Another wave of $1,800 bendy rectangles has landed on store shelves, and the tech press has dutifully trotted out the same breathless coverage we get every single year.
Reviewers are calling the latest crease "barely noticeable," which is a bit like saying your new roommate is "barely a felon." We get it, the hinge is engineering magic.
The question nobody at the launch event wants to answer is simpler: who is this actually for?
Let's talk durability, because that's where the marketing gets creative.
Every manufacturer swears the screen will survive "everyday use," a phrase doing more heavy lifting than a furniture mover.
Independent stress tests keep showing these displays scratching at the same Mohs level as a stick of butter, and the factory-installed screen protector peels off like a sunburned tourist.
Meanwhile, repair costs run north of $500, which means dropping your phone is now a financial event.
Developers still treat the inner display like the weird cousin at Thanksgiving—technically invited, rarely acknowledged.
You'll open a big beautiful canvas only to find your favorite app stretched into a blurry rectangle with black bars, because optimizing for a form factor that sells in the low single-digit millions isn't worth anyone's sprint cycle.
So you paid a premium for extra screen real estate you mostly can't use.
Folding a battery in half doesn't make it bigger, and that second display drinks power like it's got a sponsorship deal.
Most of these devices barely make it to dinner with heavy use, and the fast-charging situation varies wildly depending on which brand is currently feuding with which chip supplier.
None of this is a dealbreaker on its own.
The multitasking, when it works, is legitimately nice.
But "nice" doesn't cover a mortgage payment's worth of gadget, especially when the non-folding flagship sitting right next to it does 95% of the same job for half the money and won't crack if you sneeze on it.
Foldables depreciate like a new car driven off the lot by a teenager.
Two years in, that $1,800 pocket-bender is worth less than a decent pair of headphones, largely because nobody wants to buy a used device with a hinge that's already logged a million open-and-close cycles.
The creases are shallower, the hinges are smarter, and one day this might all make sense.
But today, buying a foldable is less a purchase than a bet—a bet that the screen survives, the apps catch up, and the battery holds out long enough to justify the receipt you're hiding from your spouse.
Our take: if you've got money burning a hole in your pocket and you love being an early adopter, go for it and enjoy the party trick.
Final Thoughts
Everyone else should wait another generation or two, because right now you're paying flagship-plus prices for a device that's still figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up.