Apple's $2,000-Plus Foldable iPhone Lands in a Market Huawei and Xiaomi Dominate

Hours before Apple opens its September event in Cupertino — 1 a.m. Beijing time on Thursday — China's phone industry has already spent three days answering the only question that matters to it: what happens when the iPhone finally folds?

The answer Apple is expected to give is a device its engineers have reportedly been calling the iPhone Ultra. According to a report by the STAR Market Daily carried by Chinese outlets this week, Apple's first foldable pairs a large inner screen with a smaller outer one, folds down to roughly the size of a passport, and runs on an A20 Pro chip with Apple's own C2 modem — no telephoto camera, Touch ID, split-screen multitasking, and a hinge designed to make the crease across the display as inconspicuous as possible. The price is the story: more than $2,000 by most estimates, with the top configuration reportedly reaching $2,999, which would make it the most expensive iPhone ever sold. Chinese leaks put the domestic starting price at 14,999 yuan.

On Zhihu, China's question-and-answer platform, the most-read discussion of the launch is not about the chip but about the crease — the fold line Apple has never had to engineer before, and which early leaks suggest the Ultra has shrunk but not eliminated. "The crease problem: where exactly is it stuck?" the question asks, and the top answers read like an engineering seminar on ultra-thin glass and hinge drop-design.

Apple is arriving late to a market its Chinese rivals have spent the week re-drawing. On Sunday night, Xiaomi launched the 18 Fold, its first "mid-fold," from 10,999 yuan — as our coverage noted, CEO Lei Jun publicly winced at memory prices before showing off a "foldable graveyard" of more than 1,500 phones destroyed in durability testing. A day earlier, Huawei put its new tri-fold — a phone that opens into a tablet — on sale from 19,999 yuan, shipping with its first new flagship chip in six years. And Huawei's wide, squat "wide slab" Pura X View sits at 5,999 yuan, a shape Apple has never attempted. Richard Yu, Huawei's consumer chief, spent the pre-launch days advising iPhone owners to keep a Huawei wide-slab as a backup phone — "as a backup for a few days, it may become your main phone."

Weibo users have turned the pricing gap into a referendum. "Huawei and Xiaomi both start above ten thousand. If the iPhone Ultra really is 14,999, are you picking a domestic foldable or Apple's?" one account with a phone-review following asked, drawing hundreds of comments. Another put it sardonically: "Apple's first foldable is so cheap" — next to 19,999-yuan Huawei flagships, the joke goes, 14,999 almost sounds modest.

Chinese business media have settled on a name for the endgame that borrows from history: the "Three Kingdoms showdown" (三国杀) — the phrase is also a popular strategy card game — after the era when the realm split into three contending kingdoms before its unification. Baidu's board carries the framing on multiple trending entries this week, with analysts predicting the three brands together could control more than 80 percent of the foldable market. What no one predicts is a comfortable Apple. The company enters seven years after the first Samsung Fold and several shapes behind — and on Thursday morning, Beijing time, it will find out what Chinese buyers think a latecomer's foldable is worth.