Okay, foldable laptops. They are very new indeed and, like many new products still in their infancy, expensive. The HP Specter Foldable PC costs $5,000, which is a lot even by Apple’s MacBook Pro standards. But I bet it’s the Apple logo that should be on the back of this thing, not HP’s.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing HP here. I am of course very happy that the Specter Foldable PC exists. But after months of rumors that Apple is working on something similar, HP’s offer does little more than confirm something that has already been becoming increasingly clear: if Apple doesn’t enter the foldable laptop market relatively soon, it will be left behind. Again.
Apple only has to look at the foldable smartphone to see what I’m getting at. As Samsung, Motorola and more Android OEMs fall over themselves to launch foldable phones, the bendable iPhone remains conspicuously absent.
Surely history won’t repeat itself?
Bending over backwards to be fashionably late
Now I know what you’re already saying. Apple is not normally the first to enter a market, but once it enters this market, the game normally changes. And you would be right.
The iPhone was far from the first smartphone, but everything changed when the original 2007 model debuted. There were tablets before the iPad, but Apple’s now dominates. The Apple Watch? Far from the first Dick Tracy watch, but it is now the most popular watch in the world. Not the most popular smartwatch. The most popular watch, sell better than the entire Swiss watch industry combined.
So it’s fair to say that Apple doesn’t have to be first in a market to take over. But it has to actually be included at some point.
To put this into perspective, the original Samsung Galaxy Z Fold was launched in September 2019, four years ago this month. Yet we still don’t have a foldable iPhone and it’s believed this will be years away at best. You could say that Apple was waiting for foldable technology to get better, but honestly, just look at the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Google’s Pixel Fold. They’re both really good, all things considered. It’s time we had a foldable iPhone, and that’s a hill I’ll die on.
What about laptops?
Available soon?
Rumors have been going around for at least a year that Apple is working on some sort of foldable MacBook. We’ve even seen patents that seem to telegraph something like this. But it hasn’t happened yet. The rumors suggested that 2027 could be a possible release date, by which time the Specter Tablet PC will have been around for at least a few generations. And who knows how many other foldable laptops will also be released by then?
The Specter Foldable is a laptop that can range from a 12.3-inch screen to a huge 17-inch screen, depending on what you want to use it for. There’s an on-screen hardware keyboard for typing, and it’s all rather magical.
Now imagine that as a MacBook Pro or, if Apple prefers, an iPad. Listen up: Imagine a huge 17-inch tablet that folds in half with a Magic Keyboard on the bottom when you want to go into laptop mode. If we really want to be picky, we can ask for iPadOS And macOS on this thing too. There’s really no technological reason why that couldn’t happen.
But right now we are largely in the realm of wishful thinking. But the day that companies like HP, and not Apple, make this wishful thinking a reality is a very strange day indeed.