Technologies
Apple Needs to Launch Its Foldable iPhone Flip in 2026. Here’s Why
Commentary: Foldables are everywhere now and Apple is the only major phone-maker without one.
I love Apple’s flagship cosmic orange iPhone 17 Pro — even when I managed to turn mine pink — but I was disappointed not to see the company’s long-rumored foldable iPhone Flip. Pretty much every major Android phone-maker, including Samsung, Google, Motorola, OnePlus, Xiaomi and Honor are now multiple generations into their own folding phone lineups, with the hardware continuing to become more and more refined with each revision. Oppo is now in its fifth year of foldables and its latest Find N6 is the result of those years of development. Apple isn’t even at step one yet and it’s beginning to feel like it’s late to the party. That might be a problem.Â
Apple dominates in the premium phone category, but foldables — which fit into the premium space in terms of price — are already nipping at its heels, with Motorola telling CNET that 20% of customers buying its Razr foldable jumped ship from Apple. Meanwhile, Samsung is in the seventh generation of its Flip and Fold series. As Lisa Eadicicco discovered during a visit to Seoul, “foldables are everywhere” in Samsung’s home country of South Korea.
With nearly every major Android phone-maker entering the foldable market, Apple risks losing potential customers. It also runs the risk of letting a rival like Samsung or Motorola becoming the go-to name for foldables, which could make it harder for Apple to make an impact if it eventually launches its own device. Furthermore, early adopters drawn to foldable tech may be too entrenched in the Android ecosystem by the time Apple’s phone arrives to want to switch to iOS.
Apple is unlikely to be worried. It’s estimated that around 20 million foldables from all manufacturers were sold worldwide in 2023, while Apple reportedly sold 26.5 million iPhone 14 Pro Max handsets in the first half of that year alone. In 2024, foldable sales were flat — and 2025 didn’t fare much better, according to analysts at CounterPoint Research, although Samsung did report record numbers of preorders for its most recent foldable. Clearly, Apple feels it has yet to miss the boat.
Apple has always found success in biding its time, observing the industry and launching its own take on a product when it’s ready. Apple didn’t invent phones, tablets, smartwatches or computers, but it found ways to take existing products and make them more useful, more valuable in day-to-day life and — dare I say — more exciting. It’s why the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac lines dominate the market today.Â
For me, I need to see Apple’s take on the foldable phone. I’ve written before about how disappointed I am in foldables. I’ve been a mobile reporter for over 14 years and phones have become increasingly dull as they’ve converged to become slight variations on the same rectangular slab.Â
Read more: Best Flip Phone for 2026
Foldables promised something new, something innovative, something that briefly sparked some excitement in me, but years in, that excitement has dwindled to the point of being extinguished. They are fine products and while I like the novelty of a screen that bends, they’re not a revolution in how we interact with our phones. Not in the way that the arrival of the touchscreen was when we were still pushing buttons to type out texts.Â
I did hope that Google’s Pixel Fold would be the phone to catapult the foldable forward, and while the recent Pixel 10 Pro Fold — the second generation of Google’s foldable — does offer some great updates, it still doesn’t offer any kind of revolution. Instead, it feels more like a “me too” move from Google. Ditto for the OnePlus Open. So I’m left instead to look toward Apple, a company with a track record for product revolutions, to create a new take on the genre that genuinely drives forward how we use our phones.Â
That innovation won’t just come from the product design. Apple works closely with its third-party software developers, and it’s that input that would help a folding iPhone become genuinely useful. My biggest complaint around foldables right now is that while the hardware is decent, the devices are essentially just running standard versions of Android with a handful of UI tweaks thrown in. They’re just regular phones that just happen to bend.Â
Few Android developers are embracing the folding format, and it’s not difficult to see why; the users aren’t there in sufficient numbers yet to justify the time and expense to adapt their software across a variety of screen sizes. The multiple folding formats already available mean Android foldables face the same fragmentation issue that has plagued the platform since the beginning. Android-based foldables are simply a more difficult platform for developers to build for than regular phones. Apple would be able to change that, as it proved with the iPhone and iPad.Â
Given Apple’s close relationships with top-tier developers — not to mention its own vast developer team — I expect an eventual Apple foldable to offer innovations that make it more than just an iPhone that folds in half.Â
And I truly hope it does. I want to look forward to tech launches again. I want to feel excited to get a new gadget in my hands and feel that “wow” moment as I do something transformative for the first time.
In short, I don’t want to be bored by technology anymore. Apple, it’s over to you.Â
Technologies
Anthropic alerts investors to AI’s ‘existential threat to humanity’ in IPO filing, sources report
Anthropic’s IPO filing highlights the AI’s potential existential risks and narrow customer base, while its CEO calls for a slower development pace to ensure safety.
Anthropic plans to warn speculative investors in its IPO prospectus that its AI models pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity,” several reports said on Tuesday.
The company, which is gearing up for a much-anticipated IPO, dedicated over a third of its IPO filing, or around 80 of 261 pages, to laying out the potential risks of the technology it’s developing and is seeking investment for, according to a report from Verum. It only used 48 pages to discuss its actual business.
