MagSafe is in.
That is the headline, because for the last few months it genuinely was not clear. A folding phone needs a hinge, a hinge needs space, and magnets need space too. Something had to give, and plenty of people assumed it would be the ring of magnets on the back that half your desk accessories depend on. It is not. According to Mark Gurman, speaking in a new Tom’s Guide interview, every signal he has seen points to MagSafe being present and correct on the iPhone Ultra.
Good. Because a £2,000 phone that cannot sit on the charging puck you already own would have been a very expensive kind of annoying.
That interview dropped a week out from the launch and it is stuffed with detail, including a few things nobody had reported before. Here is what we now know.
Confirmed, 9 September: Apple announced it on stage. It is the iPhone Duo, $1,999 for 256GB rising to $3,199 for 2TB, in Star White and Night Sky, with a 7.6-inch inner display and a 5.4-inch cover display. Pre-orders 16 October, on sale 23 October. Full pricing and specs.
The Screens And The Silicon
Two displays, as expected. A 5.5-inch cover screen for the outside, and a 7.8-inch panel when you open it up.
That cover display size is the interesting number. Foldables live or die on whether you can actually use them shut, and 5.5 inches is a proper phone screen rather than the letterbox strip some early folding handsets tried to pass off. If Apple has got the aspect ratio right, most of your day never involves opening the thing at all.
Inside, Gurman says it runs the latest Apple Pro chip and the latest Apple in-house modem. No surprises there, and honestly no need for any. This is the most expensive iPhone Apple has ever made. Shipping it with anything other than top-tier silicon would have been indefensible.
About That Crease
Here is where expectations need a small, gentle adjustment.
The rumour going round for months was “crease-less”, which was always doing a lot of work as a word. Gurman’s read is more measured: the crease is not entirely gone. It is comparable to what Samsung is doing on its latest foldables, and possibly slightly better, with the liquid metal hinge getting the credit for the improvement.
Which is fine. Genuinely fine. Nobody has eliminated the crease, and the current best-in-class versions are already at the point where you stop noticing after a week. Matching that at the first attempt would be a solid result. Beating it would be a very Apple thing to do, arriving late to a category and quietly setting the new bar.
The more interesting part is what that hinge is for. Gurman says the internal brief was to make the foldable as durable as a normal iPhone, or as close to it as physically possible, and that durability has soaked up an enormous amount of engineering time. That is a big claim for a device with a moving part running down the middle of it, and it is the single thing I most want to see tested properly. A folding phone that survives a pocket, a beach and a two-year-old is worth more than one with a perfect screen.
Multitasking Is The Real Story
The hardware will get the attention. The software is what will decide whether this thing is a novelty or a tool.
Gurman has previously reported that iOS 27 brings iPad-style app layouts and side-by-side multitasking to the Ultra. His new addition is drag and drop between apps on screen, so you can pull an image, a file or a block of text out of one and drop it straight into another.
That is the feature that makes a 7.8-inch inner screen worth unfolding. Two apps side by side with no way to move anything between them is just two apps that happen to be near each other. Drag and drop is what turns the extra space into actual work getting done. Apple has spent years refining this on iPad, and the fact that it is coming across rather than being reinvented suggests the software side may be further along than people assume.
When You Can Buy One
This is the encouraging bit. The persistent worry has been a staggered launch, with the Ultra unveiled at next week’s event and then quietly appearing in late October or November once supply catches up.
Gurman does not buy it. He would be very surprised if the foldable did not arrive at the same time as the new Pro models or very close to it, meaning either a shared launch date or a gap measured in weeks rather than months. Talk of massive delays and supply chain trouble, he reckons, is not reflecting what is actually happening.
On price, he is holding to the number he has given before: north of $2,000 to start. Convert that, add the usual adjustment Apple applies on this side of the Atlantic, and UK buyers should brace for something well into four figures. This was never going to be the sensible option.
Where That Leaves Us
A week out, the picture is close to complete. Two screens, the best chip and modem Apple makes, a hinge engineered to survive ordinary life, a crease that is competitive rather than magically absent, iPad-grade multitasking with drag and drop, and a launch that lands with or shortly after the Pro models. That leaves the harder question, which is who Apple is actually selling a folding phone to at this price.
The only genuinely unanswered question is whether the thing feels good in the hand, and no leak is going to settle that one. We find out next week.
Are You Actually Buying One?
Two grand is a lot of phone, so let us have it straight: is the folding iPhone something you have been waiting years for, or an expensive answer to a question you never asked? And for anyone already on a Samsung foldable, does Apple’s version tempt you across? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
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