The iPhone Air is a stepping stone to something even better

If you are waiting for the first folding iPhone and you have the impression that it will never happen, don’t worry. Half of it has just done so, in the form of iPhone air. Now we just have to wait for the other half to appear in 2026.

The so-called iPhone fold was considerably longer than air, and waiting has sometimes been excruciating. The foldable market as a whole is now mature: Samsung has launched things with the Galaxy fold over six years ago, and these days, each Android manufacturer respects a folding phone to offer. But Apple refuses to release a foldable until it can do things well.

This is a questionable decision, because in many ways, the best way to learn to make good foldable phones is to launch a bad. (Just look at the Samsung route from the break -ups at the top of the class.) Customers can complain, examiners can distribute devastating criticisms, but mass negative comments are a powerful growth catalyst. As long as a project is limited to the department “One day, perhaps”, it moves at a rate of snail. Tell the team they have to ship this year, anyway, and you will get three things: complaints, errors and progress.

Apple needs progress. But it is apparently unapproved to accept one of the obvious options: launch an imperfect and iterate folding phone, or never launch a folding phone at all. Instead, the company seems to have found a third way. Which is to quietly launch half of the components of the iPhone fold under the cover of something else.

After all, what else would he have had with iPhone air? According to Apple’s rigorous standards, it looks like a major strategic miss. It is extremely good in one thing (being incredibly thin) that most customers would not consider an absolute priority, while compromising in other areas that they would (battery life, additional cameras). Person needs Their phone has a thickness of 5.6 mm, and it seems unlikely that many people will be ready to pay for this with a lower battery life, lower camera performance and a high price.

But the device has much more meaning when you consider it as part of a constantly evolving product ecosystem rather than isolation. Unlike conventional smartphones, foldables must adapt to a work screen in a super line, because half the time they are closed and effectively double the thickness. (When I made a list of objects that iPhone air is thinner than, I updated folding phones because it seemed to be an unfair comparison: like opening a book and counting only half of the pages. But their unfolded thickness can be as low as 4.2 mm.) The developments and sacrifices made to create iPhone air prove their value when allowing Apple to build a folding iPhone that pocket.

Apple

Indeed, the funny thing about the design of iPhone air is that in many ways East A phone was divided into two sections of joint. Look at the “tray” on the back, one of the most daring marketing elements that I saw of a legendary company for its marketing skills. It is a glotiously inflated camera module that deforms the proportions and looks of the phone, at least, directly ugly. And its main objective is to allow Apple to cheat the dimensions by piling up half of the components in a chassis section that we are not allowed to measure. It is the equivalent of the design of scanning waste under the carpet, then inviting the guests to marvel at your brand new “interior hill”.

But I’m getting lost. The tray, as ugly as I find, is proof that Apple engineers have found how to subdivide the essential components of the iPhone and move elements at will. The 5.6 mm air part is ready and awaits the main display of the iPhone Pold; All that Apple must do now is to widen the tray and give it a second screen … then determine the hinge, which is the most difficult part of the equation but which would be in progress. Once this is sorted, you yourself have a foldable iPhone that combines media threshing and the lack of preconceived ideas of a whole new product with the learning benefits of the second generation. It is the best of both worlds.

What about iPhone? Maybe I’m wrong and it will be good enough for Apple to the guard. But I suspect it’s just a springboard. A theory explaining why Apple has opted for this brand image rather than the expected air of the iPhone 17 is that society intends to be a single-off. There are outside the normal version cycle. And when its objective was fulfilled, the air will be quietly removed in favor of the foldable apple was not entirely ready to be launched this time.