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Apple Testing Multiple Foldable iPhone Prototypes, But Has Concerns Over Display Technology and Market
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Well ANY folding phone will be roughly 2x the thickness of the device when it's unfolded. Apple can't avoid that unless they make the device like a laptop, where the screen folds of the 'body' of the device which is the thick part.
My point is just that the only people who will want to deal with the extra weight and thickness are a few 'oh new shiny' people who buy things for their newness and those people who routinely carry a phone and tablet now. For people who only carry a phone all or most of the time, it's extra weight and bulk for little benefit.
I have, it’s... pretty gimmicky for my tastes. A less comfortably-pocketable form factor than my OG iPhone SE, and a hinge that makes the full phone screen seem less robust and stable (like it’s going to start folding forward if you hold it the wrong way).
I get that for people who a phone with double the screen size of an iPhone Max a foldable phone makes that possible, but for everyone else it just adds cost, complexity, and unnecessary trade-offs. Also I’m no market research guru, but I can’t imagine that there’s a particularly large market of “people who want a bigger phone than an iPhone Max” to justify the product, especially if they’re considering dropping the relatively high-volume Mini due to low sales.
I think the crease is going to be like the notch, or like glossy monitors. It’ll be a valid compromise for the benefits, but it will only please the masses of folks that aren’t OCD.
No doubt we’re years away from AR being to the point where it will be ubiquitous, which is why I say it’s the future. I don’t see smart phones going away any time soon, and likely they will be required for compute power for initial iterations of AR glasses and maybe that will be true long into the future.
I don’t know exactly what the future holds for tech, but I do know enough to take learnings from the past and use what’s physically possible with certain materials today to come up with a good guess of what will and won’t work.
Maybe people will be ok with plastic or plastic/glass laminated screens again, like they were before Apple made rigid glass the standard, but I know my own experience with my Compaq iPaq back in the ‘90’s was horrid and that was with a flat panel (plastic covered glass screen). Certainly material science has advanced, but I’ve been in the plastic, paper and wood industries for more than 25 years and realize that sometimes, because of the physical characteristics of materials, that you can’t get everything you want - specifically related to this discussion, you can’t have a rigid material also be foldable. The company I used to own figured out how to make wood, which we all think of as being a rigid material, be able to be folded 180 degrees onto itself without cracking (in one direction). But to do that, we had to peel the wood off of logs at 0.006” / 0.15mm thick, which much like Samsung’s ultra thin glass, produces a flexible material, but eliminates its rigidity.
I do think the one solution for a foldable device would be to create separate panels that meet up with no gap or bezel, much like the device that was shown on HBO’s Westworld. But even this idea would need to account for dust or dirt getting in the mechanism or between the panels which could cause damage. I actually hoped that Microsoft would have done this, instead of their gapped / bezeled two screen device, but clearly it’s more complicated to create, at least with current tech.
Privacy is already an issue and something that will require ongoing work, regardless of whether it’s with glasses that have cameras in them or our current smart devices that already have 2, 3, 4 or 5 cameras that are able to take photos and videos even in full dark. Google was ahead of their time with the Glass, and since then everyone is carrying around phones that are recording videos or pictures. If I had to guess, we’ll see Apple offer a hampered version of AR as they attempt to provide privacy protections, while other manufactures just allow for unfettered video feeds from glasses and the market will decide what’s acceptable.
I want an AR monocle. I mean, sigh, ok I’d settle for an AR magnifying glass, but making it like a monocle would make me happy
Easy on, easy off.
It's not a lack of imagination. In my head I've been imagining folding screens and bendy devices since the 90s. I was a PDA collector before smart phones became a thing. But imagining something and making something useful with little user friction is a very very different thing. I can imagine myself in Iron Man's suit. But making a suit like that that doesn't kill the wearer is something else ?
A lot of things just can't be done like they appear in our minds or in movies. Self tying shoes sounds simpler than making a user friendly bendy phone. Even that is hard.
