Apple Reportedly Considered Going Full Palm Pilot With Its Foldable iPhone
Apple’s first foldable iPhone is no longer a distant rumor. Most credible reporting now places it on stage this September, next to the iPhone 18 Pro family, under an internal name that keeps surfacing as iPhone Ultra. The product Apple is preparing to sell is a book-style device: short and wide when closed, almost iPad-like when opened. That is not, however, the only foldable Cupertino seriously considered.
For years, Apple also studied a compact clamshell — a square flip that would have sat in a pocket the way a late-1990s Palm Pilot did. The company even prototyped a stylus for the larger foldable, then killed that idea too. The story of the first folding iPhone is as much about the designs Apple walked away from as the one it is about to ship.
Two foldables, two jobs
Foldable phones come in two main shapes, and Apple looked at both.
The book-style design folds left to right. Closed, it is a squat slab with a cover screen large enough for calls, messages, and quick apps. Opened, it becomes a small tablet. That is the path Apple chose. Reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and a string of supply-chain leaks describe a cover display of about 5.5 inches and an inner display of about 7.8 inches. The inner panel is expected to use a 4:3 aspect ratio, closer to an iPad mini than to the tall, narrow screens on most current foldables. Thickness targets are aggressive: roughly 4.5 millimeters unfolded and around 9 to 9.5 millimeters folded.
The other concept was a clamshell. Fold it vertically and you get a small, almost square brick. Open it and you get a conventional phone-sized screen. Samsung and Motorola have spent years refining that idea with the Galaxy Z Flip and Razr lines. For Apple, the appeal was obvious. A flip shrinks a full iPhone into something that disappears into a pocket. In silhouette, that closed device would have looked more like a modern Palm Pilot than any iPhone Apple has sold since 2007: short, wide, and built to live in a jacket rather than a jeans pocket.
Gurman wrote early this year that a square clamshell was “under consideration” inside Apple labs as a possible second model if the first foldable created real demand. Older reporting from The Information said Apple had already built clamshell prototypes years earlier, before settling on the larger book-style device for the debut. Chinese tipsters later claimed the flip had even reached internal review as a follow-up product.
Why the flip was called unnecessary
By March 2026, that follow-up looked much less certain.
A leak from the Weibo account Instant Digital said Apple had abandoned the flip design because most people inside the company felt it was “unnecessary.” The complaint was specific. The clamshell did not create a new must-use scenario. Its biggest selling point was that it folded small enough for skinny jeans. That, insiders argued, missed what Apple actually wanted from a new form factor.
There was a hardware problem as well. A hinge running across the middle of a small phone splits an already tight chassis in two. Battery, cameras, speakers, and antennas all compete for the same cubic centimeters. Apple has spent this generation chasing thinness — the iPhone Air already pushed that idea hard — and a flip would have made the fight worse, not better. One report put the alternative bluntly: Apple would rather design a smaller conventional iPhone than launch a flip that sacrificed internal space for a party trick.
That does not mean a clamshell iPhone is dead forever. Some older roadmaps still pointed to a flip around 2028. Gurman himself cautioned that the product was “far from guaranteed.” The decision that matters now is the first one. Apple will enter foldables with the device that adds a new job — phone plus pocket tablet — not the one that mainly shrinks the old job.
The product that survived
What remains is still a sharp break from every iPhone on sale today.
Closed, the Ultra is expected to look like a passport more than a phone. Dummy units leaked earlier this year showed a short, wide body with a dual-camera plateau and a cover screen that can handle everyday tasks without unfolding. Opened, the inner display approaches iPad mini size. That extra width is the point. Two apps can sit side by side. Video and games get a canvas that is not a tall strip. Early testers, Gurman reported in late August, were impressed by how it fit in a pocket, by the durability of the hinge, and by the iPad-style layout on the inner screen. Some also liked it as a camera viewfinder.
The compromises are equally clear. Face ID is expected to give way to Touch ID in the side button because the front panel is too thin for the usual sensor array. The front camera is rumored to sit in a small hole punch rather than a Dynamic Island cutout, though software may still keep some Island-style live activities. The rear camera system is widely described as a dual setup — a 48-megapixel main and an ultra-wide — with no dedicated telephoto. For a device that could start near $2,000, that is a notable gap next to an iPhone 18 Pro.
Software work is already visible. The first iOS 27 developer beta contained references to fold state, hinge angle, a secondary display, and a second cover glass. Apple said nothing about foldable hardware at WWDC, but the operating system is clearly being taught to know whether the device is closed, half open, or fully flat.
The stylus that almost returned
There is a second Palm echo, and it is more ironic.
Steve Jobs mocked the stylus. The original iPhone pitch treated a finger as the only pointing device that mattered. Palm built the opposite culture. The Palm Pilot’s whole interface assumed a plastic pen and Graffiti handwriting. For a foldable with iPad-like screen area, Apple reportedly asked the old question again.
According to a late-August report citing Gurman, Apple not only considered an Apple Pencil for the Ultra, it prototyped one. The accessory was imagined attaching to the side of the phone for storage and charging, the same way the Pencil docks on iPads. Then the company cancelled it. The reasons were practical: thickness, durability, and the likelihood that people would not actually carry a pencil with a phone they unfold a hundred times a day.
So the first folding iPhone is expected to stay finger-first. The large inner display will be used for split apps, reading, and video, not for handwriting or illustration in the iPad sense. That choice keeps the device simpler. It also closes the door on the most literal Palm Pilot fantasy — a pocket computer you poke with a stick.
What “Palm Pilot” actually means here
The comparison is easy to overdo. A 2026 foldable iPhone is not a monochrome organizer running on two AAA batteries. It will have cellular radios, a modern SoC, dual screens, and a price that would have bought a used car in 1997.
The resemblance is about posture, not spec sheets. The Palm Pilot succeeded because it was small enough to become a habit. You carried it because it disappeared, then opened it because the screen was useful. Apple’s cancelled clamshell chased that habit in the most direct way: fold the phone until it is a brick. The book-style Ultra chases a different habit: keep the closed device pocketable, then reward the person who opens it with a real workspace.
That is why the inner 4:3 display matters more than the nostalgia. Apple is not trying to win the flip-phone revival. It is trying to put a usable mini-tablet in a pocket and make iOS feel native on both halves. If the crease is as faint as rumored, and if the hinge holds up the way early testers claim, the Ultra will be judged on that new job. If the camera is merely decent and the price is north of two thousand dollars, it will also be judged on whether “new job” is enough.
The next few weeks
Apple has not confirmed a name, a price, or even that a foldable exists. The calendar, the dummy units, the iOS 27 strings, and Gurman’s testing reports all point the same direction: a September event, limited supply at launch, and a device that looks nothing like the slab iPhone that defined the last nineteen years.
The Palm Pilot version of that story — the tiny flip, the stylus, the organizer you flip open with one hand — was on the table. Apple studied it, argued about it, and put it back. What it kept is stranger and, if the rumors are right, more ambitious: not a phone that gets smaller, but a phone that becomes a different computer when you open it.
Whether that was the right call will be obvious the first week it is in stores. Until then, the most interesting thing about Apple’s foldable is not only the product it is preparing to announce. It is the smaller, squarer, more nostalgic machine it decided not to build.
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