Kuo revises forecast and says an under-display Touch ID for iPhone will not arrive until H2 2023 and a foldable iPhone is not expected until 2024
Context & Ripple Effects
Four months earlier, Kuo had Apple launching a foldable iPhone with an 8-inch QHD+ flexible OLED display in 2023, shipping 15–20 million units that year. Today's revision walks both dates back — under-display Touch ID to H2 2023 and any foldable iPhone to 2024 — making this the first visible crack in the aggressive timeline.
The subsequent record validates the skepticism baked into this downgrade: by 2025 Kuo was describing a $2,000+ book-style foldable targeting Q4 2026 mass production, and by mid-2026 suppliers were still planning fewer than 1 million units for Q3, with preorders at risk of slipping to Q4. The 2023 ship date never materialized at anything close to the original volume.
First-order effects
- Buyers counting on Touch ID's return get a firmer answer: under-display hardware is now an H2 2023 proposition, so Face ID remains the sole biometric path on iPhones through at least two more annual cycles.
- Apple's supplier base loses its assumed 2023 foldable window, pushing flexible-OLED ramp plans and any component commitments tied to a 2024-or-later launch.
Second-order effects
- Rival foldable makers get a longer uncontested runway: with Apple absent from the category through at least 2023–2024, there is no iPhone-shaped competitive forcing function on their pricing or design cycles in that window.
- Analyst-driven expectations reset across the supply chain — when the most-followed Apple forecaster cuts a timeline, component makers' capacity and tooling decisions anchored to the earlier date carry stranded-cost risk.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that holds here — an initial forecast of 15–20 million foldable units in 2023 collapsing into a sub-one-million-unit quarter in 2026 — suggests first-pass timelines for unannounced Apple form factors should be treated as upper bounds, not baselines, by investors and suppliers alike.
- If the cadence continues, foldable iPhones settle into a niche premium tier rather than a mainstream replacement cycle, keeping Apple's revenue structure dependent on incremental slab-phone upgrades for years longer than early forecasts implied.
The trend: Forecasts for unreleased Apple hardware form factors systematically front-run reality, with foldable-iPhone timelines slipping year after year from a projected 2023 launch toward an actual late-decade debut.