Everyone I know over 70 would love something that works like a phone when folded but like a tablet unfolded -- big enough for text to be big, small enough to carry, and without fiddly interface -- and at a reasonable price for those anchored in 1980 prices.
(If those under 17 got attached to foldables, it would be an enduring franchise.)
For those of us in between, I'd love it if my foldable when unfolded were finally the OS of choice - iPadOS or iOS or even macOS. It would be the hub for hub-and-spoke devices...
Not a fan of foldables, if I am honest. Just a personal opinion. I do not like the it feels in the pocket bc the device needs to double its thickness when folding over.
When a mobile device manufacturer (samsung, hauwei, now apple) makes a foldable, I get the impression they're running out of ideas with the "slate" form factor and are trying to stimulate sales.
Personally, I would want that R&D spend and innovation to go to more sustainable materials, longer lasting devices, and easily repairable parts to extend the devices useful life.
Opposite opinion. I have the Huawei trifold, and it's by far my favorite phone I've ever used. I'm typing this on that phone right now, half-unfolded to square mode.
I don't care that it is a few mm thicker than other phones when it's in my pocket. It's so much better than a regular phone for everything from reading books to writing email to watching YouTube, and it's also a slightly thicker regular phone. It also has a pretty good UI for moving apps to side-by-side mode, which I use so often that I'm 100% sure I will never go back to a regular phone.
It's definitely not due to running out of ideas. I have a Galaxy Fold and love it. I owned it for about two months before my wife went out and bought one for herself. And everywhere I go people want to look at it and play with it - quite remarkable.
I haven't encountered any issues with apps not supporting the wider aspect ratio. It's one of those cases in which Android's up-front investment in more flexible software paid off. Android apps were harder to write up front because they had to support resizable layouts from the get go, but by the time stuff like foldables were introduced the software library was already ready for it all.
You and me both, but I also recognize others disagree so ultimately, we'll see what the market decides.
Apple's annual gross profit was $195B last year against an R&D budget of around $35B. So, they've got more than enough spare change to throw around. I'm sure whatever they're spending on foldables isn't impairing them financially in any way.
I'm more concerned for what it means for focus, fragmented ecosystems, user experience, etc.
From Jobs:
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done."
> When a mobile device manufacturer [...] are trying to stimulate sales
> more sustainable materials, longer lasting devices, and easily repairable parts to extend the devices useful life
What they are doing, like all for-profit companies, is focusing on profits, for better or worse.
What you are suggesting (and what I'd like to) directly works against the goal of making more profits, literally all of those things will lead to less income for them.
I also want those things, but realistically, because of the economic systems we have, those things will never be the focus, because the market doesn't reward those things, and doesn't seem likely that'll change either.
I don't know what the solution is either, status quo simply sucks, with no escape in sight. Seems to be getting worse in fact.
Or, alternatively, they feel like they finally cracked the code and think they can do it better. That's when Apple finally enters a market.
Consider how much money they put in to building a car to cancel it when they decided they couldn't, in fact, do it better. I'm sure there are hundreds - maybe thousands - of failed prototypes along the way.
not necessarily, some foldables are almost as thin as a usual phone even when folded.
But as much as I like flip phones aesthetics, I do agree there lot of other meaningful areas where the R&D spend is actually needed
> Personally, I would want that R&D spend and innovation to go to more sustainable materials, longer lasting devices, and easily repairable parts to extend the devices useful life.
Does the broad market care about sustainable materials? What does that even mean? Almost no one buys something because of sustainable.
For longer lasting devices, people like buying new phones. The iPhone has pretty much not changed in the last 5 years. People just like buying the new and best
Same thing w/ repairable parts. People just like buying new things. And it's not a conspiracy theory, it's just observed behavior.
So I'm glad they're trying something, because as much as you would like these other things, the broader market of consumers don't care. Yes profits are a useful proxy for value people place on your activities. Not perfect but in the long run if you provide a shitty experience you're likely to lose.
Tbh I think the microsoft neo (or was it the duo?) was the "best" - have 2 (or more) screens but put them on a hinge. You can get one big screen with whatever panel quality you like (hell, make it a cheap or transflective if you want), or you get a smaller screen if you wish.
