Who The Hell Actually Wants a Foldable Phone?

It's August, which means 'leaked renderings' of the next generation of Apple iPhones are flooding social feeds, each with slight differences like the color options or number of phones they are releasing, yet one factor remains a constant across all speculation posts. The foldable iPhone is coming.

When I think about the foldable iPhone, the image of the giant robot from the 1984 Apple commercial is summoned up in my head, only this time he is headed towards Steve Job's grave to smash it, him, and his memory to smithereens. I also think of the garish foldable, even twist to open, phones of the mid-2000's which failed quickly and faded into the past. A past which we have, in the last few years, uncovered and decided we needed to resurrect.

Let us briefly revisit the graveyard of mobile design where tech executives apparently go to harvest ideas when their product design teams run completely out of creative steam.

Before we were asked to shell out two grand for glass with a gentle crease down the middle, the industry spent the mid-2000s throwing hinges and swivels at the wall to see what stuck. Remember the T-Mobile Sidekick? You didn’t just open it, you flicked the screen with your thumb in an aggressively performative motion. Then came the LG Chocolate series, sliding up like a sleek, cheap lipstick tube. And who could forget the fever dreams of the late 2000s? The LG enV series swiveled into full QWERTY keyboard territory, and then LG hit us with the double-hinged "origami" style phones (like the VX9800 or the Lotus), opening both vertically and horizontally as if trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube mid-text.

They were clunky, the hinges snapped if flipped the wrong way briefly, and the novelty dissolved the second you realized you were operating a plastic transformer just to send a text that said "on my way." We collectively buried these monstrosities for a reason. So, why in God’s name are we exhuming them?

If you listen to tech analysts and tech bros, we are in the middle of a massive "foldable comeback." They want us to believe this is driven by a mix of functional necessity and Y2K nostalgia. Then there are the tech bros who insist they need a phone that unfolds into a mini-tablet, and now phones that fold three times into a literal accordion of OLED screen. Huawei rolled out a tri-fold, and the internet practically swooned.I’m sorry, but why the fuck do we need these giant screens?

When did our pocket devices need to expand into something resembling a map of 18th-century Europe?

Are we doing brain surgery in the Uber?

Are we editing IMAX films while waiting in line for an iced matcha latte?

The industry’s entire defense rests on the idea that our lives will be miraculously improved if we can watch a TikTok while keeping our calendar open on a secondary panel while taking notes on a third. It’s not innovation, it’s an over-engineered solution to a problem nobody had, wrapped in plastic that leaves a visible crease down the center of your screen, a crease that tech reviewers swear you "get used to," the same way you get used to a mild roof leak in a rental apartment.

We have reached peak tech boredom. The smartphone form factor hit perfection a decade ago. A durable, water-resistant glass rectangle. But because Silicon Valley operates on a terrifying cycle of perpetual hardware upgrades, tech companies can't just sell us a flat slab that works, they have to convince us that folding that slab in half (or thirds) is the future.

So here we are, watching Apple inevitably prepare to jump on the bandwagon to sell us an "iFold" for the price of a used Honda Civic. We’re being sold retro-futurism disguised as progress, wrapped up in delicate hinges that dread a single grain of sand. I don't want a phone that folds. I don't want a phone that twists, swivels, or unfolds like an origami swan. I just want a phone that fits in my hand, doesn't break easily, and takes great photos.