Things I'm wondering about the upcoming iPhone Ultra

Some of these questions will be answered by 3 PM Eastern Time on September 9. Others will have to wait until weeks after the iPholde ships.

(I will hold on to the name "iPholde" until Apple gets a court order that forbids me, and until I've exhausted every legal appeal).

Will it be too expensive?

Apple won’t be able to do what they did with the Vision Pro. This isn’t an experimental or even unprecedented product: they’re building a phone and selling it in an established market.

Apple’s flagship iPhones sell for about as much as other flagships. The iPholde shouldn’t be any different. It ought to be about two grand in its cheapest configuration. I guess we can kite that to $2100 because of general 2026-ness.

If it’s substantially more than $2100, Apple will have to have some excellent answers to the question “How is the iPholde better than the Google Pixel Fold 11…or the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8?”

The latter — which benefits from Samsung’s years of experience in manufacturing these things — starts at just $1900.

(Oh, and this morning they knocked $250 off, just to punch holes in Apple’s rowboat.)

I'm well aware that no iPhone user is going to switch just because they think Android's got better folding phones. Apple still needs to produce truly compelling, competitive hardware at competitive prices. That's what a great company is supposed to do, regardless.

Is it an iPhone, or an iPad?

Arguably this was the most important decision Apple had to make.

When Samsung debuted the first Galaxy Fold, they had the “benefit” of an Android ecosystem in which tablets were laughable and meaningless. So clearly, it was going to be “a phone with a super-big screen” when unfolded.

Alas, Apple’s not so blessed. They’re saddled with a fully mature, sophisticated tablet OS and an app library that rivals that of desktop operating systems. Damn and blast!

Okay, so what should an iPholde user expect when they’re horsing around on their phone and they realize that they’ve been wasting time on YouTube or Reddit for an hour already? Whether they think “I should do something more productive” or “I should really commit to this avoidance of work,” what kind of experience awaits them when they move to the larger display?

I dunno. My limited experience with passport-sized foldables isn’t much help. The display is way too small for full, iPad-style multiwindowed multitasking. It’s most effective as – I hate to say it – a phone with a whomping big display.

The most practical thing I can imagine would be for the iPholde to just steal one of the iPad’s best ideas, and also an idea that’s proven to be Quite Swell in any number of previous devices where there’s a hinge behind the display (of which foldables is just the latest category):

• Apps on the big screen are fullscreen by default.
• Alternatively, you can have two apps open in a “left screen, right screen” sort of setup. This works great both for managing the limited screen size (tiling for the win!) and also cognitively. The setup gives you two partitioned “headspaces”: my Inbox is on the left, and the notes I'm writing about what I need to do this morning are on the right.
• iPholde gets the iPad’s spiffy “Slide Over” feature. This is one of Apple’s brilliant UI concepts. On mobile, there are loads of apps – messaging, note-taking, Spotify, news – that I just dip into to do this one thing, and then I’ll go back to whatever I was doing before. I don’t actually need to have the app on my screen all the time. Putting it behind a visible tab on the edge of the screen means I can get straight to it, whenever.

How will it transition between modes?

This is another one of those problems that an engineering team can argue about for months. Like the “iPad, or iPhone?” question, it forces the maker to define the point of view of the device, and absolutely nail it.

When the user decides to unfold the device…what’s implied?

• Are they continuing the same task/activity they began on the smaller, outer screen? If so, they would want the iPholde to leave them in “the same task space” when the screen clicks open: still in Slack, just bigger.
• Do they think of the outer display and the larger inside display as two separate headspaces? By this way of thinking, it doesn’t matter that the outer display was on Messages when I opened it up to the inner display. I'm expecting to see the Kindle app, with my ebook on the same two-page spread as when I stopped reading and went to bed last night.

(Easily customized with a simple System setting. But defaults matter, and defaults are quite telling.)

Will it support the Apple Pencil?

The iPholde is branded as an iPhone (we think). But can it break down some of the traditional walls between iPhone and iPad?

