Why Is It Taking So Long to Get the iPhone Fold?

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The iPhone accounts for over half of Apple’s overall revenue.

The problem is that sales are falling. Slowly – but they’re decreasing, nonetheless.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Apple has been marketing and selling the iPhone since 2007, and it has been an astronomical success. Unfortunately, there are only a finite number of human beings on the planet, and a lot of them have already bought smartphones.

Related: Foldable iPhone release date

If you live outside of the tech bubble, of which I’ve been a part for most of my adult life, smartphones are just that – smartphones. It takes either a broken screen, a failing battery, or an unmissable carrier deal to make most normal people change their device. And when they do, they’ll probably go for the latest version of what they already have. This makes life for smartphone manufacturers like Apple incredibly difficult. How do you reinvent a market which doesn’t need reinventing in the eyes of its customers?

At the moment, it seems the answer is to either make smartphones thinner or foldable (or both). And the jury is still out as to whether either of those approaches will lead to iPhone-level success.

At the time of writing, Apple has yet to make its mark with either a very thin or a foldable smartphone, but I think I know why the latter in particular is taking so long to make an appearance.

The problem with foldables

I’ve used and reviewed a lot of foldable smartphones. I have one on my desk right now that I can’t mention because it’s embargoed at the time of writing. But it is brilliant – I can tell you that.

I’ve also reviewed and continue to use what I think might be my favourite smartphone of 2025 so far – the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. It is, finally, a foldable from the grandaddy of the category that I can see myself switching to full-time, from a regular smartphone.

Read my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 review!

The problem is that these still aren’t regular smartphones. They’re very expensive. They have design compromises (crease, anyone?). Their use case beyond the initial “wow, this is cool” first few weeks is troublesome.

Is it any surprise that Apple hasn’t placed its own foldable in the ring yet?

Apple’s problem with foldables

I think that Apple has three problems with foldable smartphones. They’re not insurmountable, and I’m sure they can all be overcome in a typically Apple way (even if I can’t think what that would look like at the moment), but they’re big enough for Tim to continually delay the release of an ‘iPhone Fold’.

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The first is the technical stuff. I’m yet to use a foldable smartphone that doesn’t have a crease running down the centre of the internal display where it folds in half. As time has drawn on, that crease has decreased (nice!) and become less of an eyesore, but you can still see and feel it on most new foldables.

Does the crease matter? No. Once you get into foldable life and find a use case for yours, the crease all but ceases to exist. Like any perceived technical shortcoming about which Reddit users obsess, the crease doesn’t impede usability. It’s just… there.

The crease matters to Apple, though. Big time. The foldable iPhone won’t have a crease (or, at least, if there is one, it’ll be virtually imperceptible), which is partly why it’s taking so long to come out. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the absence of a crease may even be one of the key marketing focal points for its foldable.

Check out my list of the best foldables here!

The second thing that’ll be troubling Mr Cook about foldables is the addressable market. In Europe, for instance, the foldable smartphone market only accounts for 1.5% of the overall smartphone market. It’s growing steadily, though. By 2030, the global foldable market is expected to be valued at over $70bn. That’s enough of a sniff for Apple to ready its troops, but not exactly a slice of cake that’s going to satisfy investors as things stand.

Thirdly, there’s the story (or lack of it). Apple needs to tell a story with all of its products. For the iPod, it was the ability to hold 1,000 songs in your pocket. For the Apple Watch, it was the launch of the world’s most personal device. For the Mac, it continues to be the story of the best computing experience money can buy. Apple is very good at telling these stories, but I would hazard a guess that the prospect of a foldable smartphone would trouble even the most creative minds in Apple’s Storytelling Department (they have one of those, don’t they?).

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What are foldables for? Who are they for? Why would you buy one over the iPhone, or instead of an iPad, or – worse for Apple’s projected revenue – instead of both?

Sorry, Tim – I don’t know the answer to that one.

What could an iPhone Fold look like?

In the absence of any ‘iPhone Fold’ leaks, it’s fun to guess what such a device might look like, what it might offer, feature-wise, and which inevitable concessions Apple will undoubtedly make.

It’ll need to be thin. Apple started that trend with the ludicrously thin M4 iPad Pro, and Samsung leapt ahead with its first flagship thinnable smartphone – the S25 Edge. Rumours persist of an ‘iPhone 17 Air’ coming later this year that will take on Samsung’s offering and possibly become the thinnest smartphone on the market. My guess is that such a device would also form the basis of an Apple foldable; picture two thin iPhones bolted together via a fancy hinge (with an even fancier name) and you’ve got yourself an iPhone Fold.

It won’t have great battery life. And it definitely won’t have a battery made from silicon-carbon. So, please reduce your expectation levels there.

Related: iPhone 16 Pro Max review

The camera system will also be hampered. At most, we’ll get whatever the base model iPhone of the time offers. Just like the Z Fold7, the foldable iPhone will have a great main camera, but will struggle when it comes to optical zooming.

A foldable smartphone is nothing without an operating system (OS) that has been tweaked to get the most from that big internal display and the ability to switch to it from the front display. This is why we should expect iOS to gain some juicy foldable-only functionality. Think multitasking, display size switching, and other stuff which no other foldable manufacturer has thought to include in its OS. It won’t be a version of iPadOS, but it’ll take cues from it. In typical Apple fashion, it’ll also be limited, feature-wise, to begin with, but it’ll nail the basics.

Final thought

The more I think about it, the more I realise that the biggest challenge Apple has on its hands with the ‘iPhone Fold’ is the story it can tell about such a device.

Get it wrong, and it’ll cannibalise iPad sales. Get it right and, coupled with a sensible pricing strategy, it could open up a whole new market for Apple. It might even tempt users of Android-based foldables over to ‘the dark side’.

All I know is that I wouldn’t want the job of coming up with that story. Rest assured, someone is, though!