Waiting for a bus
and surely a very long time – before the £2,000 models Samsung and Huawei displayed at Mobile World Congress yield anything in the £500 range
Not so sure about this. First of all, like the proverbial bus, we've been waiting for the foldables for a while and suddenly three show up, which immediately increases the competitive pressure. Secondly, the mobile phone market already has massive scale and we regularly see it in action: features that were reserved for the high-end a few years ago (fingerprint scanner, face recognition) are cropping up in mid-range and entry-level phones within a couple of years, largely because so much of the process has been industrialised. Sure, getting screen-folding right isn't easy but, assumng it's more about process than yield, once the process is there, it's easy to ramp up volume, the caveat would probably be yields on larger OLED screens, which have proved difficult to make in numbers. But thirdly, there is a huge opportunity to go after all of what's left of the notebook market. Apple seems happy enough with its premium and even more premium and as you note, Microsoft isn't there yet. Still a lot to get right / go wrong, but the potential is there.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
