Foldables Are Allowed Now

Back in May I wrote about why I love foldable phones and said I was going to buy a Galaxy Z Fold 7. I held out a little longer than planned, and for the past three weeks I have been daily driving the Galaxy Z Fold 8 instead. I also made a prediction in that post: that the form factor would be one of the biggest shifts in smartphone technology this decade. I always had a feeling Apple would eventually normalize Foldables. I didn’t expect myself to land on the Z Fold 8 as my favorite smartphone form factor.

On September 9, Apple announced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable, with pre-orders opening October 16 and availability on October 23.1 It starts at $1,999 and tops out at $3,199 for the 2TB model, which makes it the most expensive iPhone Apple has ever sold.2 I think it is a good product. I also think the way people have reacted to it says more about us than it does about the phone.

The permission slip

For most of the last seven years, admitting you liked foldables got you a particular kind of look. The polite version was “neat, but I’d never trust it.” The less polite version was that foldables were half-baked Android gimmicks, a trade show stunt that Samsung kept shipping because it had nothing better to do. Those of us who actually used them were treated as early adopters in the pejorative sense, people who valued novelty over judgment.

That was never what it was about. The appeal of a foldable, for me, was always utility: a pocketable device that opens into a real reading and working surface. I wrote at length in May about what that does for reading, for multitasking, and for finally having a screen big enough for the way I actually use a phone. Three weeks of living with one has only confirmed it. None of that was a gimmick then, and none of it changed in September.

What changed is permission. The same form factor that was a punchline last year is now a status object, and the price only helps. A $2,000 to $3,200 phone with an Apple logo on it signals in a way that a $1,900 Samsung somehow never did, even though the two are a hundred dollars apart.3 I want to be careful here, because “hypocrisy” is a heavier word than I need. I do not think most people were lying when they dismissed foldables. I think most people take their cues about what counts as legitimate from the brands they already trust, and for a very large share of Americans that brand is Apple. The Duo did not make foldables good. It made them allowed.

Green bubbles, still

The clearest evidence that this is about brand and not about hardware is the green bubble. In a July 2024 survey of 1,000 US adults, 23 percent of iPhone users said that someone they were interested in texting them from a non-Apple phone would be a dating dealbreaker, 22 percent admitted they think less of a new acquaintance the first time a green bubble appears, and 52 percent of Android users said iPhone users had made fun of them for their phone.4 A team of economists at the University of Chicago found that over 90 percent of the college students they surveyed believed a green bubble stigmatized Android users, and that iPhone-owning students would need to be paid roughly $31 a month to let their messages show up green.5 The Wall Street Journal was reporting on teenagers dreading the green bubble as far back as 2022.6 By 2024 the US Department of Justice was citing the “social stigma, exclusion, and blame” directed at non-iPhone users as part of its antitrust case against Apple.7

What makes this strange is that the original technical excuse for the green bubble is mostly gone. Apple added RCS support in iOS 18 in 2024, which brought typing indicators, read receipts, high-resolution media, and proper group chats to conversations with Android users.8 Messages between iPhones and Android phones remained green anyway.9 This past May, after years of pressure, end-to-end encryption finally came to RCS conversations between iPhones and Android phones.10 The functional gap between a blue bubble and a green one is now smaller than it has ever been. The social gap has barely moved. That tells you the color was never really about the feature list.

My hope, honestly, is that the Duo helps with this in a sideways way. A Samsung foldable next to an iPhone Duo at a dinner table now reads as “the same kind of device from a different company,” not as a curiosity. Apple recognizing the form factor legitimizes everyone who was already using it. That is a small, slightly undeserved gift to Samsung, and I will take it.

