this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
768 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
89618 readers
3125 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah... Folding screens were never a good idea.
I am all about trying new stuff though. Remember when phones had cool gimmicks? Now they are all exactly the same damn thing. Shit, even my old Samsung Galaxy whatever had an IR blaster and heart rate monitor. Now they don't even have 3.5mm head phone jacks. Every phone is the same black rectangle. I think a phone like the one from the Spike Jonze movie "Her" would be sweet.
Gimmicks are expensive and too risky, some or all people would dismiss the product immediately. We'll never see it anymore because we're no fun now.
Then again, folding screens are not that different.
I keep looking at phones with IR cameras. Thermal imaging is super handy for electro/mechanical diagnostics, and some of them are under $500.
I am cautiously optimistic. Early touchscreens were pretty shit too, but they've been developed pretty well by now. This might be figured out in time as well.
I don't know if they'll ever be perfect, as it's just a serious materials science issue to make something fold that should never show a seam, but I'd be willing to tolerate a little crease if they didn't charge an arm and a leg and made them "reliable but eventually with a small crease." Seems we are not there yet, but I thank the early adopters for their service.
I don't know man. I do remember what I thought of the early touchscreens. They got scratched up by a wet fart, they were inaccurate, they were generally not great to use. But the potential was there, and everyone could see it.
Then people much smarter than you or I made better kinds of glass, more accurate capacitive sensors, etc. They can even hide fingerprint readers behind them now, which would have been inconceivable some time ago. I do believe the crease thing can be solved with enough R&D. And I do believe it will be, because unlike the stupid edge screen stuff Samsung put on their phone ca. Galaxy S7 or thereabouts, foldable screens have a clear potential to be way more than just a dumb gimmick that nobody really cares about.
I don't know how anyone can say this with a straight face.
I have been using folding phones exclusively for years and they are excellent.
It isn't for everyone, but they are really good for many people.
This is just on Apple. Samsung has been selling Folds for 8 years now and the current iterations hardly have these issues. Is it more fragile than a regular screen? For sure. But is it fragile that it breaks from regular use? No. I've been using foldables for 6 years and none of them broke like this.
its as gimmicky as the curved screen which was horrendous for screen protectors.
I'd like a folding phone that runs Linux as a laptop alternative