There is a drawer in my office that could be referred to, without affection, as the museum. It holds eleven chargers, four of which fit nothing I own, a pair of wired earphones knotted into a shape a sailor would admire, and the white plastic remains of almost every phone I have bought since 2008 including two Blackberry.

I opened it on Friday night looking for batteries and realised I was staring at my own customer record. Thirty-pin, Lightning, USB-C. Every one of those cables is a decision I made to stay, usually while complaining loudly about the one before.

Which brings me to the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first folding phone, which reached the shops on Friday at £1,999 for the cheapest model and had sold out long before most people had finished reading the reviews.

The reviews were not kind. There is no Face ID, so after nine years of simply glancing at your phone, Apple’s own launch announcement has you pressing a button with your thumb like it’s 2016. A well-known YouTube durability tester found grit working its way into the hinge. Marques Brownlee, whose verdict moves more phones than most adverts, told the average buyer it was probably a no. John Gruber called it a beautifully finished prototype rather than a phone he would carry.

Pre-orders vanished in minutes anyway, and delivery dates slid to late January. One man told Reuters he had queued outside the London store since half past nine the night before, in the pouring rain, for a phone the experts had told him not to buy.

I have seen this behaviour before. Not in a shop. On a terrace.

Every football supporter in Britain knows the arrangement. Your club loses at home in January to a side it should have beaten by four. The new striker, bought for the GDP of a small island, couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo. You go home swearing it’s the last time.

Then the season ticket renewal letter arrives in May, with a price rise, and you have paid it before you have finished reading the paragraph. Nobody switches to the club across town because their left-back is better. You would sooner change your religion.

The Duo is the new away kit. It costs too much, bits are missing, the pundits spent all week on the sofa explaining that it isn’t fit for purpose, and on launch day it sold out in every size. Apple does not have customers. It has a season-ticket waiting list.

And, like any club, it knows the faithful will renew. Reports already suggest Face ID will return in the second Duo, which is the manager admitting in his programme notes that the new signing was a gamble and promising better next season. This year’s buyers are funding next year’s fixes: the most expensive focus group in history, and thrilled to be in it.

Business readers will recognise the economics, because they are the economics of switching costs. Satisfaction is what a customer feels about this product. Loyalty is what they feel about the next one. Apple has spent nearly twenty years making leaving expensive: the photos in iCloud, the watch on your wrist, the group chat that turns green the moment you defect. By the time it asks you to forgive a missing feature, you have far too much in the drawer to walk away.

But here is where I part company with the cheerleaders who say founders should simply ignore the critics. Loyalty is not a force field. It is a bank balance. Apple has made two decades of deposits, and the Duo is a withdrawal, a large one, made in public. It can afford it. The question every business owner should ask is whether they can.

Most small firms are not Apple. They are the new restaurant on the high street, or the café that has just put its prices up. Launch something half-finished to people with no history with you and they don’t queue in the rain. They leave a one-star review and go elsewhere. With retail sales falling and households cutting back ahead of John Healey’s first Budget, there is very little spare goodwill sloshing about to spend.

So build the balance before you draw on it. Over-deliver on the dull things: the invoice that arrives correct, the delivery that turns up when promised, the phone answered by a human being. Do that for long enough and customers will give your risks the benefit of the doubt. Last week I argued that Jaguar’s critics were judging the Type 01 by the wrong measure. The Duo’s critics have the opposite problem. They are right about the phone and wrong about the business. A flawed first version is perfectly survivable, provided people already love you.

As for me, I haven’t ordered one, and I’d like it on record that this is a principled stand about Face ID. I give it until the Duo 2. There is already a space cleared in the drawer.

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