Samsung’s latest blowout Unpacked event was the most honestly exciting event the company’s put on in years—for good reason. The new squat Galaxy Z Fold 8’s form factor seems like the right move for foldable phones. And it’s good news for Apple fans that its next device is going to look, function, and cost similar to what Samsung showed us on Wednesday.
The eighth-generation Galaxy Z Fold is, based on Gizmodo’s limited hands-on experience with the phone, the best it’s ever been. Samsung has finally managed to eliminate most of the crease in the center of the folding display. The company promises this display is also more rigid and durable than past generations of foldables. Better yet, the $1,900 Galaxy Z Fold 8’s 4:3 aspect ratio for both the external and internal display makes watching videos and playing games feel that much more natural, with slimmer black bars of the long-maligned “letterboxing” effect finally feeling like less of an issue.
See Galaxy Z Fold 8 at Samsung
See Galaxy Z Fold 8 at Amazon
Despite sporting lower specs than the $2,100 Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra—a device made explicitly for power users—the squatty Galaxy Z Fold 8 seems more enticing for the everyday phone buyer. That’s good news for Apple, since a mountain of rumors suggests we’ll see a squat, book-style foldable iPhone in September alongside the inevitable iPhone 18 Pro. Early dummy units of the device show it has a form factor that unfolds close to the size of an iPad mini.
Samsung’s screen business is set to be Apple’s sole supplier of its first foldable displays, according to Korean tech news site TheElec. We can expect that the iPhone screens will have many of the benefits of Samsung’s crease-less display. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 already proves such a good option for watching content, and multiple rumors suggest Apple will likely market its next-gen folding iPhone as a media-first device.
Francisco Jeronimo, a VP of client devices at research firm IDC, said in an email statement: “By bringing a new format to market ahead of Apple, Samsung gets to define the new format on its own terms rather than reacting to it later.” Samsung got to the finish line first. Apple likely won’t have its device ready for debut until September, but this isn’t a foot race (it’s more like a rat race, anyway).
Customers have already made it clear time and time again they don’t care if Samsung is still clinging to its crown as king of foldables. Across the wider phone-buying public, most iPhone buyers are willing to stick to the comforts of the Apple family. The latest report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, first reported by MacRumors, found that 12% of new iPhone buyers say they migrated from Android in the first quarter of 2026. Of those who bought a new iPhone, 87% were loyal Apple customers. These are effectively the same data points from last year. Most consumers stick with one ecosystem or the other and rarely ever switch.
What does loyalty mean when every device ecosystem starts to look the same? Google evidently still hopes iOS buyers will make the switch. At the time Samsung dropped deets on its latest phones, Google promoted a new migration experience built into Android 17 to transfer data from iPhones. But let’s be frank, will Gemini Notebook—formerly NotebookLM—or any Gemini Intelligence features get people to switch? Apple Intelligence is already here, and it works well enough that phone buyers aren’t missing much compared to Google’s Gemini.
By this fall, we’ll have two major phone brands shilling ultra-expensive phones for a specific kind of user—the ones who really want a pocketable miniature tablet. The end result is that there is less and less that distinguishes one phone ecosystem from the other.
See Galaxy Z Fold 8 at Samsung
See Galaxy Z Fold 8 at Amazon
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