Quick summary
Renders purporting to be the iPhone Ultra have been shared online by a reliable source - including an unexpected red version.
The leak drew a rebuttal from another big Apple source online, bringing doubt to the whole thing and leaving us none the wiser as to Apple's launch plans on 9 September.
The iPhone Ultra - Apple's first folding phone - may have been leaked from a reliable source online, ahead of the expected launch on 9 September.
Shared by Evan Blass on X, we see the iPhone Ultra (the name of which is still unconfirmed) in three colours, including a predictable white and a dark grey. Then there's a third colour - red - that seems to have drawn a rebuttal from another huge source online.
So what are we looking at? We get to see a folding iPhone, with two cameras on the rear, and a design that seems to match expectations. What wasn't expected, was a red version.
Apple has a long history of red iPhones starting under the (PRODUCT)RED programme with the iPhone 7 and running up to the iPhone 14 in 2022. Red then vanished from the colour palette.
But it might also be the case that there is no red iPhone Ultra. No sooner had Evan Blass shared the images of the red folding iPhone, as Mark Gurman came forward to say it didn't exist, that the whole thing was fake and that the folding iPhone won't come in red or green.
I'm not sure how green snuck into the conversation, but at least we know.
Further, Mark Gurman (who often seems to be the closest to Apple's whispers) says that these images aren't from Apple and they come from Xiaomi instead. Hold on - what just happened here?
Xiaomi, if you haven't heard, is also planning to launch a folding phone, called the Xiaomi 18 Fold and powered by the Xring 03 chip. While the launch was confirmed for September, it could be that Xiaomi reveals this device at IFA in Berlin next week - just to beat Apple to the punch.
And yes, a red version of the Xiaomi 18 Fold (itself thought to be based on the leaked dark red iPhone 18 Pro rumour) has leaked, which might be behind Gurman's insistence that Evan Blass is wrong.
Putting all that to one side, there is a good reason why Apple might consider a red folding phone and that's to gain more traction in China. It has released red phones for China before (stripping off the (PRODUCT)RED branding) as red is a lucky colour in China.
We're deep into the folding phone wars, it seems, and the next couple of weeks will reveal a lot more about where the battlelines lie.
