The iPhone Ultra Sells Two Retired Minis as One Foldable

Apple’s first foldable iPhone Ultra is built around a 5.5-inch cover and a 7.8-inch inner screen, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Those diagonals land on the two small canvases Apple already taught people to love, then walked away from. The company is set to show the book-style phone at its September 9 event, at a price Kuo now puts at $2,300 to $2,500.

Apple Restacks Two Small Screens in One Book

The last compact iPhone Apple sold, the iPhone 13 mini, carried a 5.4-inch screen and opened at $699. Apple ended that model on September 12, 2023, after two years on the price list, and never replaced the tall little slab.

The iPad mini kept going, but it grew. On October 15, 2024, Apple introduced the A17 Pro mini with an 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display and a Wi-Fi starting price of $499, double the storage of the prior generation at 128GB.

The Ultra’s rumored pair of screens sits between those two products. Closed, the cover is a tenth of an inch off the dead mini’s diagonal. Open, the inner panel is half an inch short of the mini tablet Apple still sells. Samsung already put a 5.5-inch cover and a 7.6-inch 4:3 inner panel on the Galaxy Z Fold 8 it unveiled on July 22, 2026.

FROM MINI TO ULTRA

1. September 14, 2021: Apple introduces the iPhone 13 mini at $699, with a 5.4-inch screen in a 140-gram body.
2. September 12, 2023: Apple drops the 13 mini and leaves no compact iPhone behind it.
3. October 15, 2024: The iPad mini with A17 Pro arrives at $499, still the smallest iPad, now on an 8.3-inch panel.
4. July 22, 2026: Samsung unveils the wide Galaxy Z Fold 8, a passport foldable with 5.5-inch and 7.6-inch screens, from $1,899.
5. September 9, 2026: Apple is set to show the iPhone Ultra beside the iPhone 18 Pro models.

Add the mini phone’s launch price to the mini tablet’s and you get $1,198. Kuo’s floor for the Ultra is $1,102 above that sum, for one object that folds.

iPhone Ultra Cover Screen Size Versus the Mini

Side-by-side photos of the Fold 8 next to an iPhone 13 mini have been doing a lot of work in the run-up to September 9, because the two devices share a small diagonal. They do not share a shape.

Apple’s 13 mini is 131.5 mm tall and 64.2 mm wide, 7.65 mm thick, and 140 grams. That is a tall 19.5:9 phone you can run with one thumb. Leaked CAD files put the Ultra, closed, around 120.6 mm tall and 83.8 mm wide, with Kuo’s thickness band of 9 to 9.5 mm. The Fold 8, which is the shipping passport of the same idea, is 123.9 mm by 81.9 mm by 9.7 mm closed.

That is a shorter, much wider brick than the mini. The Fold 8 is 17.7 mm wider than the 13 mini; the leaked Ultra body is 19.6 mm wider. Anyone hoping the cover is a mini they already know in the pocket will feel the extra width before they notice the extra tenth of an inch on the diagonal.

THE CLOSED BODIES IN MILLIMETERS

Leakers describe the Ultra cover as a short, wide 4:3 window rather than a tall phone slab, the same passport family as the Fold 8’s 10:16 cover. Dummy units also show curved iPhone corners, which the Samsung does not. The feel in a jeans pocket will track the width, not the nostalgia.

An 8.3-Inch Slab Still Owns the Mini Tablet

Open the book and the pitch flips from mini phone to mini tablet. Kuo’s 7.8-inch inner panel is the largest canvas Apple has put on an iPhone, with a 4:3 ratio that matches iPad software better than a tall foldable does. It is still not the iPad mini Apple sells now.

The current mini is 8.3 inches, 195.4 mm by 134.8 mm by 6.3 mm, and 293 grams on Wi-Fi. Ray Wong, a consumer tech editor, lined the Fold 8 up against a 5th-generation iPad mini, first calling the 7.6-inch 4:3 panel the same size, then correcting himself: that older mini was 7.9 inches, and a 0.3-inch gap is barely noticeable. Against the 8.3-inch panel, the gap is 0.7 inches on the Fold 8 and 0.5 inches on a 7.8-inch Ultra.

There is no other device in the world like iPad mini, beloved for its combination of powerful performance and versatility in our most ultraportable design.

Bob Borchers, vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Apple

Apple still has a use for that line. A foldable inner screen can borrow the 4:3 reading canvas. It cannot borrow the rest of the mini tablet without folding, a crease, and a phone radio sitting in the same sandwich.

WHAT THE IPAD MINI STILL DOES ALONE

• A flat 8.3-inch panel: The current mini is 0.5 inches larger than Kuo’s Ultra inner screen and never has to open.
• Apple Pencil Pro: The A17 Pro mini pairs, charges, and stores the pencil on a magnetic side rail the Ultra has not been described as copying.
• A 6.3 mm slab: The mini stays 6.3 mm thick; the Ultra is rumored at 4.5 to 4.8 mm only when it is open, and 9 to 9.5 mm when it is a phone.
• A $499 entry: The Wi-Fi mini still starts at the 2024 launch price, less than a quarter of Kuo’s Ultra band.

