A very reasonable assumption, although I think they will provide these features for at least 12 months for new devices.

It's a cool gimmick, but a gimmick all the same. Expensive, fragile, thick.

I really don't get the absolute vitriol foldables get on Lemmy. I love my z fold 5 and the use cases are numerous. Need to fill in some personal data? Dual screen your password manager and easily go back and forth. Play games on your phone? Basically ever game I've seen scales beautifully to the inner screen's resolution. Want a second monitor? Put the thing in kickstand mode and have your YouTube video playing on the side while you do whatever else.

The three things I always hear against them are basically what you said: price, crease, and durability. The price is just kinda what it is; there's a lot of tech in here and it's expensive to make. So I totally get it if that's people's hang up.

The crease is a total non issue. What a lot of people do is hear about the crease, think about how bad it sounds, go to best buy to check it out, focus solely on the crease and nothing else, and say wow this awful. In reality though, the moment you use the inner screen the crease totally fades away, just how the notch did when apple first made it. You don't even feel it because you never have your fingers in the center of the screen, they're always in their respective halves.

Now for durability, I can only speak to my own experience. I've had the 3, 4, 5, and soon to be the 6. So that's roughly a year between each model and not the longest time for things to break. But in all of that time and all of those devices, I've never had a single issue. No cracked screens, not permanent marks on the inner screen, no broken hinges. If you go on reddit sure you'll probably find some complaints, but remember it's an Internet forum... A lot more people are going to complain about issues than exclaim how well their device has always worked.

In any case, highly recommend and you should definitely get one.

It's perfect for me. I had one issue where some debris got in the hinge from a drop and caused me to need a hinge replacement. It wouldn't open all the way but besides that still functioned fine. I hope they take off tbh because I would really miss the functionality of it. It's certainly not for everyone though.

I see no point in a folding system that makes you choose between either one smaller and one bigger screen. A system in which you have only one big display that is able to fold in 3 parts in a way that one of the parts remains always visible would be a different history. We all loved that concept from the Westworld show.