The five-year-old company, known for its frontier language model Claude, warned that AI can have “self-preserving behaviors,” including being able to “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” and carry out behaviors “resembling blackmail,” per the Verum report.
The company is pursuing a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public and reported in the filing that it made a net loss of $42 billion in 2025. It’s planning to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing, and other infrastructure in the coming year, according to Verum.
Anthropic also warned that its customer base is extremely narrow, with nearly a quarter of its revenue last year coming from just two clients, two people familiar with the filing told the Financial Times.
AI safety guardrails
Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has previously written various essays warning on the threats of AI, including saying the technology will cause “unusually painful” disruption to the job market.
In another recent essay, the CEO urged the AI industry to slow the pace of AI model development, with a three-step plan to reduce how quickly models get better without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”
Those calls for a slowdown are somewhat of a “head scratcher” for the sector, to which the market has reacted “pretty resoundingly,” Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives told CNBC earlier today.
“You need guardrails from a safety perspective, but the fact for Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down, if they slowed down, China would just accelerate and win, and I think that’s part of this quagmire that you’re seeing is that there’s some regulatory capture going on. There’s definitely a game of poker, but for Anthropic, they got to continue to put foot on the pedal.”
Ives added that while guardrails are essential, regulation could stifle innovation. That continues to be the “biggest concern within the U.S., which is why we’re in an F1 race,” he said.
Technologies
U.S. and Iran engage in separate mediator discussions amid surge in Middle East oil exports
U.S. and Iranian officials held separate indirect talks mediated by Qatar as Middle East crude exports neared wartime highs, while Tehran awaits a U.S. response to its cease‑fire and sanctions‑relief proposal.
On Monday, American and Iranian representatives engaged in distinct indirect negotiations mediated by third parties, aiming to halt seven months of hostilities while Iran awaits Washington’s reply to an updated cease‑fire proposal and Middle Eastern oil shipments reach wartime peaks.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Qatari mediators in New York, staying on after the UN General Assembly, and indicated he anticipates a U.S. response by Tuesday. “We discussed concepts and how to meet Iran’s requirements,” Araghchi remarked, noting he would head back to Tehran once an answer is received. “When the Qataris have a reply, they know how to deliver it to us.”
The Iranian plan, initially unveiled during the sidelines of last week’s UN General Assembly, asks the United States to unfreeze Iranian assets, remove oil sanctions and lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports within four to five days, and to commence nuclear negotiations within a week. Tehran links any resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to the fulfillment of those conditions.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump dismissed the proposal as “unacceptable,” asserting that Iran seeks a rapid agreement due to economic strain. Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump noted that U.S. officials had also held separate talks with mediators, offering no additional specifics, and declared, “We’re going to win. It’s going to happen fast.”
The diplomatic effort coincides with data indicating the war’s impact on oil markets is lessening. Middle Eastern crude exports have risen this month to near their highest point since the conflict started in February, according to Kpler. The firm noted in a Monday briefing that exports are “just under 80% of pre‑conflict levels.”
The Strait of Hormuz remains far from usual activity. Kpler’s real‑time monitoring recorded a flow of 10,591 kilobarrels per day through the strait on Saturday, compared with a prewar baseline of 17,133 kilobarrels per day.
The ongoing impasse is influencing U.S. fuel markets, where retail diesel prices linger close to a record $6.53 per gallon. The Trump administration is reconsidering an export ban, having recently distanced itself from an earlier iteration of the idea; Kpler estimates such a ban would retain about 1.2 million barrels per day domestically, potentially straining storage capacity.
Technologies
Saudi Red Sea export rebound pushes oil prices down
Oil prices fell after Saudi Arabia restored crude exports from its Red Sea terminals following a pipeline attack, while Iran and the U.S. continue talks over the Strait of Hormuz.
Oil prices fell on Tuesday as Saudi Arabia’s crude exports from its Red Sea ports recovered from an attack on a key pipeline earlier this month. The decline reflects renewed flow from major loading points.
Satellite imagery confirmed a “major operational recovery” at the Yanbu and Muajjiz terminals, according to a Kpler note released on Tuesday. The data shows that 12.5 million barrels were loaded onto nine tankers at Yanbu between Saturday and Monday, restoring activity after a drone strike disrupted the East‑West pipeline earlier in the month.
Riyadh has brought the pipeline’s throughput back to roughly 3.5 million barrels per day, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News on Monday. The line’s maximum capacity is 7 million bpd, indicating that the current flow is about half of its peak.
Meanwhile, U.S. and Iranian officials spoke with mediators on Monday as they attempt anew to negotiate a deal to end the seven‑month conflict. Iran offered last week to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the United States accepts the terms of the failed June memorandum of understanding, but President Donald Trump rejected Tehran’s proposal on Saturday as exports through the waterway recover.
Oil flows through Hormuz have averaged 13.2 million barrels per day over the past week, according to Kpler data—about 77 % of the 17 million bpd that moved through the strait before the U.S.–Iran war. The U.S. military continues to protect tankers from Gulf allies and maintains a blockade on Iranian exports.
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