There's a reason the Asus Duo is so much cheaper than the ThinkPad Fold X1 and all other OLED "folding" screen devices.
> Apple's MO has never been to make junk that breaks.
Have you never used their cables? I don't think I've seen a single Apple cable lasting more than a few years if they're being used daily, the only ones that last are the ones that are kept static for the entire time.
Their computing hardware is great otherwise, no disagreement there. But their cables are the polar-opposite of whatever engineering methodologies they use for their computing hardware.
Apple Watch and AirPods were certainly category-defining products, some people would also argue that the iPad was. So 2010 or before is certainly not fair.
I was hoping for a small phone as well since I’ve read rumours about the display being 5.3in when folded. However it also said 7.8in unfolded, which implies 4.1in × 3.3in folded… quite big and squarish.
That is likely what it will be. The iPhone Air was probably just a test to see if all the super-thin components could work. Now they'll throw a hinge in the middle and a screen on the back. It'll end up being 2 or 3mm thicker, because of the bonus screen.
I considered the Z Flip many times, because I want something that is smaller by default. But people who have used one have regular display issues. I'm hoping that Apple somehow nailed this better than the competition.
The thinness and low weight of the Air is also great though. I hope that Google makes a Pixel like that, so that I can have a phone with GrapheneOS that is this thin/light.
I know people who put up with Android because they want a foldable phone, to be able to read documents more easily without carrying two devices. They're clearly not for everyone, but the relative sales of Pro vs Air or Mini suggest that these will be more popular than this suggests.
iPhone useful life is already pretty great. I'm using one regularly from 2020 (as a work device) - better than any laptop I've ever owned including classic-era Thinkpads have lasted as a daily driver.
I've been dailying a pixel fold 9 pro for a while now and love the thing. Seeing Apple finally join in is exciting as heck. I wouldn't hold your breath for a non visible crease though, nor for it to necessarily be class leading in its screen tech. I doubt any of it matters though, the Pixel Folds aren't exactly class leading in these regards either and the fold is just not a concern at all once you're using it. it's practically invisible from head on, and the "plastic screen protector" worries are really not an issue either. The durability of the inner screen is actually much better than you'd expect since it spends most of its pocketed life protected from external scratches. Mines still in great shape, even though I do not use a case nor any other form of protector.
Where apple has a significant opportunity here is the software side though. Google unfortunately doesn't seem to be too interested in exploring UI concepts with the Fold, leaving that to OnePlus and Samsung, both of which have imo better multitasking experiences than the Pixel Fold. Apple making an iPhone that becomes an iPad would probably be enough for them to win significant marketshare, but I hope they use this opportunity to do some interesting things with UI beyond what the iPad can do.
I have a Pixel 8a, and I have to use a case for it, because it appears to be designed to be as slippery as possible. Every edge is round and there's nothing to grip - it feels like an aluminium/glass bar of wet soap.
The 10 feels like it should be more slippery, but for some reason, it isn't. It stays stuck in your hand like glue, despite the back feeling like another glass screen. Something special in is coating
I think discussion here are missing that most people do not own a PC/laptop, or barely ever opens one, and not because they can't afford it, but it just didn't fit into their daily lives. This is obviously entirely different from the HN crowd.
And in that case, a folding phone is huge! Having played with one that my parent use, it's such an upgrade for reading/scrolling experience. When we all are spending so much time on the phone (that's a separate discussion, but it is the reality).
I am not fully convinced that a foldable is really going to be something that most will want, but I think it could find its niche. Given that from another article it seems that in the simulator it is using the iPad view it could be useful for some people.
Though, I have yet to find myself in a situation that I wanted to use an iPad and I was not already in a position to be carrying one. I use mine for work and I am already carrying a laptop, throwing in an iPad is a very small addition to my bag.
Any time I have just been out, was never a situation I felt like I needed something like an iPad. Throw in that this looks like it will be the size of a Mini vs the 13" pro that I use now, it puts it in an awkward position. And I could justify the rumored $2k cost to replace 2 devices that cost more than that combined.
It will be interesting to see how it does in practice, but also what it does to the separation of iOS and iPadOS.
How timely, I'm writing this from a Pixel 10 Pro Fold I bought in January.
Last night I opened it to find the inside screen having dead pixels in the center by the bend.
