Apple's Foldable is Not What You Think

I am here at Samsung's CES 2026 exhibit. If you don't know, Samsung is one of the world's global leading display manufacturers. And I don't know, they've got some like micro RGB thing behind me, whatever. The important thing is they make one of the best TVs ever made, the Samsung Frame Pro. Wow, it is fantastic. If you've not seen my review, you should check it out. But that review might be one of the reasons why I was not invited to their media day, which happened a couple of days ago with other members of the press. I've tried to get access and have since been unsuccessful, but what they unveiled there was pretty important, even though it seemed nondescript on the surface. A special new folding screen technology that somehow doesn't crease. Coincidentally, the exact display Apple has been rumored to be using for years in their upcoming iPhone Fold, a phone supposed to be released this year. So let's talk about what that is, how it works, how it's even possible, and if the iPhone Fold as a general product and category even makes sense. Here is a piece of thin 3D printed plastic. Watch what happens when I bend it repeatedly, in the same spot, over and over. You'll notice two things. First, it starts to take on a bit of memory. It doesn't quite spring back to where it was originally. And secondly, do you see this white stress line that's starting to form? Yeah, that's deformation, concentrating along a single axis. And it's not all that dissimilar from a foldable display. I mean, Samsung literally ships their foldables. Unfolded and it's not just to present them nicely the longer these displays stay closed and the more you fold them the more prominent the crease will become and this happens due to a phenomenon called viscoelastic creep the flexible polyimide structure that replaces traditional glass undergoes permanent molecular restructuring under sustained mechanical stress every time you open and close each fold cycle leaves microscopic changes in the polymer chains invisible at first but accumulating along the bend axis and Until they become that tactile ridge that you feel when you run your finger across. The type of ridge that you just, no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite get rid of. The man behind the camera, Benjamin, has a Z Fold 7. Which arrived with a barely there crease out of the box, but several months and thousands of open-close cycles later, it's noticeably more pronounced. And it's not a defect, it's material science, and it's been one of the barriers standing between foldables and mainstream adoption. It's not the barrier, that's probably cost, but it is still a factor. The challenge is that foldable displays, they're not just bendable glass, they are a complex stack of layers, each responding differently to mechanical stress. There's the polyimide substrate. There's the thin-film transistors controlling each individual pixel. There's the OLED itself with its emissive layer, integrated touch sensors, and TFE encapsulation film. There's also the ultra-thin glass on top of that, and then finally a protective film on top of that. Every layer has to fold and unfold without breaking, separating, or developing permanent deformation. And here's the takeaway. When you fold something, the outer surface stretches while the inner surface compresses. Thicker materials experience greater differential stress along that fold line, which is why making this entire stack thinner and thinner has been the engineering goal for years. Like the addition of UTG, glass thin enough actually becomes flexible because its bending stress stays below its fracture threshold. But thinner also means more fragile. Drop something on a foldable and you're almost guaranteed to crack a screen, because there is no thick glass sandwich protecting those delicate layers. So it's been a tricky thing of how do we balance durability but also hand feel to make it feel like a glass display while making sure that the materials can fold and unfold a bunch of times without creasing. It's hard. And manufacturers have tried pretty much everything. Motorola pioneered a teardrop hinge with the original Razr. You might remember that. Instead of folding flat, the screen tucks into a larger radius loop inside the hinge, and then it actually slides the display down into the chin as it closes. A clever mechanical solution, but one that didn't prove to be very reliable. Samsung's Galaxy Z series uses a dual-cam mechanism system that allows the device to hold at different angles while also pulling the display taut when it's opened flat. And some Chinese manufacturers even use optically clear adhesives that let the display layers slide microscopically past each other during folding and unfolding. These approaches all help, but they don't solve the fundamental problem. Repeated stress in the same location creates material fatigue. The crease will always develop. Samsung's new solution, the one they showed at CES, seems genuinely clever. According to analyst Ice Universe, they're using a laser-perforated metal support layer beneath the OLED stack. Let me explain what this is supposed to do by using an example that is, well, my in-laws' dogs. They are border collies. They're animals. They're dogs designed to herd. And so they take the same exact path in the yard every single day. The grass that was once there is long dead. And left in its wake is a dirt trail. Now, had these dogs varied their route slightly each time, like most dogs do, the grass would have survived, because no single spot would have taken repeated