Kuo: Apple's Foldable iPhone Could Follow iPhone X Playbook — Announced With Other Models, Ships Later

There’s a pattern in how Apple launches its most technically ambitious products. The original iPhone X was announced alongside the iPhone 8 series in September 2017, but customers couldn’t buy one until November. The delay wasn’t a marketing tactic — it was a manufacturing constraint. The OLED panels and the new Face ID system were simply too hard to make at scale.

According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the foldable iPhone is about to follow that same script.

Kuo posted on X this weekend that Apple’s first foldable device will almost certainly be announced alongside the rest of the iPhone 18 lineup in September. But pre-orders and actual shipments likely won’t start until the fourth quarter — mirroring the iPhone X timeline almost exactly.

The reason, as Kuo explains, is simple geometry. His latest industry survey puts the foldable iPhone’s second-half 2026 assembly shipments at 700,000 to 800,000 units. Of those, only 50,000 to 100,000 — roughly 10 percent — will be ready in the third quarter. That’s not nearly enough inventory for a September launch with wide availability.

By comparison, the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are expected to ship 20 to 22 million units combined in Q3 2026 alone. Those phones will be on shelves in September. The foldable, with its novel hinge mechanism, complex display, and premium component stack, simply won’t be ready.

The parallels to 2017 are striking. When Apple unveiled the iPhone X alongside the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus on September 12, 2017, the X didn’t go up for pre-order until October 27 and didn’t ship until November 3. The iPhone 8, meanwhile, was already in customers’ hands by September 22. The bottleneck then was the OLED display and the TrueDepth camera system — new technologies that took longer to mass-produce than Apple’s supply chain anticipated. Kuo estimates the iPhone X shipped fewer than a million units in Q3 2017.

The foldable iPhone faces a similar reality. The device is reported to carry a price tag of roughly $2,300 to $2,500, making it Apple’s most expensive handset by a wide margin. But even at that price, Kuo expects demand to outstrip supply through the end of 2026.

His conversations with telecom carriers, retail channels, and resellers suggest the foldable iPhone will sell out almost immediately after pre-orders open. Shipping estimates are expected to stretch to four to six weeks — or longer — and stay there through December. Scarce initial supply plus a highly distinctive visual design and genuinely new user interactions — that’s the recipe for secondary-market premiums.

Kuo says a resale price 50 to 100 percent above the official retail price is “not impossible” in the early weeks.

The iPhone X shortage resolved by late November 2017, and Apple ultimately shipped about 30 million units in the second half of that year. The foldable iPhone’s 700,000 to 800,000 units over the same period is a far more constrained number — partly because of the price, partly because the engineering challenges are even greater than what the iPhone X presented.

Kuo argues the best time to assess real demand for the foldable iPhone will be late 2026 to early 2027. By then, the holiday season will be over, the initial hype will have cooled, and production constraints should have eased. That’s when the numbers will tell us whether the foldable iPhone is a genuine product category, or just a very expensive halo device.