I love foldable phones. I use it all the time in both modes, but now I'm currently procrastinating looking up my best buy warranty plan specifics.
For a small percentage of mobile superusers, I really do believe foldables are the future. Having the ability to use desktop mode by default, or multitask, is huge.
A foldable iPhone will definitely solve one of the biggest problems at Apple. Foldable phones won't last 5-10 years. I can see Apple making all iPhone offerings foldable down the road
Are they really having any issue getting people to upgrade? At least here in Canada, carriers harass everyone to upgrade with deals where you can get a new phone for $0 once your contract is up to keep you renewing your contract.
My non-techie parents pretty much always get the latest non-Pro iPhone every couple years because their carrier calls them and practically begs them to take a new phone.
It's extremely rare to see anyone with a phone older than like 4 years.
I've gone all the way around and came back. The Samsung Fold was awesome and convenient. But carrying an ipad mini and a phone is not that big a deal. It's quite nice that the ipad mini does not have whatsapp or SMS plugged into it, so I can use it exclusively for reading books or playing music.
The cost of the iPad Mini + my phone was like $600 and the folds - even the 6th gen and above - are super unreliable, so right now that seems like the best play.
iPad mini is awesome for reading however, it took forever until Apple powered it up.
Personally, as someone being used to the Motorola Razor foldable, which happened to present back then. It was really good and cool as well. I hated the ever smaller getting Ericson smartphones.
I am looking forward to Apple's copy of Samsungs foldable smartphones. After all, I don't want to carry an iPhone as well as an iPad mini around with me.
And I see the foldable more as a replacement for the iPhone ultra max phones. No matter how large the screensize they have, they never beat the iPad mini on readability, even being stuck with the old one for many years.
> It's quite nice that the ipad mini does not have whatsapp or SMS plugged into it, so I can use it exclusively for reading books or playing music.
Both a phone and a tablet can come with WhatsApp, it's a user choice whether they are there and the frequency of checking them. Global muting the apps is also an option.
I understand your point, but it is a point mitigated by user intervention. Now, if we want to say reading on a bigger screen than a phone is a better user experience, I'm on board with that.
For me at least the screen size isn’t the limiting factor the lack of a keyboard is. I don’t know why I’d choose this device over a Neo or Air + non-folding phone.
Mentions of the resizable iOS apps seem to signal a desktop dock mode, which ties into your concern.
We know Apple is bringing a folding iPhone through manufacturing leaks. A desktop mode is less likely to be leaked, since it would be mostly software and (a lot) less reliant on third parties.
I don't think I get foldable phones. When is the extra space necessary? I mean most of them turn from a somewhat 9:16 aspect ratio to 1:1. You don't earn anything in space to consume media content. The only real improvement might be for multitasking?
Running two full size apps at once is pretty nice. Text conversation and website, things like that. Or copying and pasting credentials out of a password manager
The foldable iPhone will have an aspect ratio very close to 3:2 for the outer display (like the original iPhone) and of 1.41:1 (between 3:2 and 4:3) for the inner display (similar to an iPad).
I mean you can see more at once but now your typing experience is worse. I have an iPad and it's by far my least productive device unless it's connected to a physical keyboard. Typing on a giant touchscreen is so much more tedious than my phone's screen.
It's not perfect, but there are plenty of things I do where I'm not typing very much, but I am swapping back and forth between apps or web pages quite a bit.
The software opportunity is what's interesting. Apple making an iPhone that becomes an iPad could finally make multitasking on mobile actually work. Hardware is table stakes, the UI decisions are what will matter.
Really intrigued to see what Apple's design chops brings to this form factor. I'd love more screen real estate so I can travel without a damn laptop. The big question is how thick will it be?
More than that, it forces iPhone-only devs to get with the program and make their apps usable on larger screens too.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if next year they dissolve the iPhone/iPad distinction on the App Store altogether and maybe even remove the Catalyst toggle on the Mac App Store. If you make an iOS app, it’s also a full fledged iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS app too.
I certainly wouldn’t mind. On my Mac there are some needlessly heavy electron apps I’d swap out for their iOS counterparts in a heartbeat if that were possible, as well as some games that would run fine on macOS but their devs don’t tick the checkbox for unclear reasons.
