Foldable device prototypes were publicly demonstrated in 2013. It took five years for the technologies required to enable foldable devices to become mature enough to ship bad products. It took another five years for them to mature enough to meet Apple's scale and quality requirements.
This isn't a "moonshot" (which take decades to build), but hardware innovations like this regularly take a decade to properly productize.
This is a bizarre way of saying “if they ship it and it has reliability problems, they know they’re skating on thin ice”.
Apple’s brand has taken a beating (I’m as aghast with the latest macOS as the next nerd), but people love that when Apple ships a product, it generally works and the hardware doesn’t break.
Butterfly keyboards are a terrible stain on the hardware team’s reputation. “Scared” is the wrong word for how these things work.
It's expensive (though largely comparable to business machines) so people dunk on it being low value for money,
People dunk on them for not taking risks, but when there's a reliability problem that would be sort-of acceptable for another product it becomes international news.
When they do take "risks" (like USB-C only) people dunk on them for taking away choice.
Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm one of the people dunking on them a lot, I was not a fan of the headphone jack removal, butterfly keyboards, discoverability of 3D touch, change of UI paradigm away from Skeumorphism etc;etc;etc -- but I feel like a lot of the other manufacturers seem to get a comparative free pass, which feels unfair.
Which seems pretty standard Apple. Let others do something, see how it plays out then launch their version of it.
But the leaks I've seen of the size, makes me less excited about it. The phone when folded looks a bit wider and squatter than my Pro Max. And when open, it's smaller than my 11" iPad.
I see the promise of this concept with the tri-fold phones, where when expanded is closer in size to an 11" tablet.
