Why a Foldable iPhone Should Never Come with a Stylus | Hard Philosophy
Consumer electronics always habitually use faster chips and more features to prove progress, but how a product is remembered often depends on those tiny, specific designs—the tactile feel of materials, the trade-offs in form, and even the layout of buttons.
In "Hard Philosophy," Ifanr attempts to strip away the outer layer of technology and specifications to explore the fundamental human roots in product design.
This is the 85th article in the "Hard Philosophy" series.
On January 9, 2007, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Steve Jobs stood on the stage at the original iPhone launch event, pointing at a stylus on the big screen and mocking it relentlessly.
The audience erupted in laughter. Then, he raised his right hand: "We're going to use the best pointing device in the world. We're going to use a pointing device that we're all born with—we're going to use our ten fingers." Nineteen years have passed, and as foldable screens expand the iPhone's inner display to nearly tablet size, Apple has once again begun exploring the possibility of equipping a phone with a stylus.
Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman revealed in his latest Power On newsletter that Apple internally evaluated and tested creating a dedicated Apple Pencil for the first foldable iPhone.
Image | Digit, modified with AI
But Gurman immediately confirmed: This stylus is highly unlikely to appear at next month's launch event for the first-generation foldable iPhone.
Nineteen years later, after actually building and testing the stylus, Apple realized: Jobs was still right.
The Temptation of a Large Screen, the Reality of a Phone
Pairing a large foldable screen with a stylus feels highly intuitive and perfectly logical.
The current iPad mini has a screen of just 8.3 inches and weighs 293 grams, yet it fully supports the Apple Pencil Pro's squeeze, double-tap, and high-precision hover features. Meanwhile, the rumored inner screen of a folded iPhone measures between 7.
7 and 7.8 inches when unfolded, and previous reports indicated that internal testers even praised its iPad-like multitasking app layout.
Since the sizes are similar, why can the iPad mini use a stylus, but a foldable iPhone cannot?
Image | Apple
The difference between the two mainly lies in their daily usage states.
No matter how lightweight the iPad mini is made, it still mostly needs to be taken out of a bag and held with both hands or placed on a desk for use. When a user opens it, it usually corresponds to a relatively continuous period of time—reading an e-book, taking notes, annotating documents, or sketching. In these more immersive scenarios, the fine control of a stylus indeed brings intuitive benefits.
However, when a foldable iPhone is unfolded, the vast majority of the time it is held suspended in the hands.
Image | The Shortcut
In this posture, one hand supports the body, while the other hand must hold the stylus suspended in the air to tap and draw on the flexible inner screen. Lacking bottom support, the body is prone to shaking, and the wrist has nowhere to brace for leverage. The posture is extremely awkward, and prolonged writing, drawing, or note-taking would be painful.
Room for a Big Screen, but No Room for a Stylus
If holding it suspended to write presents ergonomic inconveniences, then within the pursuit of an ultra-thin and light body structure, the stylus also faces severe physical storage challenges.
This is not to say that styluses are difficult to manufacture at the hardware level: the OPPO Find N6 achieves dual-screen stylus support, and Huawei's latest Pura X Max large-screen foldable also supports its own M-Pen 3 Mini.
Image | Huawei Official Website
But these solutions essentially adopt a "peripheral" mindset—the stylus is an independent accessory that requires a separate phone case for storage or a separate cable for charging.
However, Apple's definition of the Apple Pencil experience is much stricter.
In the history of Apple accessory design, the original Apple Pencil and the "belly-up charging" Magic Mouse were once known as two of the most absurd spectacles—you pull off the cap and plug it straight into the iPad's bottom port like a lollipop. Not only was it visually comical and easily snapped by external force, but it also rolled around everywhere when left on a desk.
Image | Sohrab Osati
Apple spent two entire generations, until the flat-edged iPad Pro debuted with magnetic wireless charging, to completely wash away that past embarrassment. Since then, the integration of magnetic attachment, pairing, charging, and storage has become the signature experience baseline for the Apple Pencil.
Image | Business Insider
However, on a foldable iPhone, this elegance vanishes in the face of the physical limits of the body structure. If we follow the logic of industrial design, there are only four storage solutions for a stylus on a foldable screen, and each is a dead end by Apple's standards:
1. Side-Mounted Magnetic Attachment: Holds the Stylus, but Becomes a "Stumbling Block" for Unfolding
This is the solution Apple actually tested on prototypes according to Bloomberg's report, but it exposed obvious conflicts in daily use.
A regular iPad is a flat metal slab, and the stylus attaches to the frame without interfering with anything; but the side of a foldable iPhone is exactly the opening seam where the two halves of the body meet. When users want to pry open the screen, their fingers must grip this side edge to apply force.
Image | Smart Depot Tech
Once a stylus is attached to the side, not only do fingers have nowhere to grip the edge of the body, but it is also extremely easy to knock the stylus off the moment the screen is pried open.
The originally seamless flow of "taking out the phone and casually unfolding it" is forced to degenerate into an abstract juggling act: take out the phone, pull the stylus off the side, pry open the screen with both hands, find a place to put the stylus or switch hands to hold it, start using fingers to swipe the screen, close the phone when done, and then attach the stylus back.
Image | AppleTrack
Those three things Steve Jobs mocked about styluses back then—having to take it out, having to put it away, and...