Apple Really Needs to Launch a Foldable iPhone Flip in September
Apple dominates in the premium phone category, but foldables -- which fit into the premium space in terms of price -- are already nipping at its heels, with Motorola telling CNET that 20% of customers buying its Razr foldable jumped ship from Apple. Meanwhile, Samsung is in the seventh generation of its Flip and Fold series. As Lisa Eadicicco discovered during a visit to Seoul, "foldables are everywhere" in Samsung's home country of South Korea.
Would Apple go with a smaller format like the Galaxy Z Flip series?
Amy Kim/CNET
With nearly every major Android phone-maker entering the foldable market, Apple risks losing potential customers. It also runs the risk of letting a rival like Samsung become the go-to name for foldables, which could make it harder for Apple to make an impact if it eventually launches its own device. Furthermore, early adopters drawn to foldable tech may be too entrenched in the Android ecosystem by the time Apple's phone arrives to want to switch to iOS.
Apple is unlikely to be worried. It's estimated that around 20 million foldables from all manufacturers were sold worldwide in 2023, while Apple reportedly sold 26.5 million iPhone 14 Pro Max handsets in the first half of that year alone. In 2024, foldable sales were flat -- and 2025 isn't fairing much better, according to analysts at CounterPoint Research, although Samsung did report record numbers of preorders for its latest foldable. Clearly, Apple feels it has yet to miss the boat.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max is a superb phone. But what if it could bend?
Andrew Lanxon/CNET
Apple has always found success in biding its time, observing the industry and launching its own take on a product when it's ready. Apple didn't invent phones, tablets, smartwatches or computers, but it found ways to take existing products and make them more useful, more valuable in day-to-day life and -- dare I say -- more exciting. It's why the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac lines dominate the market today.
iPhone Flip: What Apple's Foldable Future Could Look Like iPhone Flip: What Apple's Foldable Future Could Look Like
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iPhone Flip: What Apple's Foldable Future Could Look Like
For me, I need to see Apple's take on the foldable phone. I've written before about how disappointed I am in foldables. I've been a mobile reporter for over 14 years and phones have become increasingly dull as they've converged to become slight variations on the same rectangular slab.
Read more: Best Flip Phone for 2025
Foldables promised something new, something innovative, something that briefly sparked some excitement in me, but several years in, that excitement has dwindled to the point of being extinguished. They are fine products and while I like the novelty of a screen that bends, they're not a revolution in how we interact with our phones. Not in the way that the arrival of the touchscreen was when we were still pushing buttons to type out texts.
I did hope that Google's Pixel Fold would be the phone to catapult the foldable forward, and while the recent Pixel 9 Pro Fold -- the second generation of Google's foldable -- does offer some great updates, it still doesn't offer any kind of revolution. Instead, it feels more like a "me too" move from Google. Ditto for the OnePlus Open. So I'm left instead to look toward Apple, a company with a track record for product revolutions, to create a new take on the genre that genuinely drives forward how we use our phones.
Google's Pixel Fold is a decent phone, but it doesn't drive the category forward in any meaningful way.
James Martin/CNET
That innovation won't just come from the product design. Apple works closely with its third-party software developers, and it's that input that would help a folding iPhone become genuinely useful. My biggest complaint around foldables right now is that while the hardware is decent, the devices are essentially just running standard versions of Android with a handful of UI tweaks thrown in. They're regular phones that just happen to bend.
Few Android developers are embracing the folding format, and it's not difficult to see why; the users aren't there in sufficient numbers yet to justify the time and expense to adapt their software across a variety of screen sizes. The multiple folding formats already available mean Android foldables face the same fragmentation issue that has plagued the platform since the beginning. Android-based foldables are simply a more difficult platform for developers to build for than regular phones. Apple would be able to change that, as it proved with the iPhone and iPad.
Apple didn't invent tablet computers, but its iPad line revolutionized the category.
Scott Stein/CNET
Given Apple's close relationships with top-tier developers -- not to mention its own vast developer team -- I expect an eventual Apple foldable to offer innovations that make it more than just an iPhone that folds in half.
And I truly hope it does. I want to look forward to tech launches again. I want to feel excited to get a new gadget in my hands and feel that "wow" moment as I do something transformative for the first time.
In short, I don't want to be bored by technology anymore. Apple, it's over to you.
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