📱 2022-04-02 05:13:02 – Paris/France.
Oh my god, the rumor mill is back. Apple is preparing a foldable iPhone! Or Ipad! A MacBook with a folding screen! This latest rumor comes from a report in The Elec, which contains two brief sentences in a short story about LG supplying foldable OLED displays to HP:
“Meanwhile, the company is also working with Apple to develop another foldable OLED panel.
The panel is designed for tablets and laptops with ultra-thin glass as the cover window instead of polyimide.
Naturally, this is proof that Apple is making a foldable Mac. Just as display analyst Ross Young claimed in February. Of course, he covered pretty hard there, giving a window of four to five years and using a lot of “maybe” and “exploring” verbiage.
IDG
Foldable displays don't always mean foldable products
Did you know that Apple has shipped hundreds of millions of iPhones with foldable OLED screens for years now? Really!
The image at the top of this article is from Apple's marketing material on how it folded the iPhone X's OLED screen at the bottom, to place the display control circuit below the screen and bring the visible pixels closer to the edge of the iPhone. Of course, no iPhone has ever folded.
Apple could source new "foldable" OLED screens for new products for the same purpose. Perhaps a future MacBook or iPad will have even thinner bezels and do the same "folding" trick as iPhones do today, leaning into control circuitry rather than visible pixels to give the produces thinner glasses.
Ultra thin glass? Apple is always trying to make its products thinner. Or maybe Apple is just experimenting.
Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold3 is one of the best foldable devices and it still has issues.
Alex Walker-Todd/IDG
Apple's experiences don't mean future Apple products
Undoubtedly, Apple has been experimenting with foldable displays and products to years. We've certainly heard rumor after rumor of the impending foldable iPhone or iPad (two or three years from now, natch) since 2017. The timeline just keeps going back further and further.
Just because Apple explores and experiments with different designs and technologies doesn't mean it will ever make it into a product. There are dozens of wacky Apple patents over the years for things that never happened. Part of being a giant tech company that spends a lot of money on R&D is working on new inventions that might get scrapped.
And foldable phones, tablets and laptops have so problems while providing very little benefit other than looking really cool. They are more expensive, less durable (Galaxy Z Fold), thicker when folded (Galaxy Z Fold3), sometimes difficult to hold (Huawei Mate Xs), and have slower processors (Motorola razr) and smaller batteries ( Galaxy Z Flip3). When you add a hinge to something, something else has to go!
In short, whenever Apple works with a vendor on "foldable displays", it does not means they're going to produce new foldable iPhones, iPads or Macs in a few years. It could just as well be:
- The display will fold into the product but the product will not.
- They just do R&D. As you do.
Or maybe it's option 3: they'll spend years working on a new foldable whatever only to find that aside from being "neat", they're generally not very good.
Update at 16:55 p.m. ET: Clarification added.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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