> I wouldn’t be surprised at all if next year they dissolve the iPhone/iPad distinction on the App Store altogether
I hadn't thought about it but it makes sense and it makes me wonder how far this would reach throughout the rest of the OS. If the iPhone can fold out into an iPad Mini, will it get the rest of the iPadOS features? The iPad used to run iOS but they rebranded the version that runs on iPad to iPadOS to distinguish that it has a handful of unique features only for big screens, mainly pertaining to multitasking. But if the line is being blurred and iPhones will have big screens with multitasking, will they go back to just calling it iOS on all mobile devices?
i’ve been waiting a few years for iphone fold, im excited that they’re releasing it this year.
its both iphone mini (yay!! mini iphone again) and ipad mini (yay!! hueg screen for bedtime youtube) in one device presumably with a cpu powerful enough to run cyberpunk 2077. what a world :)
I can't imagine they'd release a crappy folding thing like the Samsung, I think it's more likely to be effectively dual-screen that can be unfurled into something where the two screens are side by side.
This is the only phone I've seen people move away from iPhone to get, I know at least 3 women who switched from iPhone to android to get the folding clamshell Samsung and all love it.
The triple folding phone is interesting to me but I still am not at the point where I feel comfortable having a $2K phone. Where you can get a Motorolla with 12GB of RAM for $80
I mention RAM as Android with 4GB of ram is almost unusable.
Are you citing subsidized prices, or used prices? I can only find $80 Motorolas used or locked, e.g.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D323V72S and that's 4GB
12GB seems to get up into $200+, and that's still a lot of "renewed" listings.
You can find quirky little loss-leader deals here and there sometimes but I don't think you're getting 12GB of RAM for $80 on a routine basis.
Anyway it's certainly not the same phone as a flagship folding phone but for daily everyday needs more than adequate, I even was able to run multiple gig apps eg. DoorDash/Uber Eats on the 8GB model.
I will say what people consider "worth the money" varies since I bought a $1,000.00 radar detector and it's like who buys that...
Apple has used this kind of blurry resizing animation in the past. For example, circa macOS 10.14 Mojave resizing windows in Split View would have the same effect: https://youtu.be/KDDMUxBtnkI
current view transition stack on ios was built for static transition between two well know layouts, like portrait to landscape rotation change. i would like live reflow too but i suspect 99% of existing apps aren’t ready to reflow at 120hz when they’ve been written around tween(start layout, end layout) style for decades
UIKit apps can already resize fluidly on Mac Catalyst and iPadOS. I suspect the issue here is more related to the video encoding / streaming used for iPhone Mirroring.
Wow seriously? To me it looks like a throwback to Windows 95 lightweight settings or some lightweight WM of the early 2000s like Fluxbox/OpenBox which didn't implement proper resizing to save on resources.
> This is the PSOTU’s message, which states clearly and plainly: stop thinking about creating software for a specific piece of hardware. Design software to be adaptable across a range of screen sizes and aspect ratios.
I remember so many Apple developers saying this was why Apple was better than Android. The HN archives are full of such comments.
Not that I care for either company, as they both lord over our lives and limit our freedoms.
Apple hasn't "invented" most things, from the personal computer, MP3 Player, or smart phone. They tend to revolutionize the things by making them work extremely well.
if by 'revolutionize', you mean 'let everybody else spend time, effort and money developing the idea, and once they've proven the market they buy an interesting company in the space with tons of patents, shut down everything they'd done before and make their interesting and take credit for the revolution, meanwhile, their new presence in the area mutes actual innovation, because they use all of the oxygen in the room'... sure, yeah, they do that... but the revolution was coming whether Apple participated or not.
Hey, if they can get the hinge working better it might improve the category at least. You'd expect Apple to do well at manufacturing for that kinda stuff
Agree, their "innovations" usually involve taking an existing concept or idea and executing it better. Hopefully they can pull that off and raise the bar for foldable electronics
They also buy a lot of their innovations. See Intrinsity, a fabless semi company Apple bought which lead to their Mobile Arm chips and eventually the M series.
Current foldables are fragile, require a built-in plastic screen protector, and have a visible crease. Apple is very unlikely to be willing to accept those compromises. We'll see, but I think their entry into the field will change things.
