iPhone Fold Leaks: No Face ID, ₹2.5 Lakh Price Tag in India

Apple takes the stage today for its "Surprise and shine" event, and for once the headline act probably isn't a new iPhone number — it's a hinge. Every credible leak points to Apple unveiling its first folding iPhone, nearly seven years after Samsung shipped the original Galaxy Fold.

What the leaks actually say

Apple hasn't confirmed a single spec, so everything below is informed leak-tracking from supply-chain analysts, not company statements. But the leaks have gotten unusually consistent in the last few weeks, which is normally a sign Apple's production line is already running:

• A roughly 7.8-inch inner display when unfolded, with a smaller 5.5-inch cover screen for using it closed — similar to how Samsung's Fold line works
• A hinge built to avoid the visible crease that still shows up on rival foldables after a few months of use, reportedly using a liquid-metal component for durability
• Touch ID built into the side power button instead of Face ID, because the folding front panel is apparently too thin to fit Face ID's sensor array
• No telephoto lens, which would make its camera a step down from Apple's own Pro models
• A starting price somewhere between $1,999 and $2,500 in the US, depending on storage

That Face ID trade-off is the detail worth sitting with. Face ID has been the default way to unlock an iPhone since 2017, and Apple dropping it — even on one model — would be the company admitting a fingerprint sensor is the more practical answer for a folding phone's constraints. It's a small design concession, but Apple doesn't usually make those in public.

A $2,000-plus starting price doesn't make a folding iPhone a mainstream replacement for anything — it makes it a halo device Apple sells to prove it can, not one it expects most iPhone owners to buy.

What it could cost in India — and why that number matters more here

Indian pricing leaks have been all over the place, ranging from roughly ₹1.5 lakh at the optimistic end to over ₹3 lakh for higher storage once import duty and GST get layered on top of the US sticker price, the way they always do with Apple's premium hardware. For context, that upper range is close to what a well-specced motorcycle or a small car down payment costs in most Indian cities — this is not a phone aimed at India's iPhone-upgrade crowd, let alone its Android base.

What makes it interesting locally isn't the price tag, though — it's what a real Apple foldable does to a category that's existed in India for years but never broken out. Samsung has sold Fold and Flip devices here since 2019, and they've stayed a rounding error against India's overwhelmingly budget-and-mid-range smartphone market. Apple entering the segment, even at a price most buyers will never consider, tends to do something Samsung alone hasn't managed: it makes Indian retailers stock the category more seriously, it makes EMI and exchange offers appear for foldables specifically, and it gives the whole segment a legitimacy bump that trickles down to cheaper folding phones from Chinese and Korean brands. Apple has also been steadily shifting iPhone assembly to Foxconn and Tata Electronics plants in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka — whether the foldable is built here from day one, or trails by a few quarters like some of Apple's newer categories have, will say something about how much Apple trusts that supply chain with its most complex hardware yet.

The bigger question the event has to answer

This is also John Ternus's first keynote as Apple's CEO, having taken over from Tim Cook on September 1 — a detail we covered when the event date was first confirmed. A folding iPhone landing on his watch, rather than Cook's, makes it a useful early signal of what kind of risks Ternus is willing to greenlight now that hardware decisions run through him alone.

There's a decent chance the foldable ships this year in limited numbers and the interesting story is really next year's version, once Apple has a full generation of real-world crease and hinge data to react to. That's roughly how Apple treated the Vision Pro and the Dynamic Island before it — announce cautiously, iterate in public. A first-generation folding iPhone probably isn't for most people. But it exists to answer a question Apple has dodged for six years: not whether it can build a foldable, but whether it thinks a foldable is finally good enough to put its name on.