Apple may be planning a folding throwback that you’ll flip over

Apple hasn’t even launched its first foldable device–the iPhone Fold is strongly expected to launch this fall, more than seven months away–but reports indicate the company is already working on the follow-up. The latest report says this will be something rather different: a clamshell-style flip phone.

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says Apple “is already thinking about what comes next.” At one stage, that was expected to be what he describes as a giant foldable iPad, clocking in at a whopping 18 inches when unfolded, but in October it was reported that this project had hit a serious roadblock in its development. That leaves space for something new.

Whereas the iPhone Fold is rumored to open like a book, with a vertical design like the Galaxy Fold series of handsets, this latest product will be squarer with a horizontal fold like the Galaxy Flip. In other words, it will use the folding function for the opposite purpose to the iPhone Fold: instead of taking a standard-size smartphone and offering the ability to double its screen space, it halves the chassis size when not in use.

Clamshell-style phones are not a new idea, and were extremely popular in the early part of this century before smarphone took over. Motorola’s Razr V3 was the top-selling phone in the U.S. between 2005 and 2007, and the company revived the line in 2019. It’s an appealingly practical way of getting a lot of functionality into a small and pocketable chassis.

This far out from launch, we must inevitably warn that a lot can change. In fact Gurman says the iPhone Flip “is far from guaranteed to reach the market,” and may depend on the success or failure of the iPhone Fold. But his sources indicate that Apple is feeling bullish.

“Apple is betting that its first foldable iPhone will be successful enough to generate real demand for the category,” he writes, “and that customers will want additional shapes and sizes, much as they have with traditional slab-style iPhones.”

If that happens, the company’s foldable portfolio could explode. On top of the clamshell device, Gurman speculates that Apple could also, eventually, make a larger book-style foldable too. This makes sense, he argues, since the iPhone Fold will be smaller than equivalent devices currently offered by Samsung. But before we get anywhere near that reality, Apple needs to stick the landing with its foldable debut this fall.