Samsung's Foldable Lead Is Slipping and Apple Knows It

Samsung spent seven years and billions of marketing dollars teaching Americans that foldable phones are a thing. Now the company's reward may be watching Apple eat its lunch. That's the uncomfortable subtext of Samsung's latest Unpacked event, where the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7 arrived with thinner hinges, brighter screens, and the same message Samsung has repeated since 2019: foldables are the future. The problem? Samsung no longer owns that future alone. Google's Pixel 9 Pro Fold undercuts Samsung on price while matching it on software polish. Motorola's Razr line has quietly become the best-selling flip phone in the US by targeting a younger, cheaper audience. Chinese rivals like Honor and Huawei ship thinner, lighter foldables in Europe and Asia that make the Z Fold 7 look chunky by comparison. And then there's the elephant in Cupertino. Apple hasn't shipped a foldable. But supply chain leaks, patent filings, and analyst notes all point to a foldable iPhone arriving as soon as 2026 or 2027. When it does, Apple won't need to invent the category. It just needs to show up with a polished version and a familiar logo — a playbook it ran with smartphones, smartwatches, and wireless earbuds. That's the real threat. Samsung's foldables are engineering marvels, but they're still niche products. Counterpoint Research estimates foldables make up less than 2% of global smartphone shipments. Samsung has spent years absorbing the cost of educating consumers, refining hinges, and persuading developers to optimize apps for weird screen ratios. Apple can skip most of that tuition. There's a familiar pattern here. Samsung popularized the phablet with the Galaxy Note in 2011. Critics mocked it. Then Apple released the iPhone 6 Plus in 2014 and captured the bulk of the profits. Samsung built the OLED supply chain that made modern smartphones possible. Apple buys those panels and sells them back at a premium. Time and again, Samsung does the expensive, unglamorous pioneering work while Apple waits, watches, and wins the margin war. Foldables look like the next chapter of that story. Samsung's own mobile chief has publicly acknowledged that competition is intensifying, and the company's profit guidance has wobbled as memory chip prices swing. Foldables were supposed to be Samsung's premium stronghold. Now they're becoming a crowded battlefield where Samsung's first-mover advantage is evaporating faster than its marketing budget. None of this means Samsung is doomed. It still sells more foldables than anyone else, and its vertical integration — screens, chips, memory — gives it cost advantages Apple can't easily replicate. The Z Flip 7's $1,099 price tag is aggressive, and carrier promotions keep units moving. But "selling the most" and "winning" aren't the same thing. Apple captures roughly 80% of global smartphone profits with a fraction of the unit volume. If that dynamic repeats in foldables, Samsung will have spent a decade building a market it doesn't get to keep. Consumers, oddly, may benefit most. Real competition usually means better hardware, lower prices, and fewer excuses. Apple entering the foldable space would force Samsung to stop coasting on novelty and start competing on value. That's good news for buyers and bad news for anyone counting on brand loyalty alone. The big question isn't whether Apple will release a foldable. It's whether Samsung can make itself indispensable before that happens — through software, services, or ecosystem lock-in that Apple can't photocopy. So far, the answer is unclear. **The takeaway:** Samsung deserves credit for dragging foldables from concept to product, but pioneering a category and profiting from it are different skills. If history is any guide, Apple is happy to let Samsung pay the tuition — then show up for graduation.