15 years ago, I would agree that Apple might not have been willing to accept those kinds of issues. I'm not sure about the Apple of today. That is not a slight against any Apple leadership, but I do feel that, for a variety of reasons, the level of minimum QC has notched back a bit in the pursuit of marketshare.
Apple fumbled on QC with software this past year, but have they with hardware? I've found their hardware (both computer and physical builds) has been very high quality still.
Sure this isn't just nostalgia / rose-tinted glasses speaking? In the 2010s, Apple shipped MacBooks with GPUs that fried themselves to death, and iPhones that bent in your pocket and lost cell signal if you held them wrong. Today's Apple does have some software quality issues, but their hardware is the best it's ever been.
Could be nostalgia for sure, but the issues you are describing were not anticipated or immediately obvious on initial launch (at least as far as I recall).
From what I have seen of folding screens today, they come with some significant trade offs (creases, wear, etc). Over time, I expect these to be solved, but I don't think folding screens are a luxury item today as much as they are a tech novelty. But, the cell phone market has kind of stagnated in terms of hardware, and it looks like folding screens might be the thing to drive some upgrade purchases. During the peak iphone growth phase I believe Apple would have labelled these screens as not ready yet, but today I think they risk losing market share and are potentially somewhat forced to build a folding iphone.
The iPhone camera bump is the "jumped the shark" moment for me when Apple went from unwilling to accept that level of quality to "I'm not sure... they might". Speculative to be sure, but I believe that if Jobs was alive we'd have a paper thin camera sensor because the bump would have been a nonstarter.
Same regarding your comment... I agree, the minimum QC does feel like it notched back a bit.
"hey guys remember that screen technology that came out seven years ago and has had plenty of time to mature? Well our 65 year old CEO just discovered it and has found a way to make it stratospherically more expensive than its ever been before!"
(If those under 17 got attached to foldables, it would be an enduring franchise.)
For those of us in between, I'd love it if my foldable when unfolded were finally the OS of choice - iPadOS or iOS or even macOS. It would be the hub for hub-and-spoke devices...
It's an impossible ask, but perhaps....
When a mobile device manufacturer (samsung, hauwei, now apple) makes a foldable, I get the impression they're running out of ideas with the "slate" form factor and are trying to stimulate sales.
Personally, I would want that R&D spend and innovation to go to more sustainable materials, longer lasting devices, and easily repairable parts to extend the devices useful life.
I don't care that it is a few mm thicker than other phones when it's in my pocket. It's so much better than a regular phone for everything from reading books to writing email to watching YouTube, and it's also a slightly thicker regular phone. It also has a pretty good UI for moving apps to side-by-side mode, which I use so often that I'm 100% sure I will never go back to a regular phone.
I haven't encountered any issues with apps not supporting the wider aspect ratio. It's one of those cases in which Android's up-front investment in more flexible software paid off. Android apps were harder to write up front because they had to support resizable layouts from the get go, but by the time stuff like foldables were introduced the software library was already ready for it all.
Apple's annual gross profit was $195B last year against an R&D budget of around $35B. So, they've got more than enough spare change to throw around. I'm sure whatever they're spending on foldables isn't impairing them financially in any way.
I'm more concerned for what it means for focus, fragmented ecosystems, user experience, etc.
From Jobs: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done."
> more sustainable materials, longer lasting devices, and easily repairable parts to extend the devices useful life
What they are doing, like all for-profit companies, is focusing on profits, for better or worse.
What you are suggesting (and what I'd like to) directly works against the goal of making more profits, literally all of those things will lead to less income for them.
I also want those things, but realistically, because of the economic systems we have, those things will never be the focus, because the market doesn't reward those things, and doesn't seem likely that'll change either.
I don't know what the solution is either, status quo simply sucks, with no escape in sight. Seems to be getting worse in fact.
Consider how much money they put in to building a car to cancel it when they decided they couldn't, in fact, do it better. I'm sure there are hundreds - maybe thousands - of failed prototypes along the way.
Does the broad market care about sustainable materials? What does that even mean? Almost no one buys something because of sustainable.
For longer lasting devices, people like buying new phones. The iPhone has pretty much not changed in the last 5 years. People just like buying the new and best
Same thing w/ repairable parts. People just like buying new things. And it's not a conspiracy theory, it's just observed behavior.
