If you’ve paid any attention at all to the tech press in the past week or so, you’ve no doubt been deluged with headlines touting one company after another prepping a foldable smartphone for release — with the manufacturers ranging from Huawei to LG, Motorola, Xiaomi and several others.
All the usual suspects, in other words. And it’s also no secret, as we and others have reported, that Apple has at least considered the possibility of making such an iPhone — going so far as to obtain a patent covering “Flexible Display Devices” related to its research in this area.
And while we don’t know whether a foldable iPhone will ever see the light of day — with Apple no doubt preferring to sit back and watch its smartphone rivals try and gain traction with these devices first before it makes a move — there’s at least one high-profile tech personality who very much wants a bendy iPhone. He’s none other than Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who told a Bloomberg reporter that he not only wants to get his hands on a flexible iPhone, but that he very much wants Apple to be a leader in this still novel corner of the smartphone market.
“Apple has been a leader for quite a long time in a few areas such as Touch ID, (Face ID) and easy payment with the phone,” Wozniak said during the Bloomberg interview. “They’re not the leader in areas like the folding phone, and that worries me because I really want a folding phone.”
In the video snippet Bloomberg included of their interview with the Apple co-founder, he goes on to concede that Apple “always has surprises,” and is consistently working on a slew of new developments and products in the background. But, yes, as far as foldable phones go: “It’s one of those new technologies that catch my attention,” Wozniak said.
Foldable phones have been front-and-center at MWC in recent days, with many observers questioning their viability, given what tend to be expensive, four-figure price tags for these handsets that introduce a strange new form factor. If a foldable iPhone ever does materialize, there’s at least a chance it will look a little like the image at the top of this post — that image being a rendering prepared by Dutch tech blog LetsGoDigital based on Apple’s patent documentation.
