Apple is going to announce the iPhone Ultra (iPhone Fold) later this year, but it won’t be available to buy immediately.
It’s iPhone X All Over Again: Apple’s Folding iPhone Ultra Won’t be Available to Buy Immediately After Announcement
If you were hoping to be the first one to get Apple’s folding iPhone, then there are a few things you should know.
According to Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone Ultra, Apple’s folding iPhone, will be announced alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. However, Kuo says that the iPhone Ultra won’t be available to buy immediately.
The iPhone Ultra will be available to pre-order at a later date due to manufacturing challenges. And, the folding iPhone is expected to sell out very soon after pre-orders go live, with delivery times slipping as much as 6 weeks.
If some of this sounds familiar to you, your hunch is correct, because Apple did the same thing when it announced the iPhone X back in 2017. The phone was announced in September, and it went up for pre-order in October.
Apple is expected to ship around 20-22 million iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max smartphones in 2026. But when it comes to the iPhone Ultra, Apple is not expecting more than 7-8 million of them. Definitely a small number compared to the regular iPhone.
It remains to be seen when exactly the folding iPhone will go up for pre-order. October sounds like a good month for it, but there is a chance it may spill into November.
