Competing rumor says no folding iPad in 2024

AppleInsider

A new rumor by Mark Gurman contradicts earlier reports of a folding iPad coming in 2024 while doubling down on a "light year" for iPads in 2023.

An Apple foldable concept

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo uses supply-chain data to predict possible release windows for Apple products with a generally high level of accuracy. A report on Monday suggested Apple would hold off on iPad updates until 2024, with a new iPad mini 7 and foldable iPad arriving in that year.

Mark Gurman from Bloomberg has released his own information, contradicting Kuo slightly. While Gurman insists that 2023 will be a light year for iPads, 2024 won't have a foldable iPad.

He suggests that 2024 will introduce the long-rumored OLED iPad Pros alongside spec bumps for the base iPad and iPad mini. His sources haven't mentioned anything about a foldable iPad in 2024.

Gurman's information is understood to be sourced directly from contacts within Apple and the supply chain. His information tends to align with Kuo, with rare exceptions like this one.

Years of speculation, patents, and other hints suggest Apple is indeed working on a folding device. It isn't clear if such a product will ever be released by Apple, as Samsung's folding products have proven to be a high-end fad that serves a very small market.

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DAalseth

Re: Folding iPad.
His crystal ball isn’t any clearer than Kuo’s. He just zagged when Kuo zigged. One of them are bound to be right. 

racerhomie3

I pray to God Apple never releases a trash product like foldables to the public.

lkrupp

Here’s @lkrupp’s infallible prediction: No foldable anything from Apple anytime soon, if ever.

lkrupp

DAalseth said:

Re: Folding iPad.
His crystal ball isn’t any clearer than Kuo’s. He just zagged when Kuo zigged. One of them are bound to be right. 

Like the old Three Stooges bit. Moe asks Curly what time it is. Curly raises his sleeve and his arm has three watches on it. Moe asks Curly how he can tell the time. Curly says one watch is ten minutes slow, one watch is 5 minutes fast, and the other watch stopped at 12 o’clock. Frustrated, Moe says well, what time is it? Curly pulls out a pocket watch, looks at it, and says 3:15. Moe pokes Curly in the eyes and conks him on his head. Woo, woo, woo.

BigGuyinSF

Take anything Gurman says with a HUGE grain of salt. He’s wrong a LOT. He’ll just conveniently “update” his prediction moments before something is released to keep his prediction record high. Such useless information. I wish the Apple blogs would just ignore him so he goes away. 

hmurchison

Interesting to watch the Tech industry flail as they search for the next Goose the lays the golden eggs. 

It might be a while before we hit that next inflection point 

rotateleftbyte

JP234 said:

Less than zero would be my interest in such a gimmick. Damn that evil Samsung!

How many of the many iterations of folding phones has Samsung sold? If it isn't reaching viable proportions then Apple would not release a product unless it would blow the Samsung offering out of the water. They probably have folding iPhones and iPads in the lab as well as touchscreen Mac's but if they see the light of day outside the lab is the big unknown.
Personally, I'm not interested in any folding device other than my Macbook.

bloggerblog

I wouldn’t scratch out foldables, they could be convenient if done right. I for one would like to have an iPhone that fits in my pocket and be able to sit without feeling a like there’s a brick that’s about to crack. 

The question is can they build it where when folded it’s less than twice the thickness of a current iPhone?

DAalseth

I wonder if by ‘light year’ he meant they were just a really really long way away?

😆 

SlimyYetSatisfying

Why are blogs such as these so hell bent on seeing Apple release some type of foldable device?

9secondkox2

Of course Apple is “working on” a folding device. 

Probably working on a crumpling device too. It’s called R&D. 

And Apple would be foolish not to explore the boundaries of usability and push them to see what breaks, taking what they learn and filtering it into actual products that people love. 

What Apple doesn’t do is release research projects as actual end-products to the masses just to nerd out and say they were first, etc. 

Apple makes products that mesh with your life and make life better. The lessons learned in R&D will translate to better versions of current products and perhaps even new products. But only if it makes all the sense in the world to do it. 

Samsung’s Fold launch was an unmitigated disaster. They all broke and it was egg on their faces. To this day, multiple versions and it still isn’t just right. Can you imagine Apple doing that? Heck no! 

Apple has to justify why it does something and the measure is success. If everyone else is doing something, Apple needs to justify why it doesn’t do that also and the measure is quality and usefulness. If R&D isn’t promising and engineering can’t seem to get it just right and marketing can’t make heads or tails of it, no need to bother. It should not exist. 

I’m not waiting for a foldable. I don’t know anyone who is. Wow. Gee. It folds. Ok. Next. An ultrawide screen desktop on the other hand… that's something actually useful. 

DAalseth

9secondkox2 said:

’m not waiting for a foldable. I don’t know anyone who is. Wow. Gee. It folds. Ok. Next. An ultrawide screen desktop on the other hand… that's something actually useful. 

That got me thinking of a place a folding screen would be nice. Imagine you have a MacBook. It’s a 13 inch model so it’s light and easy to carry. The keyboard is comfortable. When you open it up though panels fold out on the sides so you have a 17 inch ultra wide screen. That I think people would go for. 

atomic101

Some type of foldable, collapsible, or holographic display is the eventual future. With the public's insatiable appetite for bigger screens, there is a hard limit for a fixed screen size on a phone or tablet. While a 20-inch smartphone "screen" may seem absurd to us now, so did today's phone sizes seem back in 2008. I have no doubt that in the future, a 6-inch smartphone screen will be considered laughably microscopic and pedestrian.... how could you ever binge watch on something that tiny?

FileMakerFeller

hmurchison said:

Interesting to watch the Tech industry flail as they search for the next Goose the lays the golden eggs. 

It might be a while before we hit that next inflection point 

"I don't understand it! Nobody wants 3D TV, nobody wants folding devices... I'm out of ideas! I mean, what else was in futuristic TV shows forty years ago???"