Why I picked the Fold

Three weeks in, I think the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is the better phone in the ways that matter to me, and I think the argument should land even with committed Apple users. The most honest reason is maturity. Samsung shipped its first Galaxy Fold in September 2019.11 The Fold 8 is its eighth generation: 201 grams, 4.5 millimeters thick when open, a 7.6-inch inner display, a sensibly proportioned 5.5-inch cover screen, and a promise of seven years of operating system upgrades.12 In the hand, the numbers translate into something that simply feels like a normal phone when closed and a small tablet when open, with none of the brick-in-the-pocket feeling that earlier generations were mocked for. Samsung has spent those eight generations learning about hinges, crease management, and what breaks, in public, at scale, and it shows. The Duo is a first-generation product from a company that has never shipped a folding hinge before. That is not an insult to Apple. First generations are first generations.

I will concede the Duo some wins. Apple rates it IP68 against water and dust, where the Fold 8 is rated IP48, meaning Samsung’s phone is still only protected against larger particles.13 Apple’s cameras and silicon are, as usual, excellent on paper.1 But I notice that Apple also put Touch ID in the side button on the Duo instead of Face ID, which is exactly where Samsung foldables have kept their fingerprint sensor for years.1,12 The side-mounted sensor is one of my favorite things about the Fold 8; unlocking the phone is part of the same motion as picking it up, open or closed. It is a small thing, but it is a small thing that Apple just conceded Samsung got right.

The iPhone features I expected to miss after switching, I do not. AirDrop was the one I was most worried about, and LocalSend, an open-source, cross-platform tool that moves files over the local network without touching the internet, has replaced it completely. I prefer its interface.14 I stopped paying for iCloud a long time ago; as I wrote in May, everything lives on local external drives now, so there was nothing to migrate. Once those two tethers are gone, the lock-in argument for staying on an iPhone gets thin quickly.

The close

There is one thing about foldables I did not fully articulate in May, because I had not lived with one yet, and three weeks later it has become the thing I value most. You can close them.

Closing a book-style foldable is a physical, slightly satisfying gesture that tells your brain “done for now.” I notice myself doing it the way other people close a laptop lid at the end of a meeting. A slab phone is never closed. It is always face-up, always one glance away, and a decade of research suggests that matters. Adrian Ward and colleagues found that the mere presence of a smartphone on the desk, even silenced and face down, measurably reduced available working memory and attention.15 A 2025 study that blocked mobile internet on participants’ phones for two weeks found improvements in sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being, with the attention gains comparable to reversing ten years of age-related decline.16 Even small amounts of friction help: an app that simply inserts a short pause before a target app opens reduced how often people opened it by more than half.17

None of those studies were about foldables, and three weeks is not a study. But they all point in the same direction: distance and friction between you and the screen are good for you. A foldable builds a little bit of both into the hardware. I believe this form factor has real potential to foster a healthier relationship with its user, and it is a potential I think both Samsung and Apple are underselling.

Fragility, repair, and where I part ways with my own side

Foldables are more fragile and less repairable than slab phones. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am more aware of it now that I carry one every day. iFixit scored the Galaxy Z Fold 7 a 3 out of 10, and its teardown team noted that the screen and chassis replacements are typically bundled together, which makes a cracked inner display an expensive event.18 Samsung’s official US price for an inner screen replacement on the Fold 8 is $579, which is nearly a third of the phone.19 iFixit has already said it is skeptical the Duo will be any better, pointing out that even Google’s Pixel Fold, which has official parts, tools, and guides available, only managed a 4 out of 10, and that replacing its inner screen is a procedure of more than 200 steps.20

I love what Fairphone is doing. The Fairphone Gen 6 earned a 10 out of 10 from iFixit, with twelve user-replaceable modules and a battery swap that takes about two minutes, and it is proof that phones do not have to be disposable.21 I support the right-to-repair movement. And I think it is fair to say Apple has moved in two directions at once. It now accepts used genuine parts in repairs and has a self-service repair program, which it did not have a few years ago.22 At the same time, it fought Oregon’s 2024 law banning parts pairing, the software practice that stops a perfectly good replacement part from working unless Apple blesses it.23 And it has steadily nudged customers toward treating damage as a subscription problem, most recently with AppleCare One, a $19.99-a-month plan covering multiple devices.24 The implicit message is: do not fix it, insure it.

