People Are Apparently Ditching Their IPhones for Fold-up Razrs: Report
A Motorola exec said that one in five people buying a model of its foldable phone were iPhone users.
The exec shared the stat with CNET, which said it comes from purchases of an earlier Razr version.
Apple is rumored to be making — or at least investigating making — a foldable phone of its own.
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One in five people purchasing Motorola's Razr phone apparently gave up an iPhone to do so.
It could be for the throwback thrill of folding their device.
A recent version of the Razr phone — whose popularity peaked in the early-to-mid 2000s when folding phones were as common as today's viral TikToks — has drawn about 20% of its sales from Apple users, a Motorola executive told tech-news site CNET.
"This is definitely the family that we have the most amount of iPhone users switching to us," Allison Yi, Motorola's head of North America product operations, said this week. (CNET said the one in five figure is from 2021, when Motorola introduced an earlier version of the Razr.)
Yi's comments came ahead of the June 23 release of the Razr Plus phone, which features a larger screen and starts at $999.99. The first Razr debuted in 2004 and cost about $500.
Apple may also be considering a foldable phone
Unlike most makers of Android phones, including Google and Samsung, Apple doesn't sell a folding phone — though it's widely reported to be working on such a device as well as a foldable iPad.
There is some speculation that Apple could, by 2025, unveil a so-called "iPhone Fold," with an organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, screen that can bend. JUST MOVED THIS UP
Some evidence that foldable devices are at least under consideration comes from patent filings. One showed a device that could be folded in half. Another filing showed a phone that could quickly shut itself to protect its screen if it's dropped.
It's also possible that Apple could never release a foldable phone if it can't ensure there won't be issues with cracking or poor wear in the parts of the screen that would bend.
Foldable phones are a blast from the past
And for all the retro energy of flip phones, there's no guarantee that younger buyers will embrace them.
Some Gen Zers, Insider has reported, appear unimpressed by recent flip-phone models.
Stephanie Elliot, 23, told Insider in March that she had switched to a foldable phone years earlier and liked that the screen was protected but that she wasn't enamored of it.
"The flip was the only appeal of this phone," Elliot said, adding: "It's just a smartphone."
Source: Business Insider
