Rasheed Richmond has owned several Samsung foldable phones. It has been a lonely existence. He is typically the only non-iPhone user at work meetings and social gatherings, and worse, people don’t even recognize his device. The 48-year-old tech chief executive in Los Angeles has tried to persuade people to try Samsung’s version. Few are biting. “They don’t feel brave enough,” he said.
Then Apple introduced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, and Richmond’s phone started buzzing with a consistent refrain: “Now I understand why you have a fold.”
Timothy W. Martin and Sooyoung Rhee’s front-page story in Friday’s Journal is a small comedy about a large business phenomenon, and it is the most quietly instructive piece in the paper.
The grievance, itemized
Samsung beat Apple to jumbo-sized screens, to 5G connectivity, and to the industry’s first mainstream foldable phone, in 2019. It has released roughly twenty foldable models since. Weeks before the iPhone Duo’s unveiling, it debuted a nearly identical-looking device.
Apple chief executive John Ternus acknowledged rivals’ foldables in his introduction, then added that those incumbents feel “like two phones awkwardly stuck together,” while the Duo brings an “entirely new design… while preserving everything you love and expect.” Samsung’s official U.S. Mobile account replied on X: “Let us know when you’re done reheating our leftovers.”
The fan response has been, to use the Journal’s word, indignant. Message boards are dissecting Apple’s promotional photograph — don’t the fingers look unnaturally long? Is the Duo discriminating against left-handed users? Samsung owners report strangers excitedly asking “Is that the new iPhone?” and describe the resulting collective eye roll. One iPhone-owning comedian posted that “this one-sided beef needs to end,” on the grounds that iPhone users don’t even know when Galaxy phones are released.
What the numbers say
With just a few months of sales, the iPhone Duo is projected to nearly match Samsung’s entire annual volume in the growing U.S. foldable market this year, and then take a majority in 2027, according to Counterpoint Research forecasts. “When Apple does anything, it gets the spotlight,” said Counterpoint’s Tarun Pathak.
And this is the thing: Samsung is not a weak company. It has display and semiconductor divisions that push genuine technical frontiers, and Apple buys some of that chip and display technology. What Apple has is the operating system, the software ecosystem, and a vast affluent installed base — about 1.4 billion iPhones against more than a billion Samsung devices, out of more than five billion smartphones worldwide.
Our read
There is a well-worn investment lesson here and a better planning one.
The investment version: first-mover advantage is frequently the opposite of an advantage. The first mover pays the cost of educating the market, establishing the category and discovering what customers actually hate about version one. The second mover reads the notes. Apple sued Samsung in 2011 for copying the iPhone and won $539 million from a jury before the sides settled; fifteen years later Samsung is the one saying its rival is reheating leftovers. Both complaints are partly true. Neither determined who made money.
The planning version is closer to home. The reason so few of Richmond’s colleagues would try a foldable is not technical. It is that they didn’t feel brave enough — his phrase, and a precise one. People do not adopt an unfamiliar thing until a trusted party makes it socially safe, and then they adopt it all at once and describe it as obvious.
That is the exact mechanism behind most household financial inertia. The default fund in a 401(k), the bank that has paid 0.44% for three years, the insurance policy nobody has priced since 2019 — none of those persist because anyone concluded they were best. They persist because changing requires being the first person in your circle to do something slightly unusual, and almost nobody wants to be that. The fifteen-minute review exists mostly to make the obvious thing feel safe enough to do.