by seec | 2025-09-14 17:53:43+00:00
Well if they were to reach that price, they would make a bit more sense since it would mean mostly giving up battery life for a bit more versatility.

But I seriously doubt it will happen in any reasonable time frame. They are fundamentally supply driven, pushed by companies marketing tech they want to sell for a bigger profit.

To become a commodity, the "pro" phones would first need to come down in price so that they are not such a big differentiating factor. Yet the companies keep adding more stuff to those in order to have the price stay around 1K.

Because the rate of improvement has slowed, we can observe the start of price compression, mid-range slab phones have become much more usable and fully featured. But there is a long way to go, Apple has only started this year to trickle down some of the pro features to their base model (mostly pro motion). To get to the 800 figure you need to have regular fully featured slab phones at around the 500 mark otherwise it doesn't make economic sense for companies to sell them at this price.

Considering where we are at this price point with the iPhone 16e (Apple is basically the price setter for much of the market), I wouldn't hold my breath.

I actually predict the reverse. Slab phones will keep getting better in the mid-range, to the point where it's going to be hard to argue for any other choice for most people. Cheap phones will get good enough to the point that they are not completely horrible but will stay a relatively poor value, using older tech in exchange or moderate savings. High-end phones will stay expensive (or even increase in price sightly) with various differentiating "features" and convenience that are unessential but good for bragging point or displaying your superiority. Foldables will stay at the apex and try to have everything of the high-end slabs but with the folding functionality as a bonus.

It is basically what the car market is, which is almost a commodity nowadays. You have the cheap cars that offer everything truly necessary for basic use but make some compromises on quality and technological refinement. Then you have the mid-range that has basically everything you could need at good enough quality/confort level while being technically up to date. And at the high-end of the market, you have the luxurious cars, German style, where you get everything a mid-range car would get you but with better quality and some features that are mostly about bragging rights and social status.

In getting commoditized the smartphone will follow a somewhat normal distribution when considering volume shipped with a larger share of the profits coming from the far end. I expect foldables to stay in that far end for quite a long time. After the iPhone launch, smartphones overtook every other type of phone at every single price point in just a few years. If foldable were going to take over, it would have happened by now, but volume has stalled and even regressed. Maybe they can get it going with major price drops but it hasn't been necessary for the slab smartphones, in fact as usefulness increased, prices increased as well.

I'm going to add that those market dynamics are exactly why we are getting an iPhone Air this year. It is a phone purely made as a differentiation factor to allow for a bigger price while not offering much practical value in return. It is made for people who would spend more than what the base iPhone sell for but also don't really care about any of the features of the "Pro" models because they wouldn't use them much and wouldn't be able to tell the difference in everyday use while paying the cost of weight/size (I don't know why they made the screen bigger than the base pro, there is probably something supply side pushing for this decision). That way they can sell more status than a base phone would provide (that is hilarious equal or better in most relevant specs) while keeping the BOM very close and thus get more profit. Outside of this the phone makes no sense; it's thinness and weight saving have no practical value because they are so small that they cannot fundamentally change the typical experience of using a smartphone.

If Apple can ever get behind the durability/quality compromise of a foldable display it is probably a "try run" for an Apple foldable that would be likely sold at twice the price while not increasing the BOM anywhere near that. It won't be better at much of anything than their pro models but that is basically the point: keep expanding the price range at the high end where profits are still to be made. They know that their basic phone will eventually have to offer even more or lower in price to stay competitive (which is why they increase the base storage ahead of the competition this year). Apple has always been able to extract more profit by staying ahead of the curve in this way. They intuitively understand the social value of technology more than the technology itself, that has made their success. High-end Androids are niche for basically the reverse reason of high-end iPhones dominating the top of the price brackets: no matter how good they get, they will never provide the same social status and coolness of an iPhone. It is thus a bit "stupid" to overspend on a smartphone and it not being an iPhone. Androids' manufacturers have struggled to make their stuff better for this reason, volumes at the high-end cannot warrant the same investment than Apple is able to make. They are constrained by bottom-up economics while Apple has fun with trickle-down economics. For this reason, if Apple is ever to release a foldable, I expect the volume of Android foldables to decrease or lower their price, in the process rendering their primary appeal less effective, still resulting in lower volume over time.