Do we need foldable displays?
A friend and professional colleague brought to my attention an excellent and very detailed “teardown” of the Apple Duo foldable phone. Here’s my response to him:
“That is a very excellent teardown+. For that alone iFixit gets my ongoing patronage, even though I still think they aren’t what they used to be.
Anyway — foldables… According to two prior mentors in my professional life, one of my talents is having a good sense of what works and what simply doesn’t. In my tenure as corporate CIO, that was one of my primary responsibilities — evaluating new tech and deciding which made sense for our organization, and what did not.
This talent, and general interest in figuring out what works and what doesn’t, has followed me into my tech publishing career. In the decades that I’ve been doing that, I’ve come across a good many example of “what were they THINKING?” — stuff that simply never made sense. I’ve also come across things that made a lot of sense, but that for one reason or another didn’t make it. And I learned that some really great tech simply never makes it to the point where it really catches on. And, of course, there is tech that aces it.
Then there are technologies that make some sense, but have inherent flaws. Pen computing, for example, really wasn’t on my radar until a friend approached me with it as a publishing opportunity, and I fell in love with it (and it changed my professional life). But with all the enthusiasm I had for pen systems, I never felt that handwriting recognition was a solid foundation to build a new technology on. And it wasn’t. Jeff Hawkins realized that, too, and Graffiti worked because it was not totally open-ended like handwriting recognition. Hawkins said, “IF you use my special alphabet EXACTLY, the system WILL recognize everything.” And it did. It just wasn’t a big enough solution for a larger problem.
For decades, the industry has tried to introduce and re-introduce 3D. It never worked. And I think it never will, not with just technology. VR/AR had/has some of the same problem, on top of lacking computing power in mobile systems (which made for terrible graphics). And so on. There are lots of such examples.
As far as folding displays go, I had/have one, and wrote a review of one (ruggedpcreview.com/3_handhelds_blackview_hero10.html). I am not sure if foldable make sense. There ARE examples of seemingly almost impossibly complex tech problems eventually getting completely solved. Foldable screens aren’t there yet, and they may, or may not, remain too complex and costly to solve a problem that may not really have required a solution. The idea behind a foldable is that you want a big screen in a small package. So you fold it. Just like we fold and store lots of stuff.
But is the need to fold screens imperative and compelling enough to mandate foldable? When I look at my own workflow, I have a tiny screen on my wrist (the Apple Watch), small screen in my pocket (my iPhone), a book/magazine-sized screen for numerous things (my iPad), my 27-inch monitors for work, and my 75-inch TV. They all work together. It’s a multiple item solution that works. So, for me, the question is whether a foldable phone that makes a small tablet is something that I’ll come to need and rely on, or not. For now, it’s not.”