The iPhone Ultra doesn’t need to be successful to be a success

Was Vision Pro a success? It depends on your definition. It didn’t sell many units — maybe a few hundred thousand, compared to about 50 million iPhones in the last three months alone — but it raised public awareness of a new product category and established Apple as one of the major players in that category. In other words, the product laid the groundwork for a cheaper, more widely accessible follow-up… the only problem being that Apple seems to have canceled it.

Vision Pro will therefore probably go down in history as one of the least successful projects of the Tim Cook era. However, this shows that sales alone are not the be-all and end-all, especially for first-generation products. And it offers a glimpse of a possible and perhaps even probable future for the iPhone Ultra: one in which it sells poorly, and Apple doesn’t mind. Or it doesn’t bother me too much, anyway.

The sales part of the equation certainly looks worrying. If early leaks are accurate, the iPhone Ultra will face the same hurdles as last year’s iPhone Air: namely hardware compromises (two rear camera lenses instead of three, no MagSafe) and perceived question marks over durability (the hinge, the fold), with the added complication of a huge price tag and a form factor that will be completely foreign to Apple fans. It’s like Air, but more. And while the Air may not have been the total failure we initially feared, it still didn’t set the house on fire in terms of sales.

There are of course some positives in the Ultra. On the one hand, the spec list should be a bit better than the Air’s; two lenses are a major improvement over that of the Air, and there will likely be more battery capacity. MagSafe would be a painful omission for me, but I feel like other iPhone users don’t care as much.

More importantly, the unorthodox and compromise-requiring design is in service of actual functionality rather than just being thin and light: having a foldable chassis means more screen real estate. And more portability, the dream combo. Again, truly transformative designs bring their own problems. I expect only wealthy early adopters would be willing to pay that much for such an unfamiliar device, and you have to remember that most of them just bought an iPhone Air. Logically, we should expect low sales figures.

This is actually the experience of every company that has launched foldable products so far. It’s a tiny market, so small in fact that as of August last year, foldable smartphones accounted for just 1-2% of total sales worldwide, according to a TrendForce analyst. These numbers are increasing, but slowly, at least for now. The arrival of the Ultra, like the Vision Pro on the mixed reality headset market, will certainly give a boost.

In the first quarter of 2026, Apple earned $85 billion from its iPhone lineup, or about 80 million units. While 3% of that figure, conservatively beating the trend, may seem like a lot, we’d be looking at between 2 million and 2.5 million individual sales of the iPhone Ultra, which would hardly be considered a success by Apple’s business standards. Extrapolating from speed test data, the Air appears to have achieved a share of more than double, which would still make it the least popular of the late 2025 models.

But would 2 million sales be a disaster? I would say no. On the one hand, given the scale of competition, the Ultra could sell far fewer units than any other iPhone by the end of 2026 and still dominate its niche. Apple reportedly wants new CEO John Ternus to be the face of foldables, and the iPhone Ultra will almost certainly be the most visible product on the market. All this attention will be a mixed blessing for other manufacturers, who may see their own numbers increase by association but will struggle to get customers excited about their offerings.

The main task of the iPhone Ultra is not to make money. Its job is to make a splash: show everyone that Apple is here with the first foldable to do things RIGHT. If that means a generation of the Ultra is a highly desirable niche product that gives its few lucky owners immense cachet, that’s okay. Unlike the Vision Pro, the iPhone Ultra has obvious places to go next; iPhone has a natural and familiar upgrade path. Future versions may add a third camera lens or MagSafe. The processor will become faster, the display will be better and the battery performance will be more optimized. Its price could even drop.

Better yet, the foldable phone will be normalized by the existence of the iPhone Ultra in a way that Vision Pro never managed to achieve for the bulky mixed reality headset (a much more difficult mission, admittedly). Fears about the hinge and fold will likely be allayed, and the launch of the first generation will give Apple’s engineers a chance to test and fix any issues with the physical design. People will see their friends walking around with Ultras, try them, and want to try it. And all that fame and desire can then be leveraged to create a best-selling iPhone Ultra 2 the following year.

I don’t expect the Ultra to break many records this year, but relatively low sales won’t make it a failure. The original iPhone sold around four million units in its first two quarters, and that saw some success. Sometimes you have to start small and see where the future takes you.

Foundry

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in one handy summary. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it pairs really well with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you also want to read it during lunch or dinner hours.

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