damage. Samsung's microperforations operate on a similar principle. They make the backing plate selectively flexible, so rather than the entire structure bending uniformly across a consistent crease line, different microsections take turns absorbing stress. Each fold distributes the load slightly differently, and without a stable stress path, no permanent crease can form. Now the force still exists, it just doesn't have the conditions to become as visible. Additionally, the perforated plate reportedly floats or shifts slightly within the hinge mechanism as well, allowing the backing to relax when unfolded rather than pulling it tightly against a sharp corner. Of course, Samsung They're not going to let me anywhere near this thing. But you know what? They can't kick me out of CES entirely. Around the corner is today's sponsor, DREO, the number one seller of fans on Amazon. And when you see this, you'll understand why. This thing is amazing. It is an indoor misting fan, which is no easy task. This uses two atomizing plates to make the beadlets basically imperceptible. 16 microns, I believe. And so you can barely feel them. You feel the cooling effect, but your hand doesn't get wet at all. Important when you're inside. As we go over here we'll find out that there are a lot of other fans and this one in particular is pretty neat to me because it uses a millimeter wave sensor so it doesn't just follow you left and right in your home but it follows you up and down as well directing the airflow right to you. as we continue over here into the kitchen you'll find that they have not just water filters and milk frothers but air fryers as well and they're enabled and powered by AI so what you can do is input your ingredients that you have in your fridge it spits out a recipe you prepare it and then well it cooks it for you pretty amazing and that extends into the living room as well this is a pretty cool ambiance that we have in here and that's because using all of Dreo's Uh, remotely controlled things, we can change temperature, we can even change smell, we can change airflow, we can change sound, and a whole lot more. Let's put myself in, ah, nearby home, Colorado, USA. I experience the scene, the air conditioning, this room very cold, and a whole lot more. Pretty neat. And that is capable and able to happen because of all of the stuff that DREO makes. If there's a product you can think of particularly involving climate, they've probably got it. This thing over here is also really neat. It is an air conditioner that is unique from other air conditioners because you typically have airflow issues. You have positive airflow, negative airflow. Pulls air from outside, it spits air back outside, and importantly, doesn't need a drain because it has its own internal dehumidifier. Really uncommon in portable air conditioning units, but this thing does it easy. Check out all the DREOS products that they've shown here at CES using the link below. Thanks. Here's my issue with foldables as they exist today, and I say this as someone who has owned and used several of them. The original Z Flip for almost a year as my daily driver, the Z Fold 2 for a number of months, and the Z Fold 5 for all of like a few days before realizing that my entire life is anchored to iOS and Android, just cannot replicate it no matter how much I would like it When you unfold a Z Fold 7, the inner display is nearly square. About 1.1 to 1 in terms of aspect ratio. Now, Samsung has been progressively squaring their aspect ratios with each generation. The original Fold was tall and slim. Fold 2 and 3 hit 5x4. Fold 4 and 5 reached 6.5. Fold 6 went to 7x6. And now the 7 is essentially square, optimizing for productivity over media consumption. If you ask me. Because a square... Well, it is objectively better than a tall rectangle for things like spreadsheets and dual-pane emails, split-screen multitasking, stuff that benefits from horizontal real estate. But for media? Like, a 21 by 9 aspect ratio video, like the one you're watching right now, is only one centimeter wider on the inner display in portrait mode than the cover screen is horizontally, and only about one centimeter wider when in landscape mode compared to portrait mode. Most of that huge display. Just goes unused. And plenty of apps, including social media, just can't take advantage of that wider format because the content itself was designed around 20-year-old candy bar widescreen slab-based smartphone displays. Google tried something a little different, because I think they realized this problem with the original Pixel Fold back in 2023. A phone that, well, I bought just for this video. For over $500, so you better like and subscribe. Please check out my merch, please. Nobody's buying it. So they took the same 6x5 aspect ratio display found in the Galaxy Fold 4 and 5, but they oriented it horizontally instead of vertically. The same proportions, but a different approach. And they also added some beefy bezels to make that device feel even wider. Based on leaked CAD drawings, Apple may be attempting something similar, though even more distinctive. I have here the results of those labors, or fruits, or whatever the heck. Yeah, 3D-printed mockup, based on the leaked dimensions. The rumored iPhone Fold measures roughly 121 by 84 millimeters when folded, which is slightly wider than the original OG Fold, but a lot shorter, resulting in just a very stout device with a 4 by 3 aspect ratio interior display. And, uh... Well, that's meaningful, because having spent some time with this thing, it's ridiculous, like, I haven't used this for a few