It’s probable that a prepared moment would’ve “fixed” the environmental lighting too so that the iPhone Duo looked perfect.

A multi-layered problem

Then there’s the iPhone Duo display itself. We know it’s using many layers of glass and other trickery to try and hide the inevitable crease, and that affects how the display appears to others, especially when it’s someone viewing at an angle.

Apple’s use of nano-texture is also at play here, since it’s an etched texture designed to scatter light and to minimize environmental glare. It’s not a one-way effect, as it does marginally soften the image of the iPhone Duo’s OLED panel.

The iPhone Duo has many layers of glass – Image Credit: Apple

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It also means that the contrast is affected when there’s more environmental light to compete against. Under bright lights, the screen will look more grey and washed out than if you looked at the same screen in a dark room.

The decision to go for a matte display for the iPhone Duo was for consumers to have a better experience under normal usage. A glossy screen, as used by rivals, would look bright and make it more attractive for sales, but it would be a detriment for everyday use.

Under such extreme viewing conditions, it’s completely understandable for the iPhone Duo to not be presented perfectly in Ternus’ hands.

After all, the bright light there was to make the stars the awards were about shine brightly.