The Chinese have created the world’s first flexible iPhone
The Chinese did what Apple couldn’t: they released the world’s first flexible iPhone. It took over 200 days and 37 broken screens to develop. The flexible smartphone segment is booming, but Apple’s flexible iPhone has only been rumored for many years.
An engineer was able to create a foldable iPhone using custom parts and a hinge from a Motorola Razr. This creation comes from a Chinese YouTuber called Science and Technology Aesthetics.
In this iPhone Fold, the engineer tried to keep as many details as possible from the original smartphone. According to the design criteria, it had to be soft enough to bend while maintaining the sensory functions.
The video shows the step-by-step creation process to dismantle what turned out to be dozens of iPhone screens, cut open the body of the donor device and repurpose it as a foldable. They tested different types of hinges on phones like the Galaxy Z Flip, but they chose the Motorola Razr hinge because of its ‘small’ display crease.
The video is in Chinese, but there are English subtitles. The process is incredibly complicated and time-consuming.
A combination of engineering ingenuity, trial and error in layering Apple’s iPhone screen, and some 3D printed parts brought the foldable iPhone to life. A lot of space saving decisions had to be made to keep the device running.
The small special battery has a capacity of only 1000 mAh, which is a quarter of most iPhone batteries. One speaker has been removed, along with all wireless charging and MagSafe components.
Touch functions continued to work fine and iOS worked fine. However, engineers needed a collapsible interface, so they installed special software through a jailbreak to support the folding ‘iron’.
Designers consider this model a prototype. The engineer wants to continue improving the process and design over time and calls this version 0.1.
This is not the first time that enthusiasts have done something that Apple has been unable to release for years. For example, back in 2017 there were rumors about the replacement of the Lightning port with USB-C in the iPhone. Apple was expected to make the switch from one port in 2019. However, the company installed USB-C in all its products except the iPhone. Therefore, the enthusiast modified the iPhone himself, creating the first iPhone with USB-C in 2021, and this mobile phone was bought for $86,000. Only in the fall of 2022, Apple officially announced that iPhones will switch to USB-C, but did not specify the date when this will happen and the nearest generations of iPhones may still not have USB-C.
The flexible smartphone segment is booming even at a time when the overall smartphone market is in decline. In 2022, the segment of flexible smartphones will grow by 73% to 16 million units, Counterpoint analysts say. At the same time, the undisputed leader is Samsung, whose share was 62% according to the results of the first half of the year and may reach 80% by the end of the year.
Flexible smartphones so far account for 1.1% of the total smartphone market of 1.352 billion gadgets in 2022. The global smartphone market shrank by 6.5% this year, according to IDC.
