Foldables are sort of boring now — and that’s great news for Apple

ColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechMobileCloseMobilePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All MobileFoldables are sort of boring now — and that’s great news for AppleFolding screens are no longer novel, but they’re finally good enough for an iPhone.by Dominic PrestonCloseDominic PrestonNews EditorPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Dominic PrestonAug 2, 2026, 12:00 PM UTCLinkShareGift Photo: David Imel / The VergeColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechMobileCloseMobilePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All MobileFoldables are sort of boring now — and that’s great news for AppleFolding screens are no longer novel, but they’re finally good enough for an iPhone.by Dominic PrestonCloseDominic PrestonNews EditorPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Dominic PrestonAug 2, 2026, 12:00 PM UTCLinkShareGiftDominic PrestonCloseDominic PrestonPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Dominic Preston is a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on smartphones and Android, follow Dominic Preston. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedBelieve it or not, it didn’t all start with Samsung. Royole, a now-bankrupt manufacturer of flexible displays, was the first to release a commercial folding phone, the “charmingly awful” FlexPai. Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold followed a year later, plagued by a variety of faults that saw review units break within days. That launch went so badly that it prompted Chinese rival Huawei to delay the launch of its own Mate X foldable by five months; its unusual design with the foldable screen wrapped around the outside of the phone proved unpopular regardless. Motorola was next to join with its first Razr foldable, closely followed by Samsung’s similar Z Flip; we scored each 4/10 and 6/10 respectively.To say it was a rough first two years for foldable phones would be an understatement, but things did get better. Samsung’s subsequent generations of foldables didn’t break half as easily as the first wave, and it learned the valuable lesson that integral parts of the display stack shouldn’t be as easy to remove as a screen protector.More manufacturers joined the market, with foldables launched by Google, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Honor, and more. Prices slowly came down too — while flagship book-style foldables have hovered more or less around the $2,000 mark for seven years straight, cheaper models have appeared too. Motorola’s entry-level Razr is now $799, and last year Samsung introduced a cheaper FE variant of its Z Flip 7, for $899.The hardware evolved over that period too. Foldables got thinner, lighter, and more durable; the creases got flatter and less visible, while some displays began to include stylus support too; the cameras started to catch up to standard slab phones. Perhaps most importantly, the form factors began to shift too.How it’s goingUntil recently, foldable phones settled into two broad categories: compact flip phones, by now with square cover screens that extend across the outside of