I said a few days ago that I’ve decided to try the iPhone 16 Pro Max. After all, this might be the last time I get to use this particular type of device. I want ultra-slim phones, and I’ll start with the iPhone 17 Air this year. Next year, I’ll seriously consider the foldable iPhone if it launches.
While we can’t say for certain whether Apple will finally make a foldable iPhone, we’ve seen an increasing number of leaks pointing to 2026 as the year when the first-gen foldable iPhone arrives. The latest one seemingly provides one of the main specs: The purported display sizes.
A leaker listed them online, saying the cover screen will measure 5.49 inches while the inner foldable display will measure 7.74 inches. At first sight, the dimensions might not make much sense. That’s what I thought. I then used ChatGPT to see if I could get to the bottom of this, and the results are quite interesting. I’m not saying that the dimensions above are genuine, just that they make a lot of sense. In fact, the iPhone Fold might be a lot easier to handle when used in folded mode than the Galaxy Z Fold 6.
How big is Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Fold?
One of the biggest complaints about the Galaxy Z Fold design has been the cover display, which was too narrow for comfortable folded operation. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 is much better since Samsung made the external display slightly wider.
I will list the Galaxy Z Fold 6 dimensions to help us understand the foldable iPhone later:
- Unfolded: 153.5 x 132.6 x 5.6 mm; 7.6-inch display with 91% screen-to-body ratio
- Folded: 153.5 x 68.1 x 12.1 mm; 6.3-inch cover display
Leaker Digital Chat Station, known for his iPhone Fold leaks, said on Weibo that the foldable iPhone will have a 7.74-inch foldable display. That’s about as large as the Galaxy Z Fold 6’s foldable screen. It’s the outer display that doesn’t make sense. At 5.49 inches, the cover screen is about as big as an iPhone 13 mini display.
Using ChatGPT to calculate the iPhone Fold’s size
Assuming the dimensions are accurate, I still couldn’t reconcile the two sizes, and I wasn’t about to get back to geometry for the sake of this rumor, not when I have something better around: ChatGPT access. I fed the AI the dimensions, trying to see if they made sense.
I assumed Apple would want small bezels, especially for the inner display. But the cover display can’t have large bezels. The iPhone SE 4 is about to “kill” that form factor once and for all.
Unfortunately, GPT-4o, lacking reasoning capabilities, messed up calculations more than once despite my steering it in the right direction. After a few minutes of going back and forth with it, I moved to o3-mini-high, OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT reasoning model.
I gave a more advanced AI model the original rumor in Chinese, explained that the foldable iPhone will look like the Galaxy Z Fold, and said the foldable display will have to have a screen-to-body ratio of about 90%. I asked o3-mini-high to give me the dimensions that would make such a device possible.
About a minute later, the AI had answers for me. Here’s how big the foldable iPhone could be (the thickness doesn’t matter for this exercise):
- Unfolded: 120.4 x 168.8 mm ; 7.75-inch display
- Folded: 120.4 x 84.4 mm; 5.49-inch cover display
This would make the foldable iPhone a lot smaller than the Galaxy Z Fold 6. When folded, it wouldn’t be as tall, which seems surprising. Do we have any drawings for that? Well, o3 can’t do them, but it can instruct GPT-4o on creating simple diagrams to help us understand the dimensions:
The sizes above are even less surprising if you consider the size of the iPhone 13 mini: 131.5 x 64.2 mm. It’s almost as if Apple wants to create a foldable iPhone by joining two iPhone 13 minis with a hinge. Naturally, I went back to o3-mini-high to see how big such a foldable would be. ChatGPT gave me the dimensions again.
Let’s use the iPhone 13 mini as a starting point
A foldable iPhone based on two iPhone 13 mini would have these measurements assuming the iPhone 13 mini’s screen-to-body ratio stayed in place:
- Unfolded: 131.5 x 128.4 mm ; 6.78-inch display
- Folded: 131.5 x 64.2 mm; 5.40-inch cover display
Such a foldable would have a foldable display about 1 inch smaller than Digital Chat Station’s claims.
What if we fold the iPad mini 7 in half?
When Apple launched the iPad mini 6 a few years ago, I said the tablet was practically a large iPhone waiting to be folded. That was my next thought for ChatGPT. I instructed o3-mini-high to fold the iPad mini 7 but apply a screen-to-body ratio identical to the iPhone mini 13. The iPad mini has massive bezels, which aren’t acceptable for phones.
I wanted to see how large the cover display would be on a foldable iPhone with a foldable display as big as the iPad mini’s 8.3-inch screen. Here’s what the AI gave me:
- Unfolded: 135.1 x 180.2 mm ; 8.3-inch display
- Folded: 135.1 x 90.1 mm; 6-inch cover display
In other words, folding the iPad mini 7 in half would give us a foldable iPhone about as big as the device in Digital Chat Station’s claims. It would be a foldable phone that’s hardly as tall as Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 6, as it would feature a wider cover screen, more suitable for one-hand operation.
Remember the Oppo Find N?
Has anybody made anything like that? Yes, they have. Oppo was the first Chinese vendor to show the world what a different Fold-type foldable could look like a few years ago. Here are the dimensions of the 2021 Oppo Find N:
- Unfolded: 132.6 x 140.2 x 8.0 mm; 7.1-inch display with 87.3% screen-to-body ratio
- Folded: 132.6 x 73 x 15.9 mm; 5.49-inch cover display
These dimensions are almost in line with what ChatGPT gave me for a foldable iPhone based on the Weibo leak.
Since the Oppo Find N, foldable phones have gotten thinner, and display bezels shrank even more. Hinge designs also improved. It’s not unfathomable to expect Apple to create a foldable iPhone that looks more like the wider Oppo Find N than the tall design Samsung has gone for with its Z Fold phones.
All of this is speculation, yes. Also, ChatGPT can make mistakes, no matter how hard I might try to steer it. But the comparisons with existing devices suggest that a foldable iPhone with a foldable display of up to 8 inches and a cover screen of at least 5.5-inch makes perfect sense. All we need now is more leakers to confirm Digital Chat Station’s leaked dimensions.