Here is where I part ways slightly with the repair community I admire. For foldables specifically, and given how complex these devices have become, I think there is a reasonable case that recycling a badly broken unit beats a marginal repair. A foldable inner display is a laminated stack of ultra-thin glass, polymer, and digitizer layers that must be replaced as a bonded assembly, which is why the repair is priced the way it is. I am not convinced the world is better off with a large secondhand market of salvaged folding panels of uncertain quality being installed in phones that may fail again soon after. The scale of the problem is real: the world generated a record 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, and only 22.3 percent of it was documented as properly collected and recycled.25 I would rather see broken foldables flow into high-recovery recycling than into a grey market of questionable repairs. I hold that view loosely, and I understand why iFixit would push back on it. The most sustainable phone really is the one you already own, which is exactly why I care that foldables get more durable, not just more fashionable.

What the bubble says about us

I want to end where I started, with the bubble, because it bothers me more than any hinge.

What does it say about a person when they make decisions about who to date, or befriend, or take seriously, based on the operating system of a pocket computer? I used to want to answer that question harshly. I no longer think it is mostly a character flaw. I think it is a habit, a trained one, and the training was very good. The green bubble is a small, daily, visual reminder that someone is on the other team, and it works on us the same way other small, daily reminders of team membership work on us. I wrote in my last essay about how easily we sort ourselves into camps and then stop seeing each other across the line. This is a miniature version of the same thing, and it is powered by a color.

The remarkable part is that the color is now almost entirely symbolic. The features are there. The encryption is there. What remains is the signal, and the signal persists because convenience and consumption are very good at hardening into social sorting without anyone deciding that they should. I do not think the iPhone Duo fixes that. But I do think a world where the foldable in your hand is unremarkable, whoever made it, is a slightly better world than the one we had in August. It is a strange way to win an argument. I will take that too.

Notes

1. “Apple Unveils iPhone Duo,” Apple Newsroom, September 9, 2026, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/09/apple-unveils-iphone-duo/.

2. Juli Clover, “iPhone Duo: Pre-Order Time and Release Date,” MacRumors, October 15, 2026, https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/15/iphone-duo-pre-orders-and-release-date/.

3. “All the News About the iPhone Duo,” The Verge, accessed October 18, 2026, https://www.theverge.com/tech/1010131/apple-iphone-duo-news-announcements; “Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Review,” GSMArena, accessed October 18, 2026, https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_z_fold8-review-2984.php.

4. Josh Koebert, “iOS 18 Survey: Are Green Bubbles Breaking Up Friendships?,” All About Cookies, survey conducted July 2024, last updated May 1, 2026, https://allaboutcookies.org/apple-vs-android.

5. Leonardo Bursztyn, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Aaron Leonard, Filip Milojević, and Christopher Roth, “Non-User Utility and Market Power: The Case of Smartphones,” NBER Working Paper 33642 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2025), https://www.nber.org/papers/w33642; see also the summary at Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago, https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insights/non-user-utility-and-market-power-the-case-of-smartphones/.

6. Tim Higgins, “Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/tech/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-teens-dread-the-green-text-bubble-11641618009.

7. “Justice Department Sues Apple for Monopolizing Smartphone Markets,” US Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, March 21, 2024, https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-apple-monopolizing-smartphone-markets; Kyle Barr, “DOJ Says Apple’s Green Bubbles Are a Monopoly Problem,” Gizmodo, March 21, 2024, https://gizmodo.com/doj-apple-green-bubbles-imessage-android-antitrust-1851358114.

8. “What Is the Difference between iMessage, RCS, and SMS/MMS?,” Apple Support, accessed October 18, 2026, https://support.apple.com/en-us/104972.

9. “RCS: Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s iMessage Alternative,” MacRumors, accessed October 18, 2026, https://www.macrumors.com/guide/rcs/.

