MTG: The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Is the Future — So Why Am I Back on an iPhone?

There is a particular sort of confidence required to move away from Apple when your entire digital life has been built inside it.

Not just a phone. The whole lot.

I have a 14-inch MacBook Pro, a 15-inch MacBook Air, a MacBook Neo that I love rather more than is probably sensible, several iPads, an iPhone 17 Pro and an iPhone 13 mini. At this point, I’m not merely in the Apple ecosystem. I have bought land, built a house and installed an electric fence.

So naturally, I decided to move from iPhone to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 for 14 days.

You can watch the full video here:

I Tried the Galaxy Z Fold 8 as an iPhone User

This is not a sponsored review or an affiliate article. It is simply my experience of trying to use a very different piece of hardware while still relying on the rest of my Apple kit every day.

And the conclusion is slightly annoying.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 feels like the future.

I’m still going back to an iPhone.

MTG: The first obstacle was getting started

Before I could test the Fold properly, I had to move my eSIM from the iPhone 17 Pro to the Samsung.

That took about 45 minutes of fighting with a UK network.

The days when you could simply remove a physical SIM card and put it into another phone are disappearing. With eSIMs, switching between operating systems is not always the effortless process it ought to be. It is possible, but it is not necessarily something you do on a whim while standing in a car park.

I persevered because the standard smartphone has, in my view, reached a bit of a brick wall.

Most phones are now very capable slabs of glass. They are fast, polished and broadly similar. If you want more screen, you generally need to carry a tablet as well.

The Fold offered a different answer: one device that could be a phone when closed and a much larger working surface when opened.

That sounded useful.

It turned out to be more useful than I expected.

MTG: My eyes liked the Fold more than my workflow expected

I am over 50. My eyes are not getting better because a manufacturer has released another phone.

When I stepped back from the MacBook Neo, I found myself relying on the iPad mini and the 11-inch iPad Pro again. They filled the portability gap and made it easier to review files without leaning into a screen like a suspicious meerkat.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 changed that almost immediately.

The inner display gave me the space to review documents, look at designs and work in Canva without constantly zooming in and out. On a conventional phone, even the iPhone 17 Pro, positioning graphics can become an exercise in squinting and hoping.

On the Fold, the larger screen meant I could see what I was doing.

That matters more than people sometimes admit. A device can be technically powerful, but if the interface is too cramped for comfortable use, its capability is mostly theoretical. It is like owning a very good tool and keeping it in a locked shed.

I am not particularly interested in running three tiny apps at once. The Fold can do that, but my eyes cannot multitask in the way the marketing department would like.

What I wanted was one thing at a time, with enough space to see it properly.

For Canva, file review and general visibility, the Fold made a convincing case for replacing both a phone and a tablet in parts of my daily workflow.

MTG: The hardware is genuinely impressive

If this had been purely a hardware test, the Samsung would have won.

The hinge folds completely flat. The crease became far less noticeable when I was looking directly at the display. The build felt solid rather than delicate, and the whole device made a normal phone feel slightly old-fashioned when I returned to it.

Outdoor readability also surprised me. I expected reflections and glare from the inner display to become a constant irritation, particularly because my main iPad Pro has nano-texture glass. That was not my experience. The screen remained surprisingly usable outside.

These are observations from my 14 days with the device, not laboratory test results. Your experience may be different depending on lighting, eyesight and what you normally use.

The software was also better than I expected. One UI felt fast and highly customisable. There was plenty to adjust, but it did not feel as though the device was fighting me.

The Fold can be a phone, a tablet and a possible workstation in one device. That is not a small achievement.

It is also the reason the decision became difficult.

MTG: Then Apple started fighting back

The problems did not really arrive on the first day.

For the first 72 hours, I thought I might not go back to an iPhone at all. The larger screen solved a real problem for me, and the hardware was enjoyable to use.

Then day four arrived.

