GoKawiilApple is widely expected to release the first iPhone with a foldable display this year. What’s less certain is exactly when it will launch and what Apple will call it.
iPhone Fold, to me, is the clearest shorthand way to reference the foldable iPhone before it has an official name. It also feels like the least likely name to actually be used.
iPhone Fold, you know, the folding one
John Gruber at Daring Fireball dings Fold because the “name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables.” I laughed.
“You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes,” he wrote this week. “A good name conveys feeling, not just function.”
Fair, but iPod touch immediately comes to mind.
It was the iPod with a touch screen, marred only by the common shorthand iTouch.
iPhone Fold isn’t a very aspirational name, but it fits the format used by iPod touch, I think. It’s the iPhone with a folding screen.
I joked in the 9to5Mac Slack last September that Apple should call the folding display model iPhone fold (lowercase f, like the lowercase t in iPod touch) as the way to differentiate from a Samsung Galaxy Fold.
In a different era, we’d end up with iFold. For the record, I know that is a bad idea.
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