Apple IPhone 16 series Pass a multitude of new features of the improved cameras and deep integration with Apple Intelligence with updated processors. But the long -term foldable iPhone flip is still nowhere to see. Most Android telephony manufacturers, including SamsungGoogle, Motorola, OnePlus,, Xiaomi And Honor, sell folding aircraft for years now, and he is starting to feel like Apple is late at the party. It could be a problem.
Apple dominates in the premium phone category, but folding – which is part of the premium space in terms of price – are already biting with its heels, with Motorola saying Cnet These 20% of customers buying its Razr foldable ship jumped from Apple. Meanwhile, Samsung is in the sixth generation of his Flip and Fold series. As Lisa Eadicicco de Cnet discovered during a visit to Seoul, “Foldables are everywhere“In the country of origin of Samsung, South Korea.
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With almost all the main Android telephony manufacturers who arrive on the foldable game, Apple runs the risk not only to lose potential customers, but also to allow a rival like Samsung to become the essential name of the category, which could make it more difficult for Apple to have an impact if it finally launches its own folding product. In addition, customers who have become early early of a foldable, attracted by fancy bending technology, can be too rooted in the Android ecosystem when Apple’s phone arrives to go to iOS.
Apple is unlikely to worry. It is estimated that around 20 million foldables of all manufacturers were sold worldwide in 2023, while Apple would have sold 26.5 million iPhone 14 Pro Max handsets in the first half of this year only. Obviously, Apple believes that he has not yet missed the boat.
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Apple has always managed to wait for its time, observe industry and launch its own vision of a product when ready. Apple did not invent phones, tablets, intelligent watches or computers, but it has found ways to take existing products and make them more useful, more precious in daily life and – I dare to say – more exciting. This is why iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac lines dominate the market today.
For me, I need to see Apple on the foldable phone. I have already written on how Disappointed I am in foldable. I have been a mobile journalist for over 13 years and phones have become more and more boring because they have converged to become slight variations on the same rectangular slab.
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Foldables promised something newSomething innovative, something that briefly sparked a certain excitation in me, but several years, this excitement has decreased to the point of being extinguished. These are good products and although I like the novelty of a folding screen, it is not a revolution in the way we interact with our phones. Not in the way the arrival of the touch screen was when we still press the buttons to type texts.
I hope the Google Pixel fold would be the phone to catapult the foldable forwardand while the new Pixel 9 pro fold – The second generation of Google from Google – offers major updates, it always offers no kinds of revolution. Instead, it looks more like a “me too” move from Google. Ditto for the OnePlus Open. So I still have to look at Apple, a business with history for product revolutions, to create a new vision of the genre that really advances the way we use our phones.
Google’s Pixel fold is a decent phone, but it does not advance the category significantly.
This innovation does not only come from product design. Apple works in close collaboration with its third -party software developers, and it is this entry that would help a folding iPhone to become really useful. My biggest complaint concerning foldables at the moment is that, although the equipment is decent, the devices are essentially simply executed standard android versions with a handful of launched user interface settings. These are regular phones that simply folded.
Few Android developers adopt the folding format, and it is not difficult to see why; Users are not there in sufficient numbers to justify time and expenses to adapt their software to a variety of screen sizes. The multiple folding formats already available are available on Android foldables are faced with the same fragmentation problem that has tormented the platform from the start. Foldables based on Android are simply a platform more difficult to build for developers than ordinary phones. Apple could change that, as it has proven with the iPhone and iPad.
Apple did not invent tablets, but its iPad line has revolutionized the category.
Given Apple’s close relationships with high -level developers – not to mention its own developer team – I expect a possible Apple foldable to offer innovations that make it more than a simple iPhone that folds in half.
And I really hope it is. I want to wait for technological launches again. I want to feel excited to have a new gadget in my hands and feel this moment “wow” because I do something transformer for the first time.
In short, I no longer want to be bored by technology. Apple, it’s for you.
