Browsing: Foldable Phones

Apple has confirmed the iPhone Duo’s inner display carries a cover layer that service centers can peel off and replace, for $19 with AppleCare coverage. It is the most quietly significant detail about Apple’s first foldable, because the crease on a folding phone does not arrive at launch. It arrives in year two, and Apple is the first manufacturer to sell a consumer fix for it.

Apple opens iPhone Duo pre-orders on October 16 and ships on October 23, but it added a new Get Ready step on October 12 that lets you build the whole order in advance. The reason is supply: assembly yields are reported at just above 60 percent, and analysts expect only about 6 million units in 2026.

The vivo X Fold6 went on sale outside China on October 1 with an 8.02 inch inner screen, a 6,900mAh silicon anode battery, a 200MP Zeiss main camera and a real periscope telephoto. It out-specs the Galaxy Z Fold 8 on almost every line that matters, then asks more money for it and skips the United States entirely.

Apple crossed a $5 trillion valuation during Tuesday’s session and closed below it. The rally rests on a foldable iPhone that has not taken a single preorder yet, and a Siri that has only just shipped.

The Kirin 9050 Pro is the first commercial chip built on Huawei’s LogicFolding architecture, and the company says it contains no American technology. The design stack really is Chinese. The machines in the fab are not. Here is where the line actually falls.

Apple’s iPhone Duo opens to a 7.6 inch inner display, starts at $1,999 and climbs to $3,199. Here is the full spec sheet, the hinge engineering, and the two things Apple had to leave out to make it fit.

Samsung spent Apple’s keynote live posting jokes about the iPhone Duo, including a line about reheating its leftovers. The spec sheets tell a closer story.

Huawei announced the Mate XT 2 Ultimate Design on September 7, a second-generation tri-fold that folds inward instead of wrapping around itself. It arrives five months after Samsung quietly stopped selling the tri-fold everyone said was the future.

Apple takes the wraps off its first folding iPhone on September 9, and the rumor pile has spent months building a list of what the phone will not have. Face ID, a telephoto lens, mmWave 5G and the Action button are all expected to be missing from a phone that starts around $2,000.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says the folding iPhone Ultra will likely ship with MagSafe magnets built into the phone. Samsung has shipped eight generations of foldables without ever doing that, leaving the magnets in a case you buy separately.