For years, Apple has long played the role of a “late revolutionary” in the foldable screen sector. While the industry has already formed a “two-power rivalry” pattern and foldable smartphones have continued to iterate, Apple’s first foldable product, the iPhone Fold, is finally making its much-anticipated debut. What’s even more noteworthy is that its second foldable offering—the compact foldable iPhone Flip—is already in intensive testing, scheduled for release in the fall of 2027, marking the official kickoff of Apple’s foldable product ecosystem layout.
Apple’s foldable screen strategy presents a clear “two-step jump” approach. It is reported that the iPhone Fold, to be launched this year, will adopt a “wide-fold” scheme similar to Huawei’s Pura X, with an inner screen featuring a landscape orientation where width exceeds height, and an area close to that of the iPad mini, focusing on productivity needs. Meanwhile, the iPhone Flip will return to the vertical compact foldable form factor; when unfolded, its inner screen area and aspect ratio will be similar to those of the iPhone 17 Pro Max, targeting fashion and differentiated positioning. Apple’s bet is that once the first foldable iPhone validates market demand, consumers will seek more diversified foldable forms, just as they have distinct needs for straight-screen phones.
However, Apple’s timing for entering the compact foldable market is quite challenging. Currently, compact foldable phones are in an awkward predicament. Despite their high appearance value and social attributes, they have faced considerable controversy in a market dominated by pragmatism. Due to the additional hinge mechanism and outer screen assembly, compact foldable phones are inferior to same-generation straight-screen phones in terms of specifications. Moreover, their upper limit is merely “on par with straight-screen phones”—they cannot deliver the advanced experience that large foldable phones offer, making them a poor value proposition for consumers who pay a premium.
Apple dares to enter the market against the tide, with its core confidence stemming from its mastery of key technologies. According to exposed patents, Apple is developing a flexible screen assembly with “self-healing” capabilities. The surface covering is made of an ultra-high-toughness deformable polymer material that can automatically fill in small scratches or indentations. Additionally, a metal mesh is embedded in the screen; when energized and combined with specific wavelength light irradiation, it enables “induced material repair,” similar to the principle of shape-memory alloys regaining their form through heating. To address the issue of flexible materials becoming brittle and prone to cracking in low temperatures, the patent even includes a heating function—when the iPhone screen detects excessively low temperatures, it can generate heat through high-brightness pixels in the folding area and the energized metal mesh to soften the screen material first, ensuring safe folding and unfolding. These technologies, if mass-produced, are expected to resolve the core pain points of compact foldable screens and create a “unbreakable” product experience, as highlighted in the latest electronics news.
Notably, Apple’s “foldable” layout is not limited to the iPhone. Since 2025, Apple’s iPhone product line has shifted to a multi-pronged parallel model, encompassing the pragmatic Pro series, the all-round digital series, and the design-oriented Air series. Beyond this, Apple is also advancing projects such as Vision Pro and AR products, Apple Intelligence, and self-developed A-series and M-series processors—and “foldability” will become an evolutionary direction for the entire product family. In addition to the iPhone Fold and Flip, foldable iPads, flexible MacBooks, and even rollable Pro Displays are under potential planning; the only constraint is time.
Nevertheless, for ordinary consumers, it is crucial to rationally view the experience limitations of compact foldable screens. Compact foldables cannot deliver a significantly different experience from straight-screen phones, while large foldable screens, when unfolded, can transform from communication tools into more capable productivity and content consumption devices—their visual impact and efficiency improvements are more fundamental. Apple’s launch of the iPhone Flip is largely to seize the market of fashion-conscious users who pursue individuality and extreme portability. However, the true future of foldable screens is likely to depend on the “large-fold” scheme that can upgrade the form factor of the iPad.
Cook once promised during a quarterly earnings call that Apple will bring groundbreaking innovations later this year, and the company’s best products “are yet to come.” With continuous breakthroughs in foldable screen technology and the gradual improvement of the product matrix, it remains to be seen whether Apple can rewrite the foldable screen market landscape by leveraging its ecological advantages and core technologies—something the industry and consumers alike eagerly anticipate.