A
Mayor AR? Uncle AR? AR Uncle? Monoply guy but his monocle has AR technology? I dont know but i am sure men would be classy with this stuff.I want an AR monocle. I mean, sigh, ok I’d settle for an AR magnifying glass, but making it like a monocle would make me happy
Miniaturised rotors the rollable concepts use are extremely fragile. So both rollable and bendable have durability issues that are difficult to resolve.
Cool! Not released yet though, and I want the other type -- rather than a full sized phone rolling out into a tablet, I want a full sized phone that rolls up in to a smaller form factor.
I am confident that there is a very strong market for a potential 8” iPhone screen that fits in your front pocket.
Basically. That's one of the phones I have now..
normal phones have just got too big to be comfortable in my pocket, and I can't tell you how many times they slip out of my pocket when sitting down -- and using them is even worse!
Inspector Gadget would find AR glasses useful (didnt he have them?)Or, if a monocle isn’t possible “Inspector AR” or “Detective AR”
In my retroactive canon, yes. Although, I think it was more that he just… saw things.
iPhones have gotten thicker in recent years. The thinnest iPhones were the 6/6s. The recent MacBook Pros were criticized for being thicker, even it if was just around the edges. I think we are past the stage of fetishizing thinness to that degree.
Have you tried one of Samsung's recent Fold phones? The crease is there on the screen and you can feel it with your finger, but looking straight on to the screen it isn't really visible. you just see a single large screen. It was a pleasant surprise. I expected something much more intrusive.
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I don't want my phone to be light enough that it flies in the wind, I want actual thickness and weight, I dont agree with people that follow the "thinner is better" trend thingy.
You are still comparing apples to oranges, I'm not arguing a Fold device versus a larger iPad tablet, only the similar screen sized iPad mini. The Fold's market is growing, although I'm sure it was dwarfed by mini 6 sales, although I have no reference to back that up. The Fold is definitely a niche market, no argument there. Apple's tablet sales (for all tablets) Q3 2021 were 14 million, most likely higher in Q4 with the holidays and the new iPads. I would think that the ipad mini was only a small percentage of that, but can only surmise without numbers, but even at very optimistic 25% that's a solid 3.5 million. But you still can't take Samsung out of the game, they announced 1 million in foldable sales about a month after release, not too shoddy for a niche market, and more importantly significant growth and market penetration year over year.
Edit: Found that Q3 2021 2.6 million foldables sold, 93% of those by Samsung, not shabby at all, with predictions of an even better Q4.
But as I said, it's a niche market, not only because of the high price tag, but also all the perceived negatives it may or may not suffer from, but still has good sales and just like Apple not abandoning the iPad mini or the iPhone SE because of niche sales, there isn't any reason for Samsung to abandon foldables from a financial pov.
How big is your pocket?
Current smartphones are at the maximum size that most would consider to be "pocketable". Doubling that screen size just doesn't provide enough benefit to put up with the shortcomings in durability and inconvenience.
I still continue to disagree, but I think we are now delving into personal opinion and use case, nothing wrong with that. The bottom line is factoring which is more important, portability or a larger screen. I would gladly give up having a thicker phone for the functionality of a much larger screen, but you value a more portable phone over a larger screen.
There are people, like me, who remember the beginning of the cell phone industry and actually owned the early versions. My boss had the original Motorola brick cell phone, while my first was a bag phone - literally came with a bag to hold the coiled cord and amplifier / electronics. Back then, there was no thought about being able to carry a cell phone in your pocket, but that quickly changed. I had early Motorola flip phones, then got what was for a period of time the thinnest cell phone in the world, a Sanyo, which I loved because it was pocketable. When you’re talking about a folding, full sized smartphone, it’s going to have to be effectively twice as thick as current candy bar smartphones, since you need close to twice the amount of battery to drive the double sized screen.
I’m pretty sure most people are NOT going to want to go back to the days of needing a cell phone holster that they wear on their belts to hold their device, so thinness isn’t going away.