Apple’s long-rumored foldable iPhone hasn’t been announced yet, but after years of speculation, it seems like this device could finally be coming out soon(ish). Multiple sources claim that Apple could be targeting a late-2026 launch for its first foldable phone, and new rumors suggest the company is even already thinking about its second model, which could be a clamshell-style foldable iPhone.

But of course, nothing is official yet. Plans can change, features can be dropped and timelines can slip. Still, recent reports paint the clearest picture yet of how Apple might approach a foldable iPhone and how it plans to differentiate itself from rivals like Samsung and Google.

Here, we’ve rounded up the most credible iPhone Fold rumors so far, covering its possible release timing, design, display technology, cameras and price. We’ll continue to update this post as more rumors and details become available.

When could the iPhone Fold launch?

Rumors of a foldable iPhone date back as far as 2017, but more recent reporting suggests Apple has finally locked onto a realistic window. Most sources now point to fall 2026, likely alongside the iPhone 18 lineup.

Mark Gurman has gone back and forth on timing, initially suggesting Apple could launch “as early as 2026,” before later writing that the device would ship at the end of 2026 and sell primarily in 2027. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has also repeatedly cited the second half of 2026 as Apple’s target.

Some reports still claim the project could slip into 2027 if Apple runs into manufacturing or durability issues, particularly around the hinge or display. Given Apple’s history of delaying products that it feels aren’t ready, that remains a real possibility.

What will the iPhone Fold look like?

Current consensus suggests Apple has settled on a book-style foldable design, similar to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold series, rather than a clamshell flip phone.

When unfolded, the iPhone Fold is expected to resemble a small tablet like the iPad mini (8.3 inches). Based on the rumor mill, though, the iPhone Fold may be a touch smaller, with an internal display measuring around 7.7 to 7.8 inches. When closed, it should function like a conventional smartphone, with an outer display in the 5.5-inch range.

CAD leaks and alleged case-maker molds suggest the device may be shorter and wider than a standard iPhone when folded, creating a squarer footprint that better matches the aspect ratio of the inner display. Several reports have also pointed to the iPhone Air as a potential preview of Apple’s foldable design work, with its unusually thin chassis widely interpreted as a look at what one half of a future foldable iPhone could resemble.

If that theory holds, it could help explain the Fold’s rumored dimensions. Thickness is expected to land between roughly 4.5 and 5.6mm when unfolded, putting it in a similar range to the iPhone Air, and just over 9 to 11mm when folded, depending on the final hinge design and internal layering.

Display and the crease question

The display is arguably the biggest challenge for any foldable phone, and it’s an area where Apple appears to have invested years of development.

Multiple reports say Apple will rely on Samsung Display as its primary supplier. At CES 2026, Samsung showcased a new crease-less foldable OLED panel, which several sources — including Bloomberg — suggested could be the same technology Apple plans to use.

According to these reports, the panel combines a flexible OLED with a laser-drilled metal support plate that disperses stress when folding. The goal is a display with a nearly invisible crease, something Apple reportedly considers essential before entering the foldable market.

If Apple does use this panel, it would mark a notable improvement over current foldables, which still show visible creasing under certain lighting conditions.

Cameras and biometrics

Camera rumors suggest Apple is planning a four-camera setup. That may include:

• Two rear cameras (main and ultra-wide, both rumored at 48MP)

• One punch-hole camera on the outer display

• One under-display camera on the inner screen

Several sources claim Apple will avoid Face ID entirely on the iPhone Fold. Instead, it’s expected to rely on Touch ID built into the power button, similar to recent iPad models. This would allow Apple to keep both displays free of notches or Dynamic Island cutouts.

Under-display camera technology has historically produced lower image quality, but a rumored 24MP sensor would be a significant step up compared to existing foldables, which typically use much lower-resolution sensors.

iPhone Fold’s hinge and materials

The hinge is another area where Apple may diverge from competitors. Multiple reports claim Apple will use Liquidmetal, which is a long-standing trade name for a metallic glass alloy the company has previously used in smaller components. While often referred to as “liquid metal” or “Liquid Metal” in reports, Liquidmetal is the branding Apple has historically associated with the material.

Liquidmetal is said to be stronger and more resistant to deformation than titanium, while remaining relatively lightweight. If accurate, this could help improve long-term durability and reduce wear on the foldable display.

Leaks from Jon Prosser also reference a metal plate beneath the display that works in tandem with the hinge to minimize creasing — a claim that aligns with reporting from Korean and Chinese supply-chain sources.

