Comment by MatekCopatek
9 hours ago
18-20 million foldable phones were sold in 2025. About 10 million PS5 consoles were sold in that same period. So there's definitely a bit of interest.
Why does it have to be an all-or-nothing fight for the final smartphone form? Can't it just be a semi-niche product that some people buy?
The PS5 is also a dead market. It was released over 5 years ago, so anyone who wanted to buy one has done so already, and the PS6 is expected sooner rather than later. The PS5 is, quite literally, a bargain bin product.
Which is why they are being sold like 50% over MSRP on the secondary market and Sony cannot ship them fast enough?
it just becomes more and more expensive with time, I don't think that counts as a bargain bin product.
With iOS 27 Apple introduced the iPhone handoff, which allows sharing the same phone number with two devices [1]. Maybe their thinking is that Duo is not necessarily your only iPhone.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/127274
So you're meant to shell out $2000 for the Duo and then an additional $1200 for an 18 or something?
Don't forget $5-10 a month extra to the carrier for the privilege of using the feature, on top of the cost of the monthly service for both lines.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, they are different markets – most people need a smartphone today, nobody really needs a PS5. A better comparison is to say that of smartphones sold in 2025 (~1.65bn), foldables represented ~1%. That's pretty niche.
I think it's a great comparison, you don't buy an expensive folding phone if you just need a smartphone, it's a luxury good just like a PS5.
I have a friend who is not at all into luxury stuff but bought one because he never used a computer and was appealed by the screen size to make the administrative stuff he was struggling to do with a regular smartphone.
Having said that he is also known to make some bad purchasing decision and living in constant debt.
A $500 console is not a "luxury good", unless you also count having a flat screen TV as a luxury good. Games is one of the most common things done in a household today
A $2000 phone (which will never be $2000, it's the minimum spec) to watch youtube videos and enjoy apps with bad layouts is in another category entirely.
That’s pre-Apple’s entry into the market, which will triple the size of the foldables market in the next 12-18 months. And cnsidering how bad foldables have been and how much better they’ll get, that’s surely not the ceiling.
Apple sold ~250m of those ~1.65bn, so if you work on it being Android only, then foldables are ~1.4% instead of ~1.1%.
For the foldable market to triple in size, Apple would need to sell 40m this year, which if we assume a flat year for overall numbers (likely given rising costs this cycle and the trend of flattening sales anyway), then it would mean the fold taking 16% of all iPhone sales. For a ~2500-3200 USD phone (base model, international pricing), that's not happening.
Why would you think foldables are about to get a lot better? They have improved over the last 10 years, but the original caveats are pretty much all still there, and the iPhone Duo doesn't appear to improve on any of them in any meaningful way.
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Some countries, like China, LOVE foldable phones. It’s fun to see how cultural it is.
From what I've gathered, China is much more in to mobile gaming and livestreaming than the rest of the world. Folding phones seem to appeal to those who primarily consume media on their phones, so it checks out they would want larger phones.
I suspect this might be my blindspot. I use my phone a huge amount, but almost never for watching video or gaming. Being able to have a "full screen" video, and another app running "full screen", with the effectively 2x screen space, makes sense.
> Can't it just be a semi-niche product that some people buy?
As a fan of smaller smartphones (the likes of which aren’t made anymore), I thought the answer to this was supposedly a resounding no.
I mean, Apple sold millions of iPhones mini but we were told that wasn’t a viable product.