days. This reminds me of, like, when I was 13 years old, and I printed out the original iPhone on a piece of paper to just feel what it would be like. Yeah, I'm there again as a 32-year-old man with the same job. Everything's fine, and I've got some observations. Yes, with a device this wide, it is a little uncomfortable to reach the left and right edges one-handed. Your thumb has to stretch further than it would with a traditional phone. But here's the thing. It's actually much easier to reach the top and bottom without re-gripping. So I don't know that it's fundamentally less usable than phones of today. It just requires a little bit of new muscle memory, I think. And that wider cover screen, in my opinion, brings two massive improvements to traditional phone slaps. First is the keyboard, which I've been, again, faking for the last... several days. But a wider display does mean a wider keyboard, which means, theoretically, easier and more accurate typing. Anybody who has fat-fingered their way through a message on a narrow phone screen knows exactly what I'm talking about. Second, shut up out there! Second, and this is more important, using the cover screen horizontally will actually be usable. Current phones with their 2x1 aspect ratios are effectively useless in landscape for anything other than video. Forget about typing, like it's so spread apart and the keyboard's so super shorty and you can't see anything above it. You're not imagining that your old iPhone 4 worked better horizontally than your new phone. It did. 16x9 isn't as wide. And 3x2, the rumored aspect ratio of this cover display, is even less wide. There's tons of room for activities. But this is not the display we're here for. When you unfold this iPhone Fold prototype, You're getting a landscape display that opens horizontally, one of the only foldables on the market other than, I guess, Samsung's Trifold that is oriented this way. And I don't think that this is coincidental because landscape is how most people use iPads, certainly how I do. And Apple seems to acknowledge this. Face ID on current iPad Pros is positioned for landscape orientation. It's how you watch movies. It's how you edit photos. You run apps side by side. But here is what I didn't fully consider until holding this, despite being an iPad owner with the same aspect ratio. When you hold this screen in portrait mode, it's actually pretty great. For 16x9 video like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, you're getting way more usable real estate on this display than you would expect, way more than on a squared foldable. Here is that aspect ratio overlaid on both displays. That's most of the screen being used for content. And for reading, browsing, anything text heavy, oh, it's like a night and day improvement over a slab phone. I think this is really the Goldilocks ratio in between the square aspect ratio that you find on other foldables and the long KitKat that you'll find on your run-of-the-mill phone slab that's already in your pocket. And if this inner display expands to the roughly 7.6 to 7.9 inches that it is rumored to, that puts it remarkably close to the 8.3 inch iPad mini. The iPad mini runs the full iPadOS windowing experience. And well, I don't really use my iPad mini anymore. And so I decided to recently revisit it and I expected cramped chaos, but I found it surprisingly capable, like maybe the best for this new windowing interface You're able to hold it just in your hands. You can move windows without flinging your arms around, moving your hand. It's all in the thumbs, baby. What's more, running two full-size iPhone apps side-by-side will work comfortably because the front display will be three-by-two, as will each respective landscape half of the inner display. Now, you might be thinking, yeah, that's every foldable. However, There's not many instances in which you would run two apps side by side horizontally on other foldables because that outer display is just too darn thin. But here I can absolutely see this being the case. And the reason I know that's the case is because I already do it on my iPad. And importantly, a foldable iPhone with this aspect ratio will not require developers to rework all that much because existing frameworks already support it. Let's work through the remaining hardware rumors, because there are a few, and they're a bit, um, goofy. According to the leaked drawings, the rumored iPhone measures 9.6mm folded, not groundbreaking, actually thicker than the Z Fold 6's 8.9mm. But in the hand, I gotta say it feels totally fine, and unfolded, it's only 4.5 to 4.8mm thick, roughly 20% thinner than the already impossibly thin iPhone Air. There my only hope for. For a form factor like this, is that they would use silicon carbon batteries and use the 3D printed titanium that they're using on the iPhone Air to reduce weight wherever possible, because we're to the point now where foldables actually feel pretty good, pretty thin, but they are all heavy, too heavy. And that is where this thing would feel big, is if it was very, very weighty. The biometrics also get weird. Face ID is rumored to appear on the outer display, but not. The inner screen, with Touch ID embedded in the power button, making its return for unfolded authentication. Um, I mean, I guess it makes sense, like, practically, but... Two authentication methods that are different seems a bit strange. There's even speculation that Face ID might just be entirely absent. I actually think that's more likely, either because the display assembly is too thin to accommodate the sensor array, or because they