The iPhone Fold can’t be just a folding iPhone

Folding phones are everywhere. There are enough of them that our friends at TechAdvisor have maintained a best folding phone guide for several years. Samsung even just came out with a tri-fold phone, in a very “we made a razor with even more blades” sort of approach.

And while folding phones have gotten quite good over the past several years and are reasonably popular considering the high price they command ($1,500 or more for the best models), the expectations for Apple’s long-awaited folding iPhone are a lot higher. Apple has avoided making a folding iPhone for years, even while the problems with screen creases and wonky hinges have more or less been resolved. A folding iPhone is going to have to be more than just “it’s an iPhone, but it folds.” It has to enable you to do things you can’t do with a non-folding iPhone.

Going their own way

A plethora of leaks have given us a decent picture of what the iPhone Fold will look like: A book-style folding iPhone somewhat squatter and wider than its contemporaries in the Android space, with an external display around 5 and a half inches and an internal unfolded display a little under 8 inches.

The back will have two cameras, arranged in a horizontal “plateau” similar to that on the iPhone Air. It will have Touch ID in the power button rather than Face ID, and volume buttons along the top edge. Most of the left side of the device will be occupied by the display and battery, giving it the highest battery capacity of any iPhone yet (rumors say north of 5,000mAh).

But all of that is just hardware. It matters, of course, but it doesn’t give you a reason to spend twice as much on an iPhone that folds. People aren’t out there clamoring for a wider iPhone that costs $2,000 or more.

The real reason to buy the iPhone Fold will have to be the software, and that’s the one part of the picture we just don’t have any real information about.

What could you do with a folding iPhone?

Obviously, folding phones make for good “lean back on the couch and consume content” experiences. Unfolded, the two-hand experience and larger display make for better web browsing and video watching. But sleek design and “it’s bigger on the inside” probably isn’t going to make the folding iPhone a success. The iPhone Air put a premium on design at a high price, and by all accounts, it did not do well. Apple will need to add significant capabilities to iOS if it wants the Fold to be a success.

iOS just isn’t made for a screen that is wider than it is tall. The outside display can look and act more or less like your iPhone (but with those dimensions, a lot of apps will need interface updates). But what happens when you run an app on the inside display? Is it just a larger version? Will Apple let you run two apps side-by-side in split screen? It seems obvious that this would be a capability, but again, that’s what every Android foldable can do, and it’s not the sort of thing that makes everyone rush out to spend two grand on a phone.

Apple

Since iPadOS is already “iOS with extra big-screen features,” perhaps the folding iPhone will actually run iPadOS? On the outside screen, apps would run in a full-screen view like an iPhone, but inside you’d get a dock, multitasking, support for a keyboard and mouse/trackpad, and all the other goodies added in iPadOS 26. Add in support for Apple Pencil, and the iPhone Fold could, in fact, be a “hybrid iPhone/iPad” device that starts to make a lot more sense. After all, the iPad mini has a screen size of 8.3 inches, just half an inch bigger than the reported size of an unfolded iPhone Fold. They even appear to have similar aspect ratios.

Maybe you wouldn’t pay $2,000 for an iPhone that unfolds to a bigger display, but would you pay that much for an iPad mini that folds up and fits in your pocket?

I still expect more than that, though. For starters, every folding phone has to deal with the everyday use case of “I have something open on the outside screen, and then I unfold my phone to use the inside screen.” What happens to that app—how ​​it behaves through that transition—is an area ripe for innovation. The easy thing is to simply show that app on one half of the inside screen, or perhaps provide an option to open such apps across the entire inside display. I hope Apple is thinking a little more deeply about it and will surprise us with something delightful.

Accessories are another opportunity to do something special. Cases would need to be specially designed to work around the hinge. Maybe they can do other things, like provide a fold-out stand for watching videos or working with a keyboard and trackpad? Maybe the phone is too thin to attach an Apple Pencil for charging, but the case can provide the required stability?

Luke Baker

More than just an iPhone that folds

iPhone is a popular enough brand that Apple could definitely sell a number of them if it were nothing more than an iPhone on the outside and a bigger iPhone on the inside. Even at the rumored $2,000+ price, just being the first folding iPhone, with a posh design and excellent marketing, would make it the must-have aspirational gadget of the holiday season.

But over time, selling an iPhone that costs twice as much as an iPhone Pro is going to have to come with more than just the gee-whiz factor. The “wow factor” of folding phones is several years in the rearview mirror, and the novelty of being the first one from Apple is sure to be short-lived. To continue to sell folding iPhones month after month, year after year, Apple is going to have to make it do something that no other iPhone can do, other than fold in half.