Samsung expects Apple foldable competition in 2024, but not like you'd expect

Silver 12.9-inch iPad Pro on top of records with Apple Pencil
(Image credit: Luke Filipowicz / iMore)

Apple will enter the world of the foldable in 2024, Samsung believes. But it won't be a foldable iPhone, as you might expect. It'll be something altogether bigger.

If Samsung's expectations are on the money, Apple is set to announce a foldable iPad before it chooses to make an iPhone that bends in the middle. That's according to a report based on what the South Korean tech company is telling its suppliers, at least.

Bendy tablet

The Elec reports that Samsung has been telling its suppliers that it expects Apple to join the foldable market in 2024 with a tablet or notebook product, choosing to enter the smartphone fray later. While Samsung is a big player in foldables, it sells two bendy phones rather than tablets. Apple, it thinks, will choose to think different.

This isn't the first time that the prospect of a foldable iPad has been suggested, however. CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood previously told CNBC that he believed Apple would choose to fold the iPad first, again with 2024 being a possible launch window.

Going back to February 2022, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and display analyst Ross Young were also pointing to some sort of 20-inch foldable display, possibly some sort of MacBook with half of the display turning into a touchscreen keyboard. It's possible that all of these reports are coming from the same place, adding fuel to the fire that Apple will indeed eschew the foldable iPhone in favor of something new — at least initially.

At the time, Gurman said that the 20-inch tablet could also transform between a Mac and an iPad depending on what the user needed at any given time. That would surely make it the best iPad and best Mac in one fell swoop. 

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.