After years and years of work, Apple at last has the crease-free folding display it needs for the iPhone Fold — and Samsung is displaying some of the first manufacturing prototypes at this year’s giant Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Reports from the show floor seem excited by the display, confirming it displays no visible crease whatsoever. It’s made by Samsung’s display arm, which is also an Apple partner. SamMobile claims the panel is set for use in the upcoming Galaxy Z Fold 8, but we believe Apple and Samsung Display have been cooperating on design and development for the folding screen, and we expect a version of this will also be used in the iPhone Fold later this year.

Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring this week confirmed the first foldable iPhone, “Remains on track for a Fall 2026 launch, with supply chain forecasts targeting 15-20m units for the first full-year cycle, or 7-8m units of C2H26 production, subject to future change,” according to a client note seen by Computerworld.

Apple’s work is almost complete

Apple has been working on a folding iPhone for over a decade, filing patents for such a device since 2014. All the same, despite those efforts, it has never actually introduced such a device.

I believe this is because the company needed to wait until manufacturing technology had evolved to a point where it became possible to make hard-wearing, resilient folding displays that did not snap in use and do not possess a visible crease. The last thing Apple wants is for tens of millions of iPhones to snap in normal use — that kind of live experimentation would make “antenna-gate” seem like a vacation in Hawaii. At the scale of iPhone sales, Apple simply could not afford to introduce this device until those concerns — in the glass and also the hinge — were resolved.

What Samsung is showing at CES seems to meet Apple’s demands. It also seems to deliver on what we expect Apple will introduce in its folding phone, specifically an almost totally invisible hinge and an OLED display.

New partners enter the frame

Part of what makes this possible is a new metal plate tech supplied by South Korea’s Fine M-Tec, which Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo last year said would make something similar for the iPhone. These metal plates help mitigate the stress on the display hinge, enabling the display material to avoid becoming visibly creased. It seems to be significant that the purported Apple partner last year announced a $12 million investment in new equipment and facilities to expand production of these metal plates for folding smartphones. These laser-drilled components are likely to be rolling off the production line now, and will be used by both Apple and Samsung. 

The metal plate design is only part of the display innovation Apple and its Samsung manufacturing partner have had to achieve to reach this point. It’s also important to think about the other half of the equation in play with folding iPhones, which is what people will do with these things. We kind of know the answer to this now each time we open an iPad mini, which offers just slightly more display (8.3-inch) than the 7.8-inch we expect from the iPhone Fold.

The 120.6mm-by-167.6mm (unfolded) device will use an Apple 5G modem, TouchID, eSIM, and four cameras in a device that folds out to be around as thin as a 5.6mm iPhone Air. (I consistently refer to the device as iPhone Fold, but we don’t yet know what Apple will actually call it.)

Apple silicon is enabling new designs

What makes the device possible isn’t just the hinge or the display — the ability to create super-slim folding smartphones that aren’t compromised in terms of performance or computational efficiency comes as a direct result of Apple Silicon. What that means is that the new folding technology Samsung is offering a partial glimpse of at CES will also be one of the best performing smartphones money can buy. We know this because Apple’s existing iPhones already lead the business.

And what that means, in short, is that Apple’s folding device is likely to have been worth waiting for. We’ll find out more this fall.

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