The hinge was the thing to worry about, and the people who have used one are not worried.
Mark Gurman reported in Bloomberg's Power On newsletter that he has spoken to multiple people who tried pre-release versions of Apple's first folding iPhone, the model widely expected to be called the iPhone Ultra. They told him the hinge mechanism worked and felt durable. They said the phone is thick when folded and still fits in a pocket. They liked the large inner display enough to describe app layouts on it as closer to an iPad than to a phone.
Our roadmap for this phone puts one line at the top of its risk list: the hinge, not the screen, is the thing to watch. A folding phone is two rigid halves joined by a mechanism that has to survive being opened and shut thousands of times, and that mechanism is what has ended most folding phones badly. One report from unnamed testers does not prove a hinge over five years of use. It does mean the first people outside Apple to handle one did not come away talking about the crease.
Touch ID comes back.
The folding model uses the fingerprint reader rather than Face ID, the system that unlocks an iPhone by looking at your face. Our roadmap has carried that as a possibility for months and it sat there unattributed to anyone who had held the hardware. It is now something people who used the phone have described. There is also no telephoto lens on it, the camera that zooms optically without softening the picture. The people Gurman spoke to still rated the photographs, and said the phone works unusually well as a viewfinder, which is one of the things a large folding screen is good for. Our roadmap lists two rear cameras plus selfie cameras on both displays, and no telephoto is what a two-camera back looks like.
Apple has announced none of this. The event where the folding iPhone is expected to appear alongside the iPhone 18 Pro, the Pro Max and new Apple Watches has not been dated by Apple either, and Gurman's account rests on people he does not name. Until this week the folding iPhone existed on our roadmap as two display sizes, a thickness in millimetres and a list of things that could go wrong. Now there are people who have opened and closed one.