Samsung Touts 'Welcome to Foldables' as Apple's $1,999 Duo Takes Aim at Its Lead

SEOUL — Samsung Electronics answered Apple's first foldable iPhone with billboards, a website essay on weight and a round of posts that treated the iPhone Duo as a copy of work Korea already shipped.

Apple unveiled the Duo on Wednesday at $1,999, a book-style phone with a passport-shaped cover and a 7.6-inch inner screen. Samsung put the Galaxy Z Fold 8 on sale in August at $1,899 after showing the same wide layout on July 22. The $100 gap is the number both companies will live with into the holidays.

Liz Lee, an associate director at Counterpoint Research, called Apple's sticker the surprise. "Apple's pricing was one of the most impressive parts. Keeping the iPhone Duo just under the $2,000 mark, at $1,999, and only about $100 above the Galaxy Z Fold 8 looks like a pretty bold move by Apple," she said. "We expect that Apple will really change the competitive landscape in foldables, and Samsung will see the most visible share pressure. But Samsung also has scale, years of experience and strong global distribution."

Counterpoint's current-year forecast puts Samsung at about 38 percent of foldable shipments and Apple at 25 percent if the Duo lands as planned. That would be a first-year haul no Chinese brand has managed in the West, and it would come from a company that still buys foldable panels from Samsung Display — Samsung's own screen unit.

John Ternus, eight days into the Apple chief executive job after Tim Cook, framed the category as unfinished. He criticized existing foldables as "like two phones awkwardly stuck together." Samsung's reply on X was not a spec sheet. It posted lines that read as taunts: "reheating our leftovers" and "So far, so same." The company also bought outdoor space in Seoul, Tokyo and London with "Welcome to Foldables" and "The World's Lightest Fold," pointing at the Fold 8's 201-gram body. A Samsung website post on Wednesday walked through years of shaving grams off the hinge and chassis.

The hardware gap the ads sell is real on a scale. The Fold 8 is 53 grams lighter than the Duo's listed 254 grams and thinner unfolded. Apple lists IP68 dust and water resistance; Samsung lists IP48 on the Fold 8. Apple claims up to 31 hours of video on the inner panel against Samsung's 26-hour claim. Independent lab tests are not public. The Duo uses an A20 Pro chip on a 2-nanometer process; the Fold 8 uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. Apple added Pencil support and MagSafe-style magnets. Samsung dropped the S Pen on this wide Fold.

None of that changes who built the factory. Samsung shipped the first mass-market foldables in 2019 after early units cracked and the launch slipped. It has since put eight generations on shelves while Huawei and others took share in China. Apple is arriving after that learning curve, using suppliers Samsung trained. Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, put the timing in a sentence companies use when they do not want to say "late." "Apple is good at getting its timing right and entering the market when a product reaches a certain level of maturity," he said.

Calendars now split the category. The Fold 8 is in stores. The Duo opens for preorder at 5 a.m. Pacific on Oct. 16 and ships Oct. 23 in more than 70 countries, with 28 more markets on Oct. 30. iPhone 18 Pro models ship Sept. 18. Apple is not asking foldable buyers to wait until December. It is asking them to wait five weeks while Samsung's ads occupy the airports.

Price outside the United States is less polite. The Duo starts near $2,000 in the U.S. and climbs sharply in India and parts of Europe, where the Fold 8 can look hundreds of dollars cheaper. That is Samsung's distribution argument in a spreadsheet: more stores, more carrier deals, more colors — graphite, cream, lavender, pistachio against Apple's star white and night sky.

Gemini on the Fold 8 is Samsung's software pitch against iOS 27.1 and an App Store that developers will rebuild because the Duo is an iPhone. Foldables have always died on software as much as hinges. Apple's bet is that Messages and split-view will feel finished. Samsung's bet is that eight years of One UI windows still count when the inner screen is the same 7.6 inches.

Share pressure, in Lee's phrase, does not require Apple to outsell Samsung worldwide. It requires Apple to take the customers who would have bought a Fold because there was no iPhone version. Those customers are in the United States, Britain, Japan and South Korea — exactly where the billboards went up. Huawei remains the problem in China. Apple remains the problem everywhere else.

Samsung did not cut the Fold 8's price on Wednesday. It did not announce a new Ultra giveaway. It told the street it got there first and that the first-year iPhone looks familiar. "So far, so same" is a slogan that works until October 23, when the same-looking phone is in an Apple Store with a different logo and a waiting list.

The foldable market is still a sliver of total smartphone sales. Apple's $1,999 entry is how slivers become aisles. Samsung's campaign is how an incumbent reminds the aisle who paid for the broken screens in 2019. Both can be true through Christmas. Only one company has a 38 percent forecast that just developed a 25 percent neighbor.