The iPhone Ultra doesn’t need to be successful to be a success

Was Vision Pro a success? That depends on your definition. It hasn’t sold many units–perhaps a few hundred thousand, compared to 50 million or so iPhones in the last three months alone–but it has raised public awareness of a new product category and established Apple as one of that category’s major players. In other words, the product laid the groundwork for a cheaper and more widely accessible follow-up… the only problem being that Apple appears to have cancelled it.

Vision Pro, then, will probably go down in history as one of the least successful projects of the Tim Cook era. However, it shows that sales alone are not the be-all and end-all, particularly for first-generation products. And it offers a glimpse of a possible and perhaps even likely future for the iPhone Ultra: one in which it sells badly, and Apple doesn’t mind. Or doesn’t mind too much, anyway.

The sales part of the equation certainly looks ominous. If early leaks are accurate, the iPhone Ultra is going to face many of the same hurdles as last year’s iPhone Air: namely hardware compromises (two rather than three rear camera lenses, no MagSafe), and perceived question marks over durability (the hinge, the crease), with the added complication of a massive price tag and a form factor that will be completely alien to Apple fans. It’s like the Air, only more so. And while the Air may not have been the total flop we feared at first, it still didn’t set the house on fire, sales-wise.

There are some positives to the Ultra, of course. For one thing, the spec list should be a little better than that of the Air; two lenses is a major upgrade on the Air’s one, and there’s likely to be more battery capacity. MagSafe would be a painful omission for me, but I get the impression that other iPhone users don’t care quite as much.

More importantly, the Fold’s unorthodox and compromise-necessitating design is in service of actual functionality rather than just being thin and light: having a foldable chassis means more screen space and more portability, the dream combo. Then again, truly transformative designs bring problems of their own. My expectation is that only wealthy early adopters will be willing to pay so much for such an unfamiliar device, and you have to remember that most of them just bought an iPhone Air. Logically, we should expect sales numbers to be low.

That, in fact, has been the experience of all the companies that have released foldable products so far. It’s a tiny market, so tiny, in fact, that in August last year, folding smartphones accounted for just 1–2 percent of total sales globally, according to a TrendForce analyst. Those numbers are growing, but slowly, at least for now. The arrival of the Ultra, like the Vision Pro in the mixed-reality headsets market, is sure to give things a jolt.

In Q1 2026, Apple earned $85 billion from its iPhone lineup, or about 80 million units. While a cautiously trend-beating 3 percent of that might seem like a lot, we’d be looking at somewhere between 2 million and 2.5 million individual sales of the iPhone Ultra, which would hardly be counted as a success by Apple’s commercial standards. Extrapolating from speed-testing data, the Air looks to have reached a share of more than twice that, and that would still leave it as the least popular of the late-2025 models.

But would 2 million sales be a disaster? I would say not. For one thing, given the scale of the competition, the Ultra could sell far fewer units than any other late-2026 iPhone and still dominate its niche. Apple reportedly wants incoming CEO John Ternus to be the face of foldables, and the iPhone Ultra will almost certainly be the market’s most visible product. All of that attention will be a mixed blessing for other manufacturers, which may see their own numbers rise by association but will struggle to get customers excited about their offerings.

The iPhone Ultra’s primary job is not to make money. Its job is to make a splash: to show everyone that Apple is here with the first foldable to do things right. If that means a generation of the Ultra being a highly desirable niche product that gives its few lucky owners immense cachet, that’s okay. Unlike the Vision Pro, the iPhone Ultra has obvious places to go next; the iPhone has a natural and familiar upgrade path. Future versions can add a third camera lens or MagSafe. The processor will get faster, the display better, and battery performance will become more optimised. It might even drop in price.

Best of all, the foldable phone will be normalised by the existence of the iPhone Ultra in a way that Vision Pro never managed to achieve for the bulky mixed-reality headset (a far more difficult assignment, admittedly). Fears about the hinge and the crease will likely be allayed, and the first-gen launch will give Apple’s engineers a chance to test and iron out any issues with the physical design. People will see their friends walking around with Ultras, try them out, and want to try it. And all that fame and envy can then be leveraged into a bigger-selling iPhone Ultra 2 the following year.

I don’t expect the Ultra to break many records this year, but relatively low sales won’t make it a failure. The original iPhone sold roughly four million units across its first two quarters, and that’s gone on to be reasonably successful. Sometimes you have to start small, and see where the future takes you.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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Podcast of the week

Apple has announced that Tim Cook will no longer serve as Apple’s CEO and John Ternus will have the job starting on September 1. In the latest episode of the Macworld Podcast, we talk about the announcement and what it could mean.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

The rumor mill

In yet another Macworld exclusive, Felipe Esposito reveals Apple’s ‘Ultra’ roadmap. The iPhone Ultra, MacBook Ultra, and many more are on the way.

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Video of the week