The difficulty was not that Android was bad. The difficulty was that the rest of my life was still Apple-shaped.

Family chats were the first reminder.

RCS is meant to make messaging between Android and iPhone users less awkward. In my experience, the transition was not completely smooth. Reactions sometimes arrived as strange text strings, and video clips could be compressed far more heavily than expected.

That may not bother you. It may also depend on the people in your group, their phones and the messaging services involved. But in my family chats, it created friction.

You become the person who has apparently ruined the group chat simply by changing your phone.

That is a surprisingly effective form of social pressure.

MTG: AirDrop is more than sending a file

Before someone writes the inevitable comment: yes, there are ways to send files from the Fold to a Mac.

Quick Share and local-send options can work. I did manage to transfer files without connecting a cable.

But it was not the same as AirDrop in my workflow.

There were extra taps and permission prompts. Sometimes the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro appeared to have no idea the Fold existed until I toggled Wi-Fi off and on again.

That sounds minor. It is minor, in isolation.

However, when you are moving camera assets and large video files around during a creative workflow, a sequence of small delays becomes a real interruption. The issue is not whether a file can be sent. The issue is whether it happens naturally, at the point you want it to happen, without making you stop and think about the process.

The same applied to Apple’s shared clipboard and Universal Control. Once the Fold replaced the iPhone, those links between my devices disappeared.

Again, that is not an argument that Android is inferior. It is an argument that ecosystems are useful when all your devices belong to the same one.

I had spent years allowing Apple to build a digital nervous system around me. Removing one part did not just remove one feature. It severed several connections.

MTG: The odd case of the iPhone 13 mini

Then there is the iPhone 13 mini.

I keep it for one very specific reason: it is just a phone.

I do not use it for Canva, editing or documents. It does not need to be a workstation. It handles calls, messages and quick everyday tasks, then syncs neatly with everything else I use.

The Fold is more ambitious. It tries to do everything.

That is its strength, but also part of the problem. It can replace the phone, the tablet and perhaps a small amount of laptop work. But it does not recreate the simple, single-purpose experience of the little iPhone inside an Apple setup.

Sometimes more capable is not the same as more convenient.

MTG: So which should you buy?

The practical answer is not “Samsung good, Apple bad” or the other way round.

Choose the Fold if the hardware solves a problem you actually have. If you want more screen for reading, designing, reviewing files or carrying fewer devices, its form factor can make a genuine difference. It is not just a party trick.

Choose the iPhone if the convenience of your existing ecosystem matters more than having a larger screen in your pocket. If your family, colleagues and working habits all depend on iMessage, AirDrop, shared clipboard, Universal Control and close Mac integration, moving may involve more disruption than you expect.

The important bit is to choose based on the trade-off, not the theatre.

Do not buy a foldable simply because it looks futuristic. Do not stay with an iPhone simply because every advert tells you the ecosystem is seamless. Look at the things you actually do every day, then decide which inconvenience you would rather live with.

For me, the hardware has won the argument.

The ecosystem has won the decision.

After 14 days, I reset the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and put it back in its box. The Galaxy Buds 4 Pro never even made it out of theirs; they remain sealed.

I am going back to the iPhone 17 Pro.

There is some speculation about a future iPhone Ultra or a foldable iPhone, but none of that changes what is available to me today. It is not an announced solution in this review, and it should not be treated as one.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 proved something important to me: foldable hardware can be genuinely useful, particularly when your eyes and your work need more space.

But Apple remains the immovable object.

The Fold is the future I want.

The iPhone is the future I can currently live with.

if anything I've said today struck a chord with you and you'd like a chat or if you have a particular challenge with energy, power & infrastructure, business generally or you might like to use the studio, drop me an email at andrew@aelhawley.com - if you've watched the video version of this blog you can drop a comment below and, I think I'm supposed to say like and subscribe but I won't. See you on Sunday in the field.. that to be clear, isnt my garden.