So I'm glad they're trying something, because as much as you would like these other things, the broader market of consumers don't care. Yes profits are a useful proxy for value people place on your activities. Not perfect but in the long run if you provide a shitty experience you're likely to lose.
There's a reason the Asus Duo is so much cheaper than the ThinkPad Fold X1 and all other OLED "folding" screen devices.
Have you never used their cables? I don't think I've seen a single Apple cable lasting more than a few years if they're being used daily, the only ones that last are the ones that are kept static for the entire time.
Their computing hardware is great otherwise, no disagreement there. But their cables are the polar-opposite of whatever engineering methodologies they use for their computing hardware.
The thinness and low weight of the Air is also great though. I hope that Google makes a Pixel like that, so that I can have a phone with GrapheneOS that is this thin/light.
iPhone useful life is already pretty great. I'm using one regularly from 2020 (as a work device) - better than any laptop I've ever owned including classic-era Thinkpads have lasted as a daily driver.
Where apple has a significant opportunity here is the software side though. Google unfortunately doesn't seem to be too interested in exploring UI concepts with the Fold, leaving that to OnePlus and Samsung, both of which have imo better multitasking experiences than the Pixel Fold. Apple making an iPhone that becomes an iPad would probably be enough for them to win significant marketshare, but I hope they use this opportunity to do some interesting things with UI beyond what the iPad can do.
>I do not use a case
I have a Pixel 8a, and I have to use a case for it, because it appears to be designed to be as slippery as possible. Every edge is round and there's nothing to grip - it feels like an aluminium/glass bar of wet soap.
The 10 feels like it should be more slippery, but for some reason, it isn't. It stays stuck in your hand like glue, despite the back feeling like another glass screen. Something special in is coating
And in that case, a folding phone is huge! Having played with one that my parent use, it's such an upgrade for reading/scrolling experience. When we all are spending so much time on the phone (that's a separate discussion, but it is the reality).
"Samsung has this cool foldable phone—they seem to be taking the design mantle away from Apple these days."
"I hear this VR thing is the future of computing. Why isn't Apple in this space?"
I suspect even in the Jobs-era you might point to the iPad as Apple being pressured into responding with a product in the tablet space.
The Apple Watch a reaction to the Pebble?
https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/a-new-era-for-design
Though, I have yet to find myself in a situation that I wanted to use an iPad and I was not already in a position to be carrying one. I use mine for work and I am already carrying a laptop, throwing in an iPad is a very small addition to my bag.
Any time I have just been out, was never a situation I felt like I needed something like an iPad. Throw in that this looks like it will be the size of a Mini vs the 13" pro that I use now, it puts it in an awkward position. And I could justify the rumored $2k cost to replace 2 devices that cost more than that combined.
It will be interesting to see how it does in practice, but also what it does to the separation of iOS and iPadOS.
Last night I opened it to find the inside screen having dead pixels in the center by the bend.
I love foldable phones. I use it all the time in both modes, but now I'm currently procrastinating looking up my best buy warranty plan specifics.
For a small percentage of mobile superusers, I really do believe foldables are the future. Having the ability to use desktop mode by default, or multitask, is huge.
My non-techie parents pretty much always get the latest non-Pro iPhone every couple years because their carrier calls them and practically begs them to take a new phone.
It's extremely rare to see anyone with a phone older than like 4 years.
The cost of the iPad Mini + my phone was like $600 and the folds - even the 6th gen and above - are super unreliable, so right now that seems like the best play.
For you maybe, but for most it is, or we'd all be doing it.
It's really nice to have a tablet always with you. I live in a warm country so I don't usually wear a coat or a big bag.
Also, on android there's really no good small tablets. They're all 10" and bigger.
Personally, as someone being used to the Motorola Razor foldable, which happened to present back then. It was really good and cool as well. I hated the ever smaller getting Ericson smartphones.
I am looking forward to Apple's copy of Samsungs foldable smartphones. After all, I don't want to carry an iPhone as well as an iPad mini around with me.
And I see the foldable more as a replacement for the iPhone ultra max phones. No matter how large the screensize they have, they never beat the iPad mini on readability, even being stuck with the old one for many years.
I did this way back when the first iPad mini was released, and it's not bad.
