These are absolutely a gimmick. A fun gimmick for sure, but not worth the prices for flagship phones these days, especially when cheaper non-folding phones are more durable
My wife loves her foldable phone. Why when first one broke I got her another one.
Guess who’s laughing all the way to the bank
I really loved the new razr I had for the last two years. Hella fun to play with…but everyone’s right. It’s a fragile gimmick going after your nostalgia. Folding screens like this just aren’t ready for the abuse we put on them.
I bought a 2023 Razr not long after its successor came out. The phone was only $550 because I wasn’t buying a current flagship (it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s foldable, flagship phones have gotten obnoxiously expensive), and so far it’s held up just fine. There’s creases in the protective layer over the screen where it bends the most, but it’s not anything that really hinders my user experience.
The fact that it actually fits in my back pocket without destroying the fabric is a huge plus for me.
From the article:
“I recently posted my take about this on Mastodon and I accidentally rage-baited one of my good friends who daily-drives a folding phone. So he messaged me on Signal passionately defending it. He finds it useful as a phone + iPad Mini replacement, especially since he bought his used for $400”
Therein lies the issue. The future that Apple, Google, et al sees is one where we move towards device convergence. There was a brief period where it wasn’t uncommon for a person to have a phone, tablet, laptop or desktop, etc. if you go back a bit more there were even more devices (iPods, cd players, etc). but the modern context has shown that phones can do a LOT of compute. An iphone 16 pro max from 2 years ago can perform around the level of a GeForce 1050, an aging but still somewhat viable card, except where that takes around 75 watts the iphone gpu takes 6-7 (lol). The iphone 18 pro max is closer to a 1060, which is about double the compute power. And then you have stuff like the m5 ipad which is a bit more powerful.
They’re not top end machine equivalents but they don’t have to be. 80-90% of users (possibly more) don’t do anything that requires such compute power. This has been reflected in consumer spending for years now. Smartphone and laptop sales are still growing, albeit at a slower rate, whereas desktop and laptop sales continue to fall. The future is people using smartphones for everything, tablets for power users, and laptops/desktops for the extreme high end power users. This sucks because it’s an ergonomic nightmare to do everything on your phone, the walled garden approach of all major phones will greatly hasten everything being locked down, mobile browsers are trash and even though the majority of traffic comes through them web designers still ignore making sites work on mobile browsers, etc
Of course the anti corporatist narrative fits in well here: these companies are excited for this convergence because it shifts control away from the user. The pc by nature is an open platform and has to have some degree of openness to work with multiple hardware configurations and peripherals. The phone is consistent hardware (extremely so in apples case) and the precedent has long been set for locked down everything. at the same time the consumer eats this shit up despite tons of people yelling about it so maybe we deserve it. But convergence makes sense from a consumer perspective too; we can’t afford to buy a laptop, phone, and tablet.
Two bricks held together with a hinge is weaker than just a brick… Who would have thought…
I really like the idea of a tri-fold phone running Nura that can revert to a tablet or desktop. It’s one device for multiple form factors, for different use cases.
For those who buy them, they only need to last a year.
I don’t know what people do with tablet-size phones. I feel like they’re mostly to show off.
A lot of reading (especially PDFs), videos, comics, charts, spreadsheets, even browsing Lemmy when the comments get too indented to read on a narrow screen. It’s just a full color e-reader that fits in my pocket. Sure, people comment on it sometimes when I unfold it to show them something better, but I could not care less about showing off. It’s just really useful for a frequent reader.
I thought people love paying for things that break easily.
/s for those who think at the speed of sloth
