Apple is going to release its first foldable iPhone in 2026 according to Apple insider Mark Gurman.
Bloomberg’s Gurman spends week in, week out, reporting on what Apple’s up to, and its first foldable will apparently land around seven years after Samsung put foldables on the map in 2019.
He says the phone will actually be pretty similar to what Samsung is trotting out today in the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold line. That’s the flagship foldable where the phone looks mostly like a normal Android when folded up, only to open up into what is more like a small tablet.
It’s a familiar design then, and no Vision Pro-style trailblazer. But perhaps that won’t matter. It will certainly be the most dynamically different iPhone we’ve seen since at least the iPhone X, if not since the series’s beginnings.
There’s some bad news. Gurman says the phone is likely to cost more than $2000, likely to translate to upwards of £2000 in the UK based on today’s pricing of Apple’s MacBooks.
Analysts recently had their say on how large the phone’s screens are likely to be too. Trendforce reckons we’ll get a 5.5-inch outer screen and a 7.8-inch inner one.
These are a little smaller than the screens of either the latest Samsung or Honor foldable phones. Honor’s Magic V5 has a 6.43-inch outer screen, a 7.95-inch inner one. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 goes even larger, with a 6.5-inch outer display, an 8-inch screen inside.
Other recent leaks include that the phone may have a battery of up to 5500mAh capacity, the largest seen in an iPhone to date. And it’s higher capacity than most of today’s foldables, including the 4400mAh Z Fold 7.
There are of course other ways for Apple to make its first foldable stand out. The issue of the screen crease of foldable phones is still ongoing. And maybe Apple will make it feel better in hand than most.
Apple also has one other important advantage. It controls the hardware and the software, giving it scope to come up with compelling reasons to own a foldable phone beyond what we have today. The tricky bit is dreaming up with what those might be.
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