I really don’t like the direction of this foldable iPhone. Maybe I will change my mind after seeing people use it for a while, but right now I genuinely don’t understand what problem Apple is trying to solve. The iPhone Duo closes into a 5.4-inch phone and opens into a 7.6-inch screen. Apple says it is the largest display ever on an iPhone. Fine. But why? We spent years making phones bigger. Every few generations the screen got larger, bezels disappeared, the body got wider, things became heavier, and eventually we arrived at the Pro Max. The iPhone became about as large as most people would reasonably tolerate carrying around every day. Now apparently the next innovation is to make the phone smaller again, put another screen inside it, add a hinge, and unfold it into a wider screen. At some point I think we have to ask whether the smartphone industry has simply reached the peak of creativity on what we can meaningfully do with the physical form of a phone. Because this increasingly feels like rearranging the rectangle. Make it longer. Make it wider. Make the bezels smaller. Make it thinner. Make the cameras bigger. Now fold it in half. And suddenly we have a new category. I am not convinced. Samsung has been doing this for years and deserves the credit for actually pioneering and refining foldables. But why does Apple need to follow Samsung all the way here? Samsung makes a Fold, therefore eventually Apple must make one too? Apple has always been powerful enough to ignore a trend completely when it doesn’t think the experience makes sense. And this is where I genuinely doubt Steve Jobs would have been easy to convince. He wasn’t against entering categories Apple didn’t invent, but there had to be a damn good reason for the product to exist. I can almost imagine the conversation. “We’ve made an iPhone that folds.” “Why?” “So you can unfold it into a much bigger screen.” “We sell the iPad.” Because that is really where this loses me. The Duo opens to 7.6 inches. The iPad mini is 8.3 inches. So my phone now unfolds into something approaching the size of another Apple product already sitting on the shelf. Where exactly is the line now? And yes, I know the advantages. Bigger screen in your pocket, multitasking, two apps at once, better media consumption. The engineering will probably be brilliant. Apple may even make the best foldable phone ever made. I still don’t know why I need a foldable phone. That’s the part nobody has really sold me on. Foldables have existed for years. Samsung, Huawei, Motorola and others have had plenty of time to demonstrate the use case, yet they still haven’t become the obvious next form of the smartphone, at least I don’t see it in the hand of everyday users. That matters. I expected Apple’s eventual entrance into foldables to make me finally understand what everyone else had been trying to achieve. Instead my immediate reaction is basically: Oh. Apple made the Samsung thing. A beautiful, ridiculously polished, probably better engineered Apple version of the Samsung thing, but still the Samsung thing. Maybe I will be proven wrong. Maybe actually using one changes everything. For now, it feels like we finally pushed the smartphone rectangle as far as it could go and, having run out of places to take it, decided to fold the rectangle. I would rather Apple spend that obsession making the iPhone significantly smarter, getting their damn Apple Intelligence to work for starters, pushing AI forward, improving battery life and finding new ways to make the device I already have more useful. Apple doesn’t need to participate in every hardware trend. Sometimes it can simply look at something and say, “No, we don’t think you need that.” On this one, I wish they had.

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