Comment by djfergus
8 hours ago
Will be interesting to see what these look like in an Apple Store after a few months of people handling them. Seeing the creases and crunchy-feeling hinges on well-used Samsung Fold display models has always been enough to put me off wanting one.
I feel like Apple might be more restrictive and not allow display of creased examples (assuming it happens)
Hard to imagine Apple would not remove damaged devices from the floor.
> Seeing the creases and crunchy-feeling hinges on well-used Samsung Fold display models has always been enough to put me off wanting one.
This has been a solved issue in modern foldables already. I live on a beach with Fold 6 and while I'm quite careful not to drop it I never had the sand stuck there for prolonged time. If there are any particles that crunch they do seem to disappear after a few folds which makes sense as metal is harder than sand. The inner screen has a soft protector you can replace at Samsung center for 15$ and 30 minutes of wait making the screen basically new.
> as metal is harder than sand
The contents of sand tend to be substantially harder than metal.
It doesn't matter if sand grains have higher Mohs hardness than metal alloys if the sand grains have no structural integrity to actually do anything.
Especially the soft Al or Ti alloys the phones are made of.
Not to mention, more abrasive - every process engineer's nightmare.
One thing I generally trust with Apple is that if they finally released a foldable screen that they've overcome those issues. Apple tends to let others release new tech while they tend to be more conservative until they've polished it.
Honestly it works. I've never been tempted by foldable phones, but this version piques my interest.
In particular being able to do "dual screen" or large screen. Then add the behind screen facetime camera. Suddenly it goes from "eh" to "oh". Small tweaks perhaps but it changes how i view the form factor.
They've adopted OLED for screens, but it's gotten even worse with iPhone 17 with horrible PWM difficult to look at. While Chinese models are introducing DC dimming and fighting the problem.
I honestly still don't get how it's a good idea to have such a frail part being central to the phone experience and we probably don't know what are all the failure modes
For example, I bet Apple is not splitting the video signal and feeding it from both sides, which means that if your screen "fails funny" you get a dead left panel.
Zero-radius folds are rarely a good idea
Folding screens have been a thing for around 6 years now and pretty early on manufacturers realized that 'zero radius' bending was not gonna work, so there were some pretty clever hacks that increased the internal space to allow the screen to fold in a teardrop form to soften the impact.
But regarding the dead left panel, you will have _no_ panel because if the panel fails, all of the inside screen will be affected, since it's one unit.