Apple to showcase £2,000 foldable iPhone

Apple is believed to have been secretly working on an iPhone that unfolds like a paperback novel for close to a decade, under the watchful eye of John Ternus in his previous role as Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering.

It will be the biggest shake-up to the design of the iPhone since it was introduced in 2007, save for perhaps the launch of the iPhone X — the first to drop the Home Button and debut facial recognition — back in 2017.

A foldable would fuse the best elements of the iPhone and iPad, letting users run multiple apps side-by-side, expanding the user interface of applications with sidebars, and offering a large canvas to binge-watch boxsets. Apple is tipped to have settled on a stockier passport-shaped design, which packs a 7.8-inch widescreen folding screen to enjoy blockbuster movies and cinematic television shows with intrusive black bars at the top and bottom.

Closed, this iPhone will purportedly boast a 5.5-inch screen, so you can quickly reply to text messages, follow turn-by-turn directions, play a podcast, or take a photo without the need to unfold each time. This paperback-like design requires a selfie camera on the outside for FaceTime calls, as well as one accompanying the larger folding screen.

On the back, whispers from inside the Californian company point to a dual-camera system, with a primary and ultra-wide lens. This will boast all of the trimmings you’d expect, including Portrait Mode with a DSLR-like bokeh blur behind your subject, panoramas, slow-motion video, Action Mode for GoPro-like stabilised video, and more.

With a cutting-edge pliable touchscreen with almost no visible crease, four cameras scattered across the design, and a durable ultra-thin chassis that measures just 4.5mm when unfolded (for comparison, the barely-there iPhone Air measures a comparatively chunky 5.64mm), it’s perhaps unsurprisingly that some tipsters claim this’ll be the first iPhone that starts from £2,000. And with worldwide component shortages already forcing Apple to hike prices across its iPad and Mac lineup, this incoming foldable could get a lot more expensive than that.

All eyes will be on John Ternus to see how the Apple CEO — just eight days into his new role — pitches this new folding form-factor and its potentially eye-watering price tag.

Market intelligence firm IDC estimates that demand for foldables is steadily rising. Samsung was first out of the gate with a foldable phone, introducing the Galaxy Fold back in 2019. While that initial model sold a relatively modest 500,000 devices worldwide, IDC claims that some 23 million foldables are now sold each year.

That’s a 50x increase in annual shipments in just seven years.

Given Apple sold a record-breaking 247 million smartphones worldwide last year, shareholders will be hoping the iPhone manufacturer can bolster sales of this burgeoning category even further.

If you’re not convinced to shell out £2,000 on a first-of-its-kind foldable iPhone, there will be plenty of other new gadgets announced during its September 9 showcase, whispers suggest. Successors to the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max will be unveiled with improved cameras, bigger batteries, faster processors, and new colours.

The Dynamic Island — that’s the pill-shaped cut-out at the top of the screen that shows real-time alerts, incoming notifications, and background activities — will be smaller on these new models, leaksters claim. This will be achieved by Apple moving some of the Face ID facial recognition components beneath the screen.

It’s unclear whether component shortages will force Apple to increase price tags across the iPhone lineup, as we’ve seen from the latest foldables from Samsung and the new Pixel range launched by Google this summer.

Elsewhere, new Apple Watch models and AirPods 5 are expected to round out the announcements.

If you’re eagerly waiting for a follow-up to the iPhone 17, which was announced in September last year, you’ll need to keep holding your breath. According to those with knowledge of the company’s plans, iPhone 18 will launch in the first few months of 2027 alongside a sequel to the iPhone Air.

In the past, Apple has introduced new colours early in the new year to refresh its iPhone lineup, but it appears the $4.6 trillion (£3.4tn) brand wants to spread out the launch of its five smartphones across the calendar.

Of course, nothing is confirmed until Apple Chief Executive John Ternus takes to the stage in the Steve Jobs Theatre, a purpose-built venue named after the late co-founder, located on the grounds of Apple’s spaceship-like headquarters in California.