Why Apple should release the folding iPhone Flip this year

Apple’s The iPhone 16 Series packed numerous new features of enhanced cameras And deep integration with Apple Intelligence to updated processors. But the long -standing folding iPhone flip There is still nowhere to see. Most manufacturers of Android phones including SamsungGoogle, Motorola, OnePlus., Xiaomi And honor, you have been selling folding devices for years and it starts to feel that Apple is late at the party. This can be a problem.

Apple dominates the Premium Phone category but Foldable – which fit into the first-class space in terms of price- are already inserted to the heels, with Motorola says cnet that 20% of customers who buy their RAZR Foldable Jump on Apple. Samsung, meanwhile, is in the sixth generation of its Flip and Fold series. As Lisa Ediko from CNET learned during a visit to Seoul, “Folding are everywhere“In the home of South Korea of ​​Samsung.

As almost all major Android phone manufacturers enter the folding game, Apple is at risk not only losing to potential customers, but also allowing a rival like Samsung to become the name of the category, which could make Apple influence if it eventually launches its own folding product. In addition, customers who have become early adoptive parents, attracted by fantastic bending technology, may be too attached to the Android ecosystem until the Apple phone arrives to want to go to iOS.

Apple is unlikely to worry. It is estimated that about 20 million folding from all manufacturers were sold worldwide in 2023, while Apple sold 26.5 million iPhone 14 Pro Max phones in the first half of the same year. It is clear that Apple thinks it has not yet missed the boat.

Apple has always been successful in making its time, watching the industry and starting its own product taking up when it is ready. Apple did not come up with phones, tablets, smart watches or computers, but found ways to take existing products and make them more useful, more valuable in everyday life, and to say, more exciting. That is why the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac lines dominate the market today.

For me, I have to see Apple taking over the folding phone. I wrote before I’m disappointed in folding filesS I have been a mobile reporter for more than 13 years and the phones are getting worse as they get closer to turn into light variations of the same rectangular plate.

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Folding promised something newSomething innovative, something that briefly caused some excitement in me, but for several years, this excitement has come to the extent that it is extinguished. They are fine products, and although I like the novelty of a screen that bends, they are not a revolution in how we interact with our phones. Not the way the touch screen arrives was when we were still pushing buttons to enter texts.

I hoped that Google’s Pixel folding would be Catapulting phone of folding forwardand while the new Pixel 9 Pro Fold – The second generation of Google’s Foldable- offers several great updates, it still does not offer any kind of revolution. Instead, he feels more recently as a “I” move from Google. Ditto for OnePlus openS So I stayed instead of looking at Apple, a company with an attempt to revolve products to create a new absorption of the genre that really moves forward how we use our phones.

This innovation will not just come from the design of the product. Apple works closely with its third -party software developers, and it is this entrance that would help the folding iPhone make it really useful. My biggest complaint about folding ones at the moment is that while the hardware is decent, the devices essentially work only standard versions of Android with a handful of discarded user interfaces. They are regular phones that just happen to bend.

Few Android developers perceive the form of folding and it is not difficult to understand why; Consumers are still not there in a sufficient number to justify the time and cost of adapting their software in different screen sizes. Many folding formats are already available medium folding Android are facing the same problem with the fragmentation that has hit the platform from the beginning. Android-based folding is just a more difficult platform for building developers from ordinary phones. Apple will be able to change this as it has proven with the iPhone and iPad.

Given Apple’s close relationship with the highest-level developers-not to talk about their own huge developer team-I am aware of an Apple Foldable to offer innovations that make it more than just an iPhone, which folds half.

And I really hope to do it. I want to look forward to the technology launch again. I want to feel excited to get a new gadget in my hands and feel this “wow” moment as I do something transformative for the first time.

In short, I no longer want to get bored of technology. Apple, it’s over with you.