Foldables fly off shelves while apple clings to crease fears

Two crease myths keep apple’s foldable iPhone in limbo: the seam is ugly and the screen will die young. Meanwhile Samsung just pocketed $2,899 a pop for a triangle-shaped phone that vanished in minutes.

The crease that wasn’t a deal-breaker

Galaxy Z TriFold units gone before the coffee cooled. 344 readers told us why: 46 % want the acreage, 40 % want the split-screen muscle, 14 % admit the flex is half the thrill. Zero mentioned the valley running down the middle.

apple’s engineers still treat that micro-valley like a fault line. The same polymer they fear has already survived 200 000 folds in LG’s labs and 3 million TikTok flips in the wild. Durability data now stacks higher than the iPhone’s camera bump, yet Cupertino keeps redrawing the tolerance spec.

Samsung’s display division can’t print panels fast enough. Fold 7 back-orders stretch into August; TriFold scalpers on eBay add a 40 % surcharge. The math is brutal: apple is ceding an estimated $4 billion quarterly market it once planned to own.

Chinese rivals smell blood. Oppo’s Find N3 ships with a titanium hinge and a two-year screen-swap guarantee; Xiaomi’s Mix Fold 4 undercuts the Fold 7 by $300 while matching its brightness nits. Every week apple waits, the supply chain learns to live without it.

Users aren’t waiting either. Reddit threads praising crease-blindness outnumber complaint posts 9-to-1. One line keeps repeating: “I stopped seeing it on day three, now I only see the extra inches.”

When the foldable iPhone finally arrives—2026, 2027, pick a rumor—it will land in a market that has already normalised the very flaws it feared. The novelty tax will have expired, the parts will be cheaper, and the only surprise left will be why it took so long.