The unfolded display might be smaller than an iPad, and it’ll have some kind of ditch in the middle. Using a stylus with it would nonetheless be awesome.

Who wouldn’t want to use it as a sketchbook? Whether you’re an artist or just a compulsive doodler, drawing on the open iPhone with your fingertips (or an analog stylus) would feel wrong. It would also be one of those moments that makes you wonder just why this thing costs as much as a MacBook Pro if it doesn’t have even a basic function of a $500 iPad.

(Stylus support might be impossible due to the nature of the screen, I suppose. Folding displayer need to use softer cover materials. It’s going to be a scratch magnet as it is without letting the user push something harder than flesh all over it.)

What the hell happens when you plug it into an external display?

Once again we ponder the “iPhone or iPad?” question.

Having a desktop UI on an external display attached to a tablet or phone is awesome. Would I want this kind of setup as my primary desktop computer, or as a substitute for a laptop? Wow, no. But it makes any phone or compact tablet way more flexible.

I’ve only had my Pixel 11 Pro for a couple of weeks and I’m already super-impressed with how good the experience is. I plugged it into one of the Dell displays that’s usually connected to my MacBook (along with my usual keyboard and mouse), just to take Android’s built-in desktop mode for a quick spin and see what it could do. I wound up transitioning from Just Testing into a full-on three-hour work session without particularly noticing that I was using a phone, not a laptop. I’ll say more about it in a proper post later.

iPad-style desktop mode on the iPholde would be a hell of a value-add. It’d help take the curse off the $2000 (or more) sticker price. And by the way: the Pixel and Galaxy Folds support desktop modes on external displays.

But let’s assume that the iPhone-iPad barrier remains intact. What happens when the iPholde is hooked up to a screen? It’ll mirror the screen. But which screen? Can you mirror the larger internal display when the device is closed? And will the experience be similar to mirroring mode on an iPhone, where I instinctively feel like I’m teaching a "Meet Your New iPhone" session at my local library?

Will Apple let developers do fun stuff?

And by that I mean “will they allow third-party apps to explore the potential of this unique form factor, or will Apple impose dogmatic restrictions?”

When unfolded, the iPholde’s internal display looks like a conventional screen. It isn’t. It bends in the middle, you know?

So how about:

• A “book”-style mode, where the app’s UI can treat the screen like explicit left-hand and right-hand pages? It’s an obvious thing for reader apps.
• A “Game Boy DS” mode. The user is holding the open screen in portrait orientation, slightly bent closed. The upper half is for the game content. The lower half is under the user’s thumbs, and has the buttons. Yup, it’s an obvious thing for games. Also consider how good it’d be just for watching videos, or taking part in video calls: the device is on the table, unfolded halfway at an obtuse angle. The top half is the video, at a comfy viewing angle. The half that’s flat on the table contains all of the playback or meeting UI. Or how about streaming video apps with the video on the top, and live chat on the bottom?

(By "modes," I'm referring to how the app presents itself to the OS, via new APIs. I don't mean that the user would be toggling something in Control Center.)

This would be fantastic. It would be a damned shame if Apple suffered from a lack of ambition or imagination and told developers “it’s a big screen, thou shalt honor no UI other than what you’d do with an iPad Mini.”

It’d be a doubly-damned shame if Apple wired up the sensor on the hinge so that it automatically turns the inner display off as soon as it rotates more than ten or so degrees. It’d practically be a crime: Apple would be imposing a limitation on the potential of third-party apps for truly no rational reason.

(Admittedly, there’s ample precedent for that kind of thing.)

Back to the pricing

I do think that this $2000 (or more) iPhone demands that we raise our expectations. This needs to be one hell of a good phone.

It also needs to be one hell of a good foldable. If it's something less than the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8 ($1900! Discounted to less than $1700 today! All I'm sayin'!), well…it won't be a debacle. Apple will still sell as many as they can make. But if it costs more, and does less, iPholde Gen 1 has got to go into the scorebook as some kind of failure.