10. “Victory! End-to-End Encrypted RCS Comes to Apple and Android Chats,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 2026, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/victory-end-end-encrypted-rcs-comes-apple-and-android-chats.

11. “Samsung Galaxy Fold Now Available in Select Markets,” Samsung Newsroom, September 5, 2019, https://news.samsung.com/in/samsung-galaxy-fold-now-available-in-select-markets.

12. “[Galaxy Unpacked July 2026] A First Look at Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Galaxy Z Fold8 and Galaxy Z Flip8,” Samsung Newsroom, July 2026, https://news.samsung.com/global/galaxy-unpacked-july-2026-a-first-look-at-galaxy-z-fold8-ultra-galaxy-z-fold8-and-galaxy-z-flip8; “Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Review,” GSMArena; “Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8: Specs, Pricing, Release Date, and Everything You Need to Know,” Android Central, accessed October 18, 2026, https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/samsung-galaxy/samsung-galaxy-z-fold-8.

13. “I Tried Apple’s New Foldable iPhone Duo,” Wirecutter, New York Times, accessed October 18, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/apple-iphone-duo-folding-phone-first-impressions/.

14. “LocalSend: An Open-Source Cross-Platform Alternative to AirDrop,” GitHub repository, accessed October 18, 2026, https://github.com/localsend/localsend.

15. Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 2, no. 2 (2017): 140–54, https://doi.org/10.1086/691462.

16. Noah Castelo, Kostadin Kushlev, Adrian F. Ward, Michael Esterman, and Peter B. Reiner, “Blocking Mobile Internet on Smartphones Improves Sustained Attention, Mental Health, and Subjective Well-Being,” PNAS Nexus 4, no. 2 (2025): pgaf017, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017.

17. David J. Grüning, Frederik Riedel, and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, “Directing Smartphone Use through the Self-Nudge App One Sec,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 8 (2023): e2213114120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2213114120.

18. “iFixit Gives the Galaxy Z Fold 7 a 3/10 Repairability Score,” Android Authority, July 2025, https://www.androidauthority.com/galaxy-z-fold-7-repair-score-ifixit-3584265/; “Smartphone Repairability Scores,” iFixit, accessed October 18, 2026, https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairability-scores.

19. Debasish, “Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Fold 8, Flip 8 Screen Replacement Prices Are Official,” Gizmochina, August 17, 2026, https://www.gizmochina.com/2026/08/17/galaxy-z-fold-8-series-screen-replacement-prices-are-official-up-to-639-if-inner-screen-is-damaged/.

20. Elizabeth Chamberlain, “Will the iPhone Duo Be Repairable? We’re Skeptical,” iFixit News, September 9, 2026, https://www.ifixit.com/News/119205/will-the-iphone-duo-be-repairable-were-skeptical.

21. “Fairphone 6 Teardown: Proof Phones Don’t Have to Be Disposable,” iFixit News, 2025, https://www.ifixit.com/News/111613/fairphone-6-teardown-proof-phones-dont-have-to-be-disposable.

22. “Apple to Expand Repair Options with Support for Used Genuine Parts,” Apple Newsroom, April 11, 2024, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/04/apple-to-expand-repair-options-with-support-for-used-genuine-parts/.

23. “Oregon Passes Right-to-Repair Law Banning Apple’s ‘Parts Pairing,’” Fortune, March 28, 2024, https://fortune.com/2024/03/28/oregon-right-to-repair-apple-ban-parts-pairing/.

24. “Apple Introduces AppleCare One, Streamlining Coverage into a Single Plan,” Apple Newsroom, July 2025, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/07/apple-introduces-applecare-one-streamlining-coverage-into-a-single-plan/.

25. “Global E-waste Monitor 2024: Electronic Waste Rising Five Times Faster than Documented E-waste Recycling,” International Telecommunication Union, March 20, 2024, https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2024-03-20-e-waste-recycling.aspx.

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