But these days, the big iPhone is 7 inches to the iPad mini's 8 inches... the phone is big enough for most iPad mini use cases
Both a phone and a tablet can come with WhatsApp, it's a user choice whether they are there and the frequency of checking them. Global muting the apps is also an option.
I understand your point, but it is a point mitigated by user intervention. Now, if we want to say reading on a bigger screen than a phone is a better user experience, I'm on board with that.
Eh, iOS has profiles that let you disable whatever apps you wish to. Better than a whole other piece of hardware, IMO
I'll guess it won't be a Vision Pro level disaster, but most people will skip this device unless the price drops substantially.
We know Apple is bringing a folding iPhone through manufacturing leaks. A desktop mode is less likely to be leaked, since it would be mostly software and (a lot) less reliant on third parties.
> A third discovery was arguably more specific: a new system key that returns the total count of *built-in* displays on a device
(emphasis added)
This needs to come to ALL iPhones. You plug in a usb c cable to your monitor and bang, iPad Neo.
But Apple being Apple will software block it...
Maps are too narrow on phones.
Books also are easier to read.
My guess is one of two ways. Not address it at all. Or tell you that you don't see what you really see.
What company has ever highlighted the crease in their foldable for any reason other than to say it's improved from the previous year?
?
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if next year they dissolve the iPhone/iPad distinction on the App Store altogether and maybe even remove the Catalyst toggle on the Mac App Store. If you make an iOS app, it’s also a full fledged iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS app too.
I certainly wouldn’t mind. On my Mac there are some needlessly heavy electron apps I’d swap out for their iOS counterparts in a heartbeat if that were possible, as well as some games that would run fine on macOS but their devs don’t tick the checkbox for unclear reasons.
I hadn't thought about it but it makes sense and it makes me wonder how far this would reach throughout the rest of the OS. If the iPhone can fold out into an iPad Mini, will it get the rest of the iPadOS features? The iPad used to run iOS but they rebranded the version that runs on iPad to iPadOS to distinguish that it has a handful of unique features only for big screens, mainly pertaining to multitasking. But if the line is being blurred and iPhones will have big screens with multitasking, will they go back to just calling it iOS on all mobile devices?
its both iphone mini (yay!! mini iphone again) and ipad mini (yay!! hueg screen for bedtime youtube) in one device presumably with a cpu powerful enough to run cyberpunk 2077. what a world :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is the only phone I've seen people move away from iPhone to get, I know at least 3 women who switched from iPhone to android to get the folding clamshell Samsung and all love it.
I mention RAM as Android with 4GB of ram is almost unusable.
12GB seems to get up into $200+, and that's still a lot of "renewed" listings.
You can find quirky little loss-leader deals here and there sometimes but I don't think you're getting 12GB of RAM for $80 on a routine basis.
https://hackaday.com/2026/05/26/linux-on-android-provides-in...
But yeah they're usually carrier locked, I personally use Verizon prepaid and my 8GB Motorola phone is above $80 but not $600 either, it's $200
https://www.verizon.com/smartphones/motorola-moto-g-power-20...
Anyway it's certainly not the same phone as a flagship folding phone but for daily everyday needs more than adequate, I even was able to run multiple gig apps eg. DoorDash/Uber Eats on the 8GB model.
I will say what people consider "worth the money" varies since I bought a $1,000.00 radar detector and it's like who buys that...
Might be ram boost that's bumping from 8 to 12GB
I remember so many Apple developers saying this was why Apple was better than Android. The HN archives are full of such comments.
Not that I care for either company, as they both lord over our lives and limit our freedoms.
Maybe like
WWDC 2026: Platform sample app hints at future foldable
Apple is great at winning capitalism.
From what I have seen of folding screens today, they come with some significant trade offs (creases, wear, etc). Over time, I expect these to be solved, but I don't think folding screens are a luxury item today as much as they are a tech novelty. But, the cell phone market has kind of stagnated in terms of hardware, and it looks like folding screens might be the thing to drive some upgrade purchases. During the peak iphone growth phase I believe Apple would have labelled these screens as not ready yet, but today I think they risk losing market share and are potentially somewhat forced to build a folding iphone.
Same regarding your comment... I agree, the minimum QC does feel like it notched back a bit.
Even the Jobs Reality Distortion Field couldn't alter physics.