Battery and other components

Battery life is another potential differentiator. According to Ming-Chi Kuo and multiple Asian supply-chain reports, Apple is testing high-density battery cells in the 5,000 to 5,800mAh range.

That would make it the largest battery ever used in an iPhone, and competitive with (or larger than) batteries in current Android foldables. The device is also expected to use a future A-series chip and Apple’s in-house modem.

Price

None of this will come cheap, that’s for certain. Nearly every report agrees that the iPhone Fold will be Apple’s most expensive iPhone ever.

Estimates currently place the price between $2,000 and $2,500 in the US. Bloomberg has said the price will be “at least $2,000,” while other analysts have narrowed the likely range to around $2,100 and $2,300. That positions the iPhone Fold well above the iPhone Pro Max and closer to Apple’s high-end Macs and iPads.

Despite years of rumors, there’s still plenty that remains unclear. Apple hasn’t confirmed the name “iPhone Fold,” final dimensions, software features or how iOS would adapt to a folding form factor. Durability, repairability and long-term reliability are also open questions. For now, the safest assumption is that Apple is taking its time and that many of these details could still change before launch.

Voice AI company ElevenLabs said today it raised $500 million in a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital, which was an investor in the startup’s last secondary round through a tender. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed is joining the company’s board.

The startup is now valued at $11 billion, more than three times its valuation in its last round in January 2025. Earlier in the year, the Financial Times reported that the startup was looking to raise at that valuation.

The company said that existing investor a16z quadrupled its investment amount, and Iconiq, which led the last round, tripled it. Some prior investors, like BroadLight, NFDG, Valor Capital, AMP Coalition, and Smash Capital, also joined the round. New investors for the funding included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic
Capital, and Bond.

ElevenLabs said that it will disclose some investors later in February, which might be strategic partners. The company has raised over $781 million to date. It said that it will use the funding for research and product development, along with expansion in international markets like India, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, and Mexico.

The company’s co-founder, Mati Staniszewski, indicated that ElevenLabs might work on agents beyond voice and incorporate video. In January, the company announced a partnership with LTX to produce audio-to-video content.

“The intersection of models and products is critical – and our team has proven, time and again, how to translate research into real-world experiences. This funding helps us go beyond voice alone to transform how we interact with technology altogether. We plan to expand our Creative offering – helping creators combine our best-in-class audio with video and Agents – enabling businesses to build agents that can talk, type, and take action,” he said in a statement.

The company has seen good growth momentum as it closed the year at $330 million ARR. In an interview with Bloomberg earlier this year, Staniszewski said that it took ElevenLabs five months to reach $200 million to $300 million in ARR.

Voice AI model providers are an attractive target for investors and big tech companies. In January, rival Deepgram raised $130 million from AVP at a $1.3 billion valuation. Meanwhile, Google hired top talent from voice model company Hume AI, including CEO Alan Cowen.

from the only-OUR-propaganda-is-good-propaganda dept

So we’ve been noting how the Trump administration has been helping Larry Ellison wage war on Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust (that’s always been a lie), but because they want Larry Ellison to be able to dominate media and create a safe space for unpopular right wing ideology.

After Warner Brothers balked at Larry’s competing bid and a hostile takeover attempt, Larry tried to sue Warner Brothers. With that not going anywhere, Larry and MAGA have since joined forces to try and attack the Netflix merger across right wing media, falsely claiming that “woke” Netflix is attempting a “cultural takeover” that must be stopped for the good of humanity.

With hearings on the Netflix merger looming, MAGA has ramped up those attacks with the help of some usual allies. That includes the right wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, which has apparently been circulating a bogus study around DC claiming that Netflix and Warner Brothers are “engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma”:

“Without ever saying Warner Bros or bid rival Paramount by name, the Oversight Project’s analysis, titled Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State, insists that “relevant federal agencies must scrutinize with extreme intensity any potential Netflix acquisitions of other media and entertainment companies to take into account the full ramifications of the impacts on American society and the health of the Constitutional Republic.”

Again, the goal here is to ensure that Larry Ellison can buy Netflix (and HBO and CNN). Larry, as we’ve seen vividly with his acquisitions of CBS and TikTok, is buying up new and old media to create a propaganda safe space for America’s increasingly unhinged and anti-democratic extraction class. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal is propaganda and information control.

And like any good propagandists, MAGA has tried to invert reality, and is increasingly trying to claim it’s Netflix that covertly wants to create a left-wing propaganda empire that spreads gayness and woke:

“With its subtitle of “The Weaponization of Entertainment for Partisan Propaganda,” the report is tailored for the MAGA base. Full of talking points and and mentions of Stranger Things, the Lena Dunham-produced Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste, the controversial Cuties docu from 2020, and the Obamas-produced American Factory, the 47-page report takes repeated swipes at any expansion of the streamer and its library of “leftwing and progressive” content.”

