Apple's iPhone Duo Lifts Foldable Phones to Seven US Choices as Foldable Laptops Stall

The most recent of those, Lenovo's ThinkPad Fold 16 Gen 2, reached the market in November 2023, more than a year after it was unveiled. Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip, by contrast, are on annual upgrade cycles. TechRadar attributes the gap to a mix of structural, technological and economic problems rather than any single cause.

Price is the first obstacle. At launch, folding laptops sat at the top of their vendors' line-ups: the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED arrived in 2022 at $3,500, and the HP Spectre Foldable PC followed a year later at $5,000, roughly 2.5 times the price of a Galaxy Z Fold Ultra. Buyers at that level expect substantial memory and flash storage, the two components whose prices have climbed sharply during the AI data center-driven component shortage that TechRadar calls the RAMpocalypse. Even if PC vendors accept thinner margins on such premium machines, the report argues that successors launched today would have to carry untenable prices.

Vendors have also struggled to justify the premium because folding laptops do not deliver the same jump in device class. A folding phone packs tablet functionality into a pocketable shape; moving from a roughly 13-inch Windows experience in clamshell mode to a 16- or 17-inch one when unfolded is a smaller change, even allowing for the taller aspect ratio and portrait mode that folding laptops offer. TechRadar links this to the absence of folding tablets from Samsung or Lenovo. Most work on extending Windows across a folding display has instead centered on adapting the Peek preview feature to make virtual dual screens more useful, improvements that also apply to dual-screen laptops such as the Asus Zenbook Duo, which was updated this year.

Everyday handling adds a further trade-off. Folding phones still work when closed, and flip models have improved their closed-screen utility. Folding laptops demand more preparation. Lenovo's first ThinkPad X1 Fold could store its Bluetooth keyboard between the two halves of the folded display; the second generation keeps the keyboard separate, carried in a case that doubles as a screen stand, so users must remove the keyboard and repack the bundle before traveling. The early rollable-screen laptop concepts shown by Lenovo avoid the keyboard shuffling, although their motorized design makes users wait for the screen to retract before the lid can close.

TechRadar's conclusion is that, other things being equal, a smaller device gains more relative value from extra screen area on demand, which has favored smartphones over laptops. The next generation of laptops with bending displays, the report says, will require some rethinking.