Foldable phones mature into commodity, creating opening for Apple's entry

For nearly a decade, Samsung carried the foldable smartphone category on its back — absorbing the costs, the failures, and the skepticism that come with pioneering a new form factor. Now, with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Flip 8 arriving as polished but unremarkable refinements, the technology has crossed a quiet threshold: from frontier to commodity. In the long arc of consumer technology, this moment of maturation is rarely an ending — it is almost always an invitation, and Apple has been waiting at the door.