Of course that’s nonsense. Netflix has demonstrated that they’re primarily an opportunist, and will show whatever grabs eyeballs and makes them money (from gay military dramas that upset the pentagon to washed up anti-trans comedian hacks). And they’re certain to debase themselves further to please the Trump administration in order to gain approval of their merger.

That’s not to say that the Netflix Warner Brothers merger will be good for anybody. Most media consolidation is generally terrible for labor and consumers as we’ve seen with the AT&T–>Warner Brothers–>Discovery mergers. They almost always result in massive debt loads, tons of layoffs, higher prices, and lower quality product.

Enter an old MAGA playbook: try to convince a bunch of useful idiots that the authoritarian corporatist MAGA coalition somehow really loves antitrust reform and is looking out for the little guy, despite a long track record of coddling corporate power and monopoly control.

That’s again the game plan here by Heritage and administration mouthpieces like Brendan Carr; pretend you’re obstructing the Netflix deal for ethical and antitrust reasons, when you’re really just trying to help Larry Ellison engage in the exact sort of competitive and ideological domination you’re whining about.

Among the folks helping this project along is former Trump DOJ “antitrust enforcer” Makan Delrahim, who is now Paramount’s Chief Legal Officer. Delrahim played a starring role during the first Trump term in rubber stamping the hugely problematic Sprint T-Mobile merger, and attempting to block the AT&T Time Warner deal (to the benefit of Rupert Murdoch, who opposed the tie up).

And now here we are again, with many of the same folks joining forces to try and scuttle Netflix’s latest merger, simply to ensure their preferred, anti-democratic billionaire wins the prize.

Ideally, again, you’d block all media consolidation.

Since that’s clearly not happening under the corporation-coddling Trump administration, activists — and the two or three Democratic lawmakers who actually care about media reform — are probably better served by aligning themselves with Netflix. It’s most definitely a lesser of two evils scenario, with, as the chaos at CBS shows, greater Larry Ellison control of media being the worst possible outcome.

In any case, expect right wing propagandists and right wing media to start really lighting into Netflix in the weeks and months to come. You know, because they just really love truth and freedom and hate consolidated corporate power.

Filed Under: antitrust, disinformation, donald trump, larry ellison, maga, media consolidation, merger, streaming, video

Companies: netflix, oan, paramount, warner bros. discovery

Much has been made of the excessive power demands of AI, but solutions are sparse. This has led engineers to consider completely new paradigms in computing: optical, thermodynamic, reversible—the list goes on. Many of these approaches require a change in the materials used for computation, which would demand an overhaul in the CMOS fabrication techniques used today.

Over the past decade, Hector De Los Santos has been working on yet another new approach. The technique would require the same exact materials used in CMOS, preserving the costly equipment, yet still allow computations to be performed in a radically different way. Instead of the motion of individual electrons—current—computations can be done with the collective, wavelike propagations in a sea of electrons, known as plasmons.

De Los Santos, an IEEE Fellow, first proposed the idea of computing with plasmons back in 2010. More recently, in 2024, De Los Santos and collaborators from University of South Carolina, Ohio State University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology created a device that demonstrated the main component of plasmon-based logic: the ability to control one plasmon with another. We caught up with De Los Santos to understand the details of this novel technological proposal.

How Plasmon Computing Works

IEEE Spectrum: How did you first come up with the idea for plasmon computing?

De Los Santos: I got the idea of plasmon computing around 2009, upon observing the direction in which the field of CMOS logic was going. In particular, they were following the downscaling paradigm in which, by reducing the size of transistors, you would cram more and more transistors in a certain area, and that would increase the performance. However, if you follow that paradigm to its conclusion, as the device sizes are reduced, quantum mechanical effects come into play, as well as leakage. When the devices are very small, a number of effects called short channel effects come into play, which manifest themselves as increased power dissipation.

So I began to think, “How can we solve this problem of improving the performance of logic devices while using the same fabrication techniques employed for CMOS—that is, while exploiting the current infrastructure?” I came across an old logic paradigm called fluidic logic, which uses fluids. For example, jets of air whose direction was impacted by other jets of air could implement logic functions. So I had the idea, why don’t we implement a paradigm analogous to that one, but instead of using air as a fluid, we use localized electron charge density waves—plasmons. Not electrons, but electron disturbances.

