When Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, a new phone that folds open into a 7.6-inch screen and will cost $1,999 when it arrives in October, it reignited a question the smartphone industry has been asking for years.
Will foldable phones finally go mainstream?
It is also the tech giant’s entry into a category that, by almost every available measure, has not worked.
Foldable smartphones have been on the market for years. Samsung has iterated through multiple generations. Google, Motorola, Honor, Huawei, and others have all entered the space. Yet despite steady innovation, foldables remain a niche segment of the global smartphone market. As The New York Times recently observed, they account for only a small share (less than 2%) of the handset market despite years of availability, and our Plume data sees the same trend…or lack of one.
What makes Apple’s announcement so interesting isn’t simply that another manufacturer has entered the category. It’s that Apple has a long history of arriving late to product categories and then accelerating adoption once it believes the technology is ready.
That raises an interesting question.
Could Apple’s entrance do for foldables what years of competition have not?
Foldables Have Been Around for Years, But They’re Still Niche
Our own network telemetry tells a remarkably similar story to the broader market.
Across more than 600 million connected devices observed through Plume’s anonymized network telemetry, foldable phones still represent only a small fraction of active smartphones, 1.32% to be exact. After nearly a decade on the market, adoption remains modest.
The foldables market is also strikingly concentrated.
Nearly 94% of the foldable phones we observe across our network today are Samsung devices, with Motorola, Google, Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, and others accounting for much smaller shares (roughly 31,000 devices on our network). In other words, foldables are not yet a broad competitive category. Today, they are largely a Samsung offering.
That makes Apple’s entrance fundamentally different from another annual smartphone launch.
It could reshape an entire product category.
Apple’s Timing is By Design
Apple is rarely first. They don’t need to be.
Instead, the company has consistently waited until it believes a technology has matured before entering a category with a premium product. Whether discussing smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, or wireless earbuds, Apple’s hard-earned strategy has often been less about inventing a category than redefining consumer expectations.
The iPod shipped years into the MP3 player era. The iPhone arrived after a decade of smartphones from Palm, BlackBerry, and Nokia. The iPad followed a graveyard of tablets.
The iPhone Duo appears to follow that same playbook.
Unlike earlier foldables that often asked consumers to accept trade-offs in durability, thickness, or usability, Apple’s approach is built around the idea that the experience has finally become good enough for the mainstream premium buyer. Whether consumers agree remains to be seen, but the strategy itself is familiar.
What isn’t widely understood is how Apple’s customers have historically behaved when premium devices arrive.
Our data offers another perspective.
Premium Apple Buyers Move First
We analyzed adoption patterns over the past five years across five iPhone generations, from the iPhone 13 through the iPhone 17, using anonymized telemetry from connected homes.
One pattern appeared so consistently that it stopped looking like coincidence.
Across five consecutive iPhone launches, premium models consistently outpaced standard models in early adoption, reaching roughly one-third to nearly twice as many of their eventual adopters within the first 90 days.
With every generation we examined, Apple’s high-end versions of each new iPhone (the Pro and Pro Max models) reached their 90-day adoption milestones substantially faster than their standard counterparts. The difference wasn’t marginal. Premium models consistently reached 30% to nearly 100% more of their eventual adopters during the first 90 days after launch. For the iPhone 13 generation, premium models had already reached 3.1% of their eventual installed base compared with 1.6% for standard models. By the iPhone 17 generation, those figures had grown to 14.9% and 10.8%. The pattern repeated year after year: premium buyers moved first.
Just as importantly, these aren’t niche purchases.
Premium models account for a significant share of Apple’s installed base. That means Apple has cultivated a large community of customers who have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to adopt expensive new devices early in their lifecycle.
Whatever price ceiling we once assumed for a phone has kept moving. Apple raised prices, and our data shows expensive models spreading faster and wider than cheap ones.
What it All Means for the iPhone Duo
Apple’s first foldable phone isn’t entering the market as another flagship; it’s the first major form-factor change since iPhone’s inception.
Historically, the buyers willing to spend the most on Apple’s devices have also been the buyers most willing to adopt early. If that pattern continues, the first wave of iPhone Duo adoption is likely to come from the same segment that has consistently driven early adoption of Pro and Pro Max models over the past five years.
One big thing to keep in mind, though: The Duo is $1,999. The iPhone 18 Pro is $1,199, and it arrives one month earlier. Anyone who wants a new iPhone this fall has a much cheaper option, which means the Duo isn’t competing with last year’s phone. It is competing with a very good phone at 60 percent of the price.
Our data shows homes adopting the top-priced tier faster than the entry tier, year after year. But it says nothing about $1,999 phones, for the simple reason that none have existed.
The macro picture does not help either. IDC expects worldwide smartphone sales to fall 17 percent this year, the steepest annual decline on record, driven by memory chip shortages that have pushed prices up across consumer electronics.
No dataset can predict the future exactly–only time will tell–but our data provides some important context.
Foldables have struggled to gain widespread adoption since they first hit the market. But they have always lacked durability and practicality. Will the larger display meaningfully change how people use their devices? Apple enters the category with something no competitor has: a large, consistently demonstrated base of premium customers who have repeatedly shown they’re willing to embrace expensive new Apple hardware earlier than the broader market.
We’ll Be Watching
While we’re not going so far as to predict that the iPhone Duo will suddenly make foldables mainstream, we are observing repeated behavior.
Across years of connected-home telemetry, we’ve seen that Apple’s premium customers behave differently. They adopt earlier, they consistently seed new premium devices into the market faster, and they do so across multiple product generations.
Whether that behavior will be enough to transform foldables from a niche category into a mainstream one remains an open question. One worth watching.
And because Plume’s anonymized network telemetry spans more than 600 million connected devices across 50 million homes and 58 countries, we’ll have a unique vantage point on the answer as it…unfolds.
A note on the data: figures are drawn from anonymized, aggregated telemetry across Plume-managed networks. Adoption pace is measured per home, counting the first device of a given generation seen in each home, indexed against that model’s eventual total adopters. Active device counts reflect the most recent full month. Foldable classification covers devices identified as folding-form-factor handsets. Market-level figures on handset share, pricing, and IDC forecasts are from The New York Times, September 10, 2026.