I hadn’t heard of Tim Pan or Mediastorm until running across his 24-minute video review of the Duo. It’s a good and fair review, but what struck me are the rather astonishing production values. Amongst other things, they stress-tested the hinge with an industrial robot by opening/closing it 10,000 times. (That’s less than one-third the folds tested by Joanna Stern’s Hingey, but still.) but It’s an incredible piece of work, especially given the one-week time constraint. English is Pan’s second language, and there’s an entire alternate version of the whole review, under the Mediastorm channel, in Chinese. It’s not just a different soundtrack — it’s entirely separate cut of the video.
At about 7:30 in the (English) review, Pan mentions that they (he?) offer every employee in the company a new iPhone each year. This year’s choices, by employee count:
- iPhone 18 Pro: 17
- iPhone 18 Pro Max: 41
- iPhone Duo: 140
The point of this in the review was to show how strong demand is for the Duo amongst Pan’s company’s Chinese employees. But what struck me is that the company has 198 employees. (Last year, he says, 150 chose the 17 Pro or Pro Max; only 1 chose the Air.) Pan’s YouTube channel includes interviews with Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer. I never heard of him before but he obviously didn’t come out of nowhere. (Perhaps this is only a function of how little YouTube content I watch.)
Pan only launched his X account this week. He posted the entire review video there, too, and it’s got 187,000 likes and 6,700 comments. As a promotion to launch his X account, he’s giving away 100 iPhone 18 Pros. Even if they’re base models purchased somewhere without sales tax, that’s $120,000.
Remarkable.