And now the timing is very appropriate because, as most people know, AI is very power intensive. People are coming against a brick wall on how to go about solving the power consumption issue, and the current technology is not going to solve that problem.

What is a plasmon, exactly?

De Los Santos: Plasmons are basically the disturbance of the electron density. If you have what is called an electron sea, you can imagine a pond of water. When you disturb the surface, you create waves. And these waves, the undulations on the surface of this water, propagate through the water. That is an almost perfect analogy to plasmons. In the case of plasmons, you have a sea of electrons. And instead of using a pebble or a piece of wood tapping on the surface of the water to create a wave that propagates, you tap this sea of electrons with an electromagnetic wave.

How do plasmons promise to overcome the scaling issues of traditional CMOS logic?

De Los Santos: Going back to the analogy of the throwing the pebble on the pond: It takes very, very low energy to create this kind of disturbance. The energy to excite a plasmon is on the order of attojoules or less. And the disturbance that you generate propagates very fast. A disturbance propagates faster than a particle. Plasmons propagate in unison with the electromagnetic wave that generates them, which is the speed of light in the medium. So just intrinsically, the way of operation is extremely fast and extremely low power compared to current technology.

In addition to that, current CMOS technology dissipates power even if it’s not used. Here, that’s not the case. If there is no wave propagating, then there is no power dissipation.

How do you do logic operations with plasmons?

De Los Santos: You pattern long, thin wires in a configuration in the shape of the letter Y. At the base of the Y you launch a plasmon. Call this the bias plasmon, this is the bit. If you don’t do anything, when this plasmon gets to the junction it will split in two, so at the output of the Y, you will detect two equal electric field strengths.

Now, imagine that at the Y junction you apply another wire at an angle to the incoming wire. Along that new wire, you send another plasmon, called a control plasmon. You can use the control plasmon to redirect the original bias plasmon into one leg of the Y.

Plasmons are charge disturbances, and two plasmons have the same nature: They either are both positive or both negative. So, they repel each other if you force them to converge into a junction. And by controlling the angle of the control plasmon impinging on the junction, you can control the angle of the plasmon coming out of the junction. And that way you can steer one plasmon with another one. The control plasmon simply joins the incoming plasmon, so you end up with double the voltage on one leg.

You can do this from both sides, add a wire and a control plasmon on either side of the junction so you can redirect the plasmon into either leg of the Y, giving you a zero or a one.

Building a Plasmon-Based Logic Device

You’ve built this Y-junction device and demonstrated steering a plasmon to one side in 2024. Can you describe the device and its operation?

De Los Santos: The Y-junction device is about 5 square [micrometers]. The Y is made up of the following: a metal on top of an oxide, on top of a semiconducting wafer, on top of a ground plane. Now, between the oxide and the wafer, you have to generate a charge density—this is the sea of electrons. To do that, you apply a DC voltage between the metal of the Y and the ground plane, and that generates your static sea of electrons. Then you impinge upon that with an incoming electromagnetic wave, again between the metal and ground plane. When the electromagnetic wave reaches the static charge density, the sea of electrons that was there generates a localized electron charge density disturbance: a plasmon.

Now, if you launch a plasmon by itself, it will quickly dissipate. It will not propagate very far. In my setup, the reason why the plasmon survives is because it is being regenerated. As the electromagnetic field propagates, you keep regenerating the plasmons, creating new plasmons at its front end.

What is left to be done before you can implement full computer logic?

De Los Santos: I demonstrated the partial device, that is just the interaction of two plasmons. The next step would be to demonstrate and fabricate the full device, which would have the two controls. And after that gets done, the next step is concatenating them to create a full adder, because that is the fundamental computing logic component.

What do you think are going to be the main challenges going forward?

De Los Santos: I think the main challenge is that the technology doesn’t follow from today’s paradigm of logic devices based on current flows. This is based on wave flows. People are accustomed to other things, and it may be difficult to understand the device. The different concepts that are brought together in this device are not normally employed by the dominant technology, and it is really interdisciplinary in nature. You have to know about metal-oxide-semiconductor physics, then you have to know about electromagnetic waves, then you have to know about quantum field theory. The knowledge base to understand the device rarely exists in a single head. Maybe another next step is to try to make it more accessible. Getting people to sponsor the work and to understand it is a challenge, not really the implementation. There’s not really a fabrication limitation.

But in my opinion, the usual approaches are just doomed, for two reasons. First, they are not reversible, meaning information is lost in the computation, which results in energy loss. Second, as the devices shrink energy dissipation increases, posing an insurmountable barrier. In contrast, plasmon computation is inherently reversible, and there is no fundamental reason it should dissipate any energy during switching.