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Comment by Hippocrates | Hacker News Reader

It blows my mind that companies have the resources to sink into "innovations" like this that are just so far out that they are sure to fail. The mere sight of this stresses me out with how fragile it looks, and how clumsy it would be to use

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The innovations in this area are incremental so you won't get the best out of it now. Investment into bending oled already went into smartphones so migrating it to laptops doest require signifiant capital. I would take this over a new set of "emoji innovation" and new OS skin/theme anytime.

I must confess that I like bending/folding screens and "rolling screens" even more (i.e. for TVs). I would fold my iphone if I could(assuming that the screen would not get worse) and I would love to double the screensize of my macbook air or shink it into an ipad.

No. If companies didn't sink resources into "innovations" like this you'd still travel around on faster horses.

Let them burn some budget on crazy ideas, some will stick.

Why does it look any more fragile than an iPad, for example?

An iPad have no moving mechanical parts, and are in an aluminum body that doesn't flex.

Iphone 6 says hi https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/270055-documents-reveal-a...

apple decided to use a paper sticker in place of metal shield, turns out whoever designed the phone in the first place used that metal shield as a structural element. No shield = bendy phone = Touch IC just so happen to be located at the bend and its balls pop off. You end up with

https://www.lifewire.com/iphone-touch-disease-4120914

We haven't solved the "bendable glass" problem yet, so foldable displays are made of soft plastic which is extremely easy to damage compared to the toughened glass you're accustomed to. You can put a permanent dent in them with your fingernail if you're not careful.

Had my Samsung fold3 a full year now, the foldable screen is surprisingly still as good as new

The iphone was at one point in time the same innovation as this and at that time there were plenty of people like you calling it an "obvious" failure.

At the time people were talking about how hard and clumsy it was to type on and getting your finger grease all over the screen of the phone.

How did that foldable phone craze a few years ago go? Are they still around?

Ya they are still around. Getting steadily less expensive.

Not just around, but growing rapidly.

https://omdia.tech.informa.com/pr/2022-mar/omdia-foldable-sm...

It's still going. I remember I t ied one in person, felt like a layer of tape on top of two displays.

IIRC the first thing people did with those phones is rip the “tape” off just to realize their phone was now broken.

That was just the first Galaxy fold. On the later ones you can safely remove the screenprotector

They are around and actually very good. I got a flip 3 for my wife and I wish I got one myself, too. While not bad, the camera could be better - I like the pixel camera more.

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