Counterpoint's foldable forecast puts Apple near 1.4% of handsets sold next year

Somebody at a case company is looking at a quote for a two-part mold this week, and somebody on an app team has a ticket asking for support for both folded and unfolded layouts. Both are pricing the same forecast.

Counterpoint's two rates compound. 1.24 times 1.37 is 1.70, so the segment ends next year about 70 percent larger than now ^[9]. Applied to the 2 percent share 9to5Mac reports for foldables today, and holding total smartphone volume flat, the segment lands near 3.4 percent of phones sold ^[10]. Apple's forecast 40 percent of that works out at roughly 1.4 percent of all handsets ^[11]. 9to5Mac reports shares and growth rates but does not give unit volumes ^[12], so a percentage is what a tooling decision has to be sized against.

The horizons differ, and the two forecasts are being read as one. Counterpoint's stops at the end of next year ^[5]. Gurman's runs ten years. "My prediction is that, within a decade, foldables will make up the majority of new phone sales," he wrote in Power On, adding that "foldables could become the do-it-all computing products of the future" ^[2]. The cost argument underneath it is that manufacturing gets cheap enough to reach even an iPhone SE ^[3].

The hardware is still moving. 9to5Mac says the likely next step is embedding Face ID in the device, easier than putting the selfie camera under the interior display, with the problem being the depth of the Face ID array on the outer screen without making the phone thicker ^[8]. The outer face is where a case has its cutouts. Gurman also floated an iPhone Duo Max with a larger display and a higher price ^[7], which would be a second geometry in the same generation.

The spend divides into money that buys geometry and money that buys capability. A mold, a bracket or a cut-to-size film fits one body and nothing else, and it is priced against that 1.4 percent ^[11]. A layout that reflows to any window width is shared with the tablet and desktop sizes already in your catalogue, so it does not need the foldable forecast to be right. Then there is how fast you can reverse it. Layout work can be undone in a release; steel cannot.

For most teams the recommendation is to do the reflow work now on the tablet budget and hold the geometry-specific spend until someone publishes units instead of shares. The cost of that patience is arriving after the launch window, when the shelf already has cases on it. If you take the other side, take it on Counterpoint's 40 percent rather than on the decade call, and size the run for a segment Counterpoint still puts below 4 percent of phones at the end of next year ^[6][10].