don't want to have multi, like, different types of authentication. And if you need Touch ID at least one place, just use it everywhere. But in my opinion, having used Touch ID extensively on the iPad Air and iPad Mini, if I had to pick one, I would choose Face ID every single time. A $2,000 flagship without it feels... Strange. But squeezing complex sensor arrays into a 4.8mm display assembly might simply not be possible. And what I will say is that Touch ID on the iPads is not very good, and actually in the example of the Galaxy Fold 7, it's got a pretty good fingerprint sensor on the side. They've gotten much better. Still though, I would prefer a Face ID array. Even if you have to hide it in some weird little place, I don't know, make it happen. Make it happen. I guess I'm now just thinking that this seems even less likely, because look at the iPhone Air. It's got Face ID, but much of it is hidden in this plateau, and that's a lot thicker. Cameras. Yeah, there's a couple of those, too. The cameras are rumored to be the dual 48-megapixel cameras that you found on the iPhone 17. So main and ultra-wide, both 48-megapixel, no telephoto in the mix. It is worth noting that the Z Fold 7 does include a 3X telephoto, though it's not very good and kind of struggles in low light. Truly proper optics, they just require more thickness and surface area than these ultra-thin foldables seem to be willing to accommodate. And honestly, that's okay. For me, I mean, I'm already using an iPhone Air that has just one camera that's not very good to begin with. And, oh, yeah, this outer screen is widely reported to be getting a standard punch-hole selfie camera, which feels a bit dated, in my opinion, for Apple to adopt in this upcoming year, especially considering that Apple has not shipped a flagship phone without the Dynamic Island for nearly four years. If they do do a punch-hole... It's because Face ID is not in the phone. Like, if there's a punch hole, no Face ID. And even if they don't have Face ID, I'm like, just keep the weird dynamic island shape because you have other sensors, ambient light, just throw it all in. Maybe not. I don't know. I'm conflicted. I'm rambling at this point. The inner display will either get an under-display camera or a simple bezel-housed sensor. And knowing Apple's historical reluctance to compromise image quality for aesthetics, well, I bet on the latter. Here's what I kept returning to, though. Apple has been watching this market for nearly seven years now. They've seen Samsung iterate through the generations. They've watched Google release the Pixel Fold, and then completely start over with the Pixel Fold 9 Pro. Pro or 9 Pro Fold. They've watched Motorola resurrect the Razr. They've watched Chinese manufacturers flood the space with increasingly capable devices. Apple didn't wait this long to release a folding phone running stock iOS with no differentiation. At least, I hope not. If this device runs windowed apps side by side, Well, that's iPadOS behavior on an iPhone. So what is this running? iOS? iPadOS? Some new hybrid fold OS? Running an app's full screen only with slide over, I guess, is something they could do, but it seems limiting given the screen real estate and price of this device. But not having display focused multitasking also seems equally likely coming from Apple, so as not to infringe on the ground that is held by the iPad Pro. Software is supposedly Apple's strength, so they keep telling me though iOS 18 is making that claim not so easy to defend. Regardless, they've got what Android foldables don't, and that is that they have developers that have spent 15 years optimizing for the iPad. Those apps will work from day one on this internal display, and they've got the wherewithal to force developers into adopting yet another display size in their lineup, which, while increasing in numbers, still pales to the volume of different sizes on Android, where apps not specifically designed for foldables, even seven years later, still look weird and are still not that uncommon. What could Apple actually do differently, you ask? I've asked myself this much over the last several weeks. Full windowing support, dynamic apps in a semi-folded state, stylus support, continuity style features. All of that has already been done by other foldables over the years. If it's just iPhone, but it folds, I gotta admit, I'll be a little disappointed. And at $2,000 and up, which is the rumored price, I think others will be as well. But maybe Apple doesn't need to reinvent the wheel because let's be honest, foldables are not the future of smartphones. This is not going to become the new iPhone Pro. When I showed my wife the mock-up, she balked at how ridiculous it is. She would never even consider it, and not just because of price. Look at this. This is nerdy power user territory. It was and has been on Android and it will be here too. And that's okay. Not every iPhone needs to be the best selling iPhone. I'm just glad to finally be getting one as someone who has been tied to the hip of iOS for years, but who has yearned for things that fold. A device where you don't feel the fold, don't see the fold and eventually stop thinking about the fold doesn't really seem like that big of a deal. And in the In the grand scheme of things, it isn't. It's just a crease on a phone, but it is very Apple. To have waited until now. It seems that the technology might be ready for Apple. The question is whether Apple is ready for the technology. And I guess that's what we're about to find out. Thank you so much for watching. And as always, stay snazzy.