Deja view: Apple is right, and Samsung was wrong (again)

Macworld

One of the benefits of coming late to a product market is that you can learn from other people’s mistakes. Samsung launches a foldable; customers don’t respond to it as well as it hoped; Samsung iterates over seven years; and everyone learns from their mistakes. When the iPhone Ultra finally comes out this fall, it will be the result of extensive research and development, and a great deal of that will have been run (and paid for) by other companies.

Early attempts at the folding smartphone tended to follow one of two general forms, depending on whether it used a standard smartphone chassis as the template for its folded or unfolded form. In the latter case, the result made sense because it was essentially a reimagining of a 1990s clamshell mobile: a normal-sized device that can be shrunk down and pocketed. But the former, a normal-sized device that can open out like a book and behave like a mini tablet, turned out to be more problematic. The idea needed work.

The issue with the default approach to book-style foldables–just take two smartphones and connect them with a hinge–is that it doesn’t create a pleasing unfolded experience. The aspect ratios are wrong. Put two generic phone screens side by side and the result is not a tablet screen of the sort we’re used to; it’s a clunky square. Nobody wants to watch movies or browse the internet on a square.

As my colleague Anyron Copeman argues over on Tech Advisor, Samsung has spent too much time clinging to this losing approach, making, as he puts it, “tweaks, refinements and yet more tweaks to the same basic and ultimately flawed design.” The Galaxy Z Fold 7 came out last summer and was an excellent foldable in many respects other than, yet again, its shape.

But miracles happen, and this year’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 at last shows an understanding of the way foldables of this type ought to work. By adjusting the dimensions of the folded form, making it a shorter and wider 16:10 (as opposed to the more elongated…