Happy Monday, I hope you had a great Soups-giving like I did.

As friends and family gathered around a myriad of crockpots sampling different soups, I heard a conversation around the iPhone Duo… pre-orders have begun.

Let this post be an open-ended question to Apple, I simply ask, “Who are you?”

This product really struck me just because I am a consumer of Apple goods. I have had envy for iPhones, found love for the ecosystem, and found a passion for music production with their creative applications. So I have wanted to justify a reason as to why I think Apple is still innovative and doing great things. The revolution of the touch screen, all-in-one device management, cloud storage and profile synchronicity has been established. But a folding phone that’s been done before… does that mean all that is left is tweaking design cosmetics?

People love the biometrics, whether it’s working or not is a different story. People love that they can just do everything from one device. I have Gen-Z friends who have done the dumb phone and no phone trends (in the hopes of preventing brain rot and increasing the amount of grass they touch) and found themselves coming back to their iPhones for safety reasons. It’s hard to justify letting your loved one and children go to the store at night and not knowing if they are safe. Granted for thousands of years, people have been without these devices and today we have a unique privilege in the United States to have access to them, but maybe the end justifies the means?

That doesn’t necessarily mean constant surveillance is necessary or good. I definitely think that our ability to mitigate the data that these companies have about us is probably one of the most important fights of the 21st-century so that my children and their children don’t have preconceived, marketing profiles built into a company database for their revenue streams.

All I am asking, Apple, is who are you as a brand? Do you desire to give seamless product ecosystems that simplify tech? Or do you care about following the trends to gain more market share on a product people are used to seeing while continuing to harvest data from them in the background. Now I don’t think that’s all you do but seeing the iPhone Duo be so blatantly a copy of other brands’ folding phones, it’s hard to tell where you stand as a brand.

I’m learning now more than ever that if someone wants to have a trustworthy brand that means you have to give your consumer the freedom to not choose you.

Where do you stand on this topic? Drop a comment below and follow me on social media for more tech updates as we scroll into November.

Until next time, be unreasonably hospitable!