Apple has had a pretty good 2025 on paper. The iPhone line-up is the strongest it has been in years, the design team finally seems to be having fun again, and a lot of long-standing gripes have been addressed with the iPhone 17 range.
But look a little closer – and crucially, look across the aisle at what Android is doing – and the picture isn’t quite as rosy. With rivals sprinting ahead on foldables and AI, 2026 is shaping up to be a genuinely pivotal year for Apple.
If the company gets it right, it stays firmly in the limelight – but get it wrong, and 2025 might be remembered less as a high point and more as the calm before the storm.
Apple had a strong 2025, but cracks are beginning to show
There’s no denying that Apple nailed the basics in 2025.
The iPhone Air grabbed headlines as the thinnest phone around – a proper feat of engineering at a time when most handsets feel like they’re bulking up to cope with bigger batteries and camera islands the size of small towns.
In the hand, the Air is classic Apple; sleek, elegant and instantly recognisable, the sort of phone that makes rival flagships look clumsy and awkward.
Then there’s the iPhone 17 Pro. After years of iterative tweaks, Apple finally delivered a meaningful design overhaul. It’s more refined, the ergonomics are better, and the whole package feels reassuringly premium, even if it has ditched titanium for aluminium.
Crucially, it isn’t just a pretty face. Battery life has had a massive boost, and the camera system has taken a proper step forward, not just one that looks good on paper. Low-light performance is improved, zoom is more consistent, and the computational photography feels smarter and more capable than before.
Even the standard iPhone 17 gets in on the act, with Apple finally relenting to years of criticism and offering 120Hz ProMotion display tech. ProMotion on the entry-level means buttery smooth is no longer something you have to pay Pro money for.
Taken in isolation, it’s a very strong flagship line-up. The trouble is, the smartphone market doesn’t exist in isolation. Once you start comparing Apple’s 2025 collection to the best of Android, those little hairline cracks begin to show.
Samsung, Google and a range of Chinese brands are shipping phones with wild camera versatility, desktop-class AI smarts running on-device and form factors that Apple doesn’t even compete in yet.
The iPhone remains an incredibly polished, cohesive experience – but it’s not always the most exciting, and it’s certainly no longer the automatic home of bleeding-edge innovation like it once was.
Which brings me nicely to the most glaring omission in Apple’s line-up.
The iPhone Fold needs to launch in 2026
The iPhone Fold – or whatever Apple ends up calling it – has been rumoured for so long it’s basically an urban legend at this point.
Every year, the whispers crop up about prototypes being tested, hinge designs being refined and Apple “waiting for the tech to mature”. And every year, Apple’s phone line-up remains staunchly familiar.
Meanwhile, Android manufacturers have been doing anything but standing still. Samsung’s book-style Galaxy Z Fold 7 is, as the name suggests, its seventh-generation foldable. This is a company that has been iterating on foldable tech since 2019, burning through the early-adopter pain so that current devices feel genuinely mainstream.
It’s not just Samsung either; the foldable space in 2025 looks dramatically different to the clunky, creaky first-gen foldables that everyone – quite rightly – mocked.
Foldables are now thinner and lighter, in some cases more so than traditional slab phones. Durability has also taken a big step up, with proper IP ratings, sturdier hinges and more resilient ultra-thin glass. The crease is still there if you go hunting for it, but on the best devices, it’s more of a faint suggestion than the deep valley of old.
In short, the foldable market has matured. The “let’s wait until they’re not terrible” argument no longer really holds water – yet Apple’s version is nowhere to be seen.
We’re now at a point where rumours are pointing towards a late 2026 unveiling for the iPhone Fold. If that happens, Apple will still be late, but not disasterously so. It can lean on its usual “we took our time so we could do it properly” narrative, and if the hardware and software are genuinely polished, most people will forgive the delay.
But if Apple misses that informal 2026 deadline, things start to look more worrying.
Samsung, for example, isn’t just on its seventh Fold; it’s pushing bigger, bolder designs like the Galaxy Z TriFold. While Android brands are experimenting with triple-folding displays and hybrid tablet-laptop ideas, Apple is still essentially selling rectangles. Really refined rectangles, but rectangles nonetheless.
Apple really needs to improve Apple Intelligence
Apple Intelligence has now been around for a while, and in 2026 it’s not enough for it to be “fine”. That’s basically where it sits today: fine. Not broken, not useless, just… a little lacklustre. And that’s the problem.
The gap between Apple and its Android rivals on AI isn’t just about how many headline features you can cram into a keynote slide. It’s about how consistently impressive those features feel in day-to-day use, and how often they fail. Right now, that happens more often than Apple would like.
Apple has tried to position Apple Intelligence as a privacy-conscious alternative to the data-hungry smarts of Google and Samsung. That’s admirable, and on-device processing is genuinely important. But when you look at actual performance – the things people will notice – Apple’s efforts too often come up short.
Siri, even with ChatGPT integration in the mix, still feels oddly stilted and inconsistent next to Google’s Gemini. There are still too many moments where Siri misunderstands basic requests, gets stuck in odd loops or throws you to a web search in a way that feels like an old habit it never kicked.
Photo editing is another weak spot. Apple’s object removal tech might sound like a match for what you get from the best Android phones, but in practice, it can be one of the worst performers once you move beyond trivial edits.
Then there’s Image Playgrounds, Apple’s answer to text-to-image tools. On paper, it ticks the box: you can generate images from prompts, tweak a few styles and drop them into messages or documents.
In reality, it feels almost laughably limited compared to what you can do with the Nano Banana-powered Gemini in 2025 – and that’s only going to become more obvious in 2026 as the underlying models continue to race ahead.
The risk for Apple isn’t just that its AI tools are weaker. It’s that they start to feel like an afterthought – a set of slightly undercooked features bolted onto otherwise excellent hardware. In a world where AI is becoming the main differentiator between smartphones, that’s not where you want to be.
If 2025 was the year Apple could still get away with “it’s early days for on-device AI”, 2026 is the year that excuse runs out. Apple Intelligence needs a serious step-change, not another round of incremental tweaks.
So yes, 2026 could be a make-or-break year for Apple – and it’ll be interesting to see how it handles the pressure, which is arguably at its highest for quite some time.
