Turns out people like them. Not so much the HN crowd, but c’est la vie.
My dad was at Stanford in 84, when the original Mac was announced. We were a Mac family from even before I was born. I watched Steve Jobs give the Macworld keynotes back before everyday people knew who he was.
When I was in college, I actually bought a TabletPC. I still identified as a Mac user - I even tried making it into a Hackintosh - but being able to draw and use gestures was interesting enough that I tolerated Windows on that device.
The day the iPad was released, my parents impulse-bought one. They were heading on an overseas trip that week and thought it would be a fun gadget to bring along.
They had me set it up for them, and I did exactly that. I didn't tinker with it, play around on it, pretend it was mine for an evening… It's the first time I remember a gadget not feeling like a new toy, even though I had spent my formative years dreaming about how cool a Mac you could draw on would be. It was just an object, and I had no interest in it beyond being a helpful family member.
Making "just a big phone" when their phone platform has always been so locked down has done the iPad concept a major disservice.
Later I plan to use it as a lighting control panel but other than that the use cases are limited.
Foldable device prototypes were publicly demonstrated in 2013. It took five years for the technologies required to enable foldable devices to become mature enough to ship bad products. It took another five years for them to mature enough to meet Apple's scale and quality requirements.
This isn't a "moonshot" (which take decades to build), but hardware innovations like this regularly take a decade to properly productize.
This is a bizarre way of saying “if they ship it and it has reliability problems, they know they’re skating on thin ice”.
Apple’s brand has taken a beating (I’m as aghast with the latest macOS as the next nerd), but people love that when Apple ships a product, it generally works and the hardware doesn’t break.
Butterfly keyboards are a terrible stain on the hardware team’s reputation. “Scared” is the wrong word for how these things work.
Which seems pretty standard Apple. Let others do something, see how it plays out then launch their version of it.
But the leaks I've seen of the size, makes me less excited about it. The phone when folded looks a bit wider and squatter than my Pro Max. And when open, it's smaller than my 11" iPad.
I see the promise of this concept with the tri-fold phones, where when expanded is closer in size to an 11" tablet.