People who want a small iPad they can throw in a bag already have one. People who want that canvas in a pocket are the ones the Ultra is built to tax.

Samsung Shipped This Passport in July

Samsung did not wait for Cupertino to guess the shape. It split its 2026 book foldables, keeping the tall model as the Fold 8 Ultra and giving the plain Fold 8 name to a wide, short passport aimed at the incoming iPhone.

The shipping Fold 8 weighs 201 grams and opens to 4.5 mm. Closed it is 123.9 x 81.9 x 9.7 mm. The cover is 5.5 inches at 1248 x 1972. The inner panel is 7.6 inches at 2448 x 1848, a 4:3 sheet of 179.2 cm². U.S. pricing is $1,899 for 256GB, $2,099 for 512GB, and $2,499 for 1TB.

That $1,899 base sits $401 under Kuo’s $2,300 floor for the Ultra. Reviewers who have had the Fold 8 since late July have already taken the photos Apple’s event will be measured against, including pocket shots next to an iPad mini and a 13 mini. Apple’s advantages, if they show up on September 9, are software, MagSafe, and a crease people cannot feel. The size is no longer a surprise.

On the crease, the bar is already sitting on a desk. Ice Universe, after living with the Fold 8, said it had a flatter crease than other foldables and that the next comparison is whatever Apple puts under a thumb. Dummy units and CAD leaks have also read as too short to iPhone owners who spent a decade climbing toward Pro Max height. The passport is easy to like in a Fold 8 review and harder to like in an iPhone silhouette, even when the millimeters match.

What $2,300 Buys After the Mini Died

Kuo has narrowed his Ultra range to $2,300 to $2,500 and still expects the phone to sell through. Mark Gurman, who covers Apple, has described the same band and, in early September, said the device is on track with MagSafe, the 5.5-inch cover, and drag-and-drop multitasking. Other desks have floated $1,800 to $2,000 (UBS) and $2,400 (Fubon). The working figure here is Kuo’s latest band.

THE BILL FOR SMALL SCREENS

• iPhone 13 mini, 2021: $699 for a 5.4-inch phone Apple no longer sells.
• iPad mini, 2024: $499 for an 8.3-inch tablet Apple still sells.
• Galaxy Z Fold 8, 2026: $1,899 for the passport that already has these diagonals.
• iPhone Ultra, rumored: $2,300 to $2,500 for both canvases in one hinge, if Kuo is right.

The mini’s old audience does not vanish at those prices. It just stops being a $699 hardware problem and becomes a financing problem. Apple is likely to push Upgrade Program payments the way it does on every halo product that cannot be compared with last year’s Pro Max on a spreadsheet.

Hardware trade-offs ride along with the hinge. Briefings point to a side Touch ID button instead of Face ID, a dual 48-megapixel rear pair with no telephoto, and an A20 chip. Gurman has said MagSafe is in, in part because Apple already buried the magnets in the thin iPhone Air. The cover will do everyday iPhone work. The inner 4:3 sheet is the reason anyone pays the second thousand dollars.

iOS Has to Be Two Phones at Once

A 5.5-inch 4:3 cover and a 7.8-inch 4:3 inner panel only work if apps reflow when the book opens. Apple can steal layout ideas from iPadOS, which already lives at 4:3, and rumor notes say new APIs are coming so developers can target the Ultra without maintaining a third UI from scratch. Gurman’s drag-and-drop line is the tell: the inner screen is meant to behave like a small iPad, not like a stretched iPhone.

That is the part a Fold 8 photo cannot preview. Samsung has had seven generations to teach One UI how to be a cover app, an inner app, and two apps at once. Apple’s first foldable will be judged on whether Messages, Safari, and the camera feel native on both leaves on day one. Equal-price talk already treats that software gap as the reason to keep the Samsung, because a first iPhone hinge is still a first iPhone hinge even if the glass looks familiar.

If the inner panel really is an iPad canvas, App Store layout work that ignored the old mini iPhone will have to care about a small cover again, and about a 7.8-inch 4:3 sheet that wants two columns. That is a developer tax Apple can levy because it waited. It is also the only way the $2,300 object is more than two retired diagonals glued to a hinge Samsung already sold in July.

September 9 Will Not Put Units in Pockets

Kuo’s latest factory survey puts foldable iPhone assembly at 7 to 8 million units in the second half of 2026, with only 0.5 to 1 million of those in the third quarter, about 10 percent of the half. He contrasts that with 20 to 22 million iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max units in the same quarter, enough to launch on a normal clock. The Ultra, he wrote, is likely to repeat the iPhone X pattern from 2017: announce with the Pros, ship later.

He has also flagged 4 to 6 week waits in the first wave, and he still thinks demand holds at $2,300 to $2,500. That scarce production window is already colliding with a memory crunch splitting the iPhone 18 lineup into a premium fall wave and a thinner spring, which is a poor backdrop for a halo foldable that needs extra displays, extra glass, and extra hinge yield.

On September 9, Apple can show a 5.5-inch cover, a 7.8-inch inner sheet, rounded corners, and MagSafe. The mini phone it killed and the mini tablet it still sells will be sitting in the same room as that demo, one of them a memory and one of them $499. Getting from the stage to a pocket is a different product.