‘Most people don’t wake up wanting to buy a foldable’: I’m convinced Apple’s iPhone Ultra will finally make foldables mainstream — but not because of the hardware
Publish Date: 2026-06-07 13:00:00
Source Domain: www.techradar.com
Apple’s first foldable iPhone — expected to be called the iPhone Ultra — still exists mostly in rumors, supply chain whispers, and analyst notes, but the prospect already feels less niche than it did a year ago.
There’s clearly an appetite among iPhone owners for something new. Apple’s yearly upgrades have become smoother, faster, and more polished, but also more familiar. Better cameras, brighter screens, and faster chips are nice and definitely still matter, but they rarely change the basic shape of the thing in your pocket.
I’m not convinced that the form factor itself is what will make Apple’s debut foldable succeed, though. Samsung, Google, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, and others have already proved that foldable phones can be impressive, useful, and surprisingly refined. Apple won’t be arriving in a category that needs rescuing. Its advantage is simpler than that.
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If the iPhone Ultra goes mainstream, it will be because Apple makes a foldable that feels like the most natural iPhone upgrade in years. The device, if and when it releases, should feel familiar when closed, more capable when opened, and never quite as strange as the idea of a folding iPhone probably should be.
Apple doesn’t need to invent the foldable
Unbox Therapy examines a dummy unit of Apple’s folding iPhone Ultra (Image credit: Unbox Therapy)
Relatively speaking, Apple is very late to foldables, which is sometimes treated as a problem. In this case, though, it may be a gift.
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The first wave of foldable phones did the awkward work, proving that flexible screens could survive real life, hinges could be trusted, and apps could adapt. Some of that took years, and some of it is still being worked out.
But the category no longer feels experimental in the way it once did. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold series has become thinner and more polished; Google has pushed the Pixel Fold line towards a more phone-like shape, and so…
