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Comment by ronsor | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get the fanfare over folding phones. They tend to be more fragile, and if I really need a larger screen, I'd much rather use a laptop or tablet.

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There's totally valid criticism to be made about the durability, not to mention price, but the pitch is crystal clear, "your phone can be a tablet on-demand". You (the proverbial you, not necessarily every person) always have your phone with you, but often don't have a tablet or laptop.

>always have your phone with you, but often don't have a tablet or laptop.

I cant do any work on a phone or tablet (emails dont count). Laptops are fine, of course. Comparing to laptops just makes too little sense. The thing is over 1cm tick when folded - making it extra difficult to put in any front pocket (or I will have get skinnier hips)

Thickness is really never an issue. My current phone in its case is over 1cm already, and I could easily fit a phone twice as thick in my back pocket, and also a bit wider. And I'm a woman, with the deficient pants pockets that entails.

And I agree that work is probably not the main use case for this for most people. It's really just a convenient way to have a tablet with you at all times. There are certainly times I wish my phone had a bigger screen.

For many people the phone is the only computing device they use. Keeping portability and offering a larger display is a compelling offering for those people.

I tend to agree with you.

> For many people the phone is the only computing device they use.

I suspect the crossover area of the Venn diagram between people who spend what a foldable costs on a phone and people who have no other computing device is extremely small.

Why so? For most people a computer (in the traditional keyboard/mouse sense) isn't a leisure device, a phone is. They scroll social media feeds and watch YouTube or whatever.

I'm sure most of us on HN use them for leisure, but for most people a computer is a device for work, not for play.

I quite like the idea of a tablet I can keep in my pocket. If there was some sort of first-party attachable keyboard (a la the iPad magic keyboard), I'd be strongly considering getting this. In the age of AI and increasingly-mature cloud agents, I can get a lot of my work done from a setup like that.

Galaxy Fold is popular with older people who have trouble reading small text

That’s a good point bigger text is possible on the iPhone but you can display less of it so it might be nice to have the bigger screen.

And if there's anything Apple wants to do, it's sell phones to older people.

I no longer need an iPad Mini in my bag with this thing...

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