Xiaomi Bets on the 'Mid-Fold' as China's Foldable Super Week Begins

Xiaomi was set to lift the curtain on the 18 Fold on Monday evening — a phone that closes into a 5.38-inch slab and opens into a 7.58-inch tablet, both screens cut to the same √2:1 paper ratio so that documents and e-books need no zooming or cropping. Hours earlier, Huawei had its own global livestream for the Mate XT 2, the second generation of its wing-spreading tri-fold, alongside HarmonyOS 7. Baidu's trending board has a name for the squeeze: a "super release week" for foldables, with Huawei, Xiaomi and, by rumour, Apple all on stage.

The form factor is the argument. The "big fold" — two full-size slabs hinged like a book — is, as one reviewer put it, essentially two bar phones glued together, with users spending 80 to 90 percent of their time on the small outer screen. The clamshell "small fold" is light but gives up battery, performance and cooling. The 18 Fold belongs to the "mid-fold," a taller book shape that closes slim and opens big, and which Xiaomi's reviewers are calling the year's defining form. "This year will be the year one of the mid-fold — Apple is doing one too," wrote the well-followed tech blogger 科技新一, who has been testing one for weeks. "Looking at big folds now, they have this old-man vibe."

What is not in dispute is the price. Leaks and analyst chatter put the starting tag around 12,000 yuan — roughly 1,700 dollars — and Xiaomi president Lu Weibing has essentially confirmed it, saying the phone is "genuinely expensive." One teardown-style accounting making the rounds blamed the component bill: first-run LPDDR6 memory adding about 2,000 yuan, Xiaomi's in-house XRING O3 chip about 600, the twin high-spec screens 500, hinges and cameras another 1,000 — more than 4,000 yuan of cost growth over last year's model before assembly. That Xiaomi even has its own phone chip to bill for is part of the same story of Chinese phonemakers pulling silicon in-house; so is Huawei's return to openly certified 5G flagships, which we covered on Friday.

The reference price everyone keeps citing is Apple's: the long-rumoured iPhone Fold is expected to land around 15,000 to 16,000 yuan in China. On Zhihu, a question about Huawei's Monday launch event drew a million degree of heat within hours, with commenters tracking whether the tri-fold has graduated from showcase gadget to daily driver.

That is the real test of the week. Foldables are no longer a novelty in China — they are the segment where Chinese makers out-design Samsung and are setting the template Apple is expected to copy, from screen ratios to hinge engineering to the mid-fold itself. What the market has not yet seen is a mainstream foldable priced like a luxury watch when memory and chip costs are climbing at once. Xiaomi's evening keynote, and the order books that follow, will show whether Chinese buyers accept that the foldable's maturation now comes with a flagship price — or whether 12,000 yuan is where the love of the big screen meets its limit.