Everyone is buzzing about Apple's rumored iPhone Fold: it might arrive in September with the iPhone 18! It might not arrive then because of production delays! It might not have a crease! So what. Who cares? Did you see the iPhone on the Orion spaceship? The one that Artemis II mission crew members used to photograph the moon? That's what matters. That's what I want to talk about.
The iPhone Fold is important not because anyone needs it. It's about competition and slot-filling. Samsung has ably carved out a folding phone market (at 2.5% ov the overall market, it's still tiny) and everyone is looking at Apple, wondering what's up.
In typical fashion, the Cupertino tech giant has taken its dear sweet time to develop its own foldable, all while watching everyone else work out the myriad flexy phone kinks. You know the ones I'm talking about: water tightness, ability to withstand a grit of sand, screen durability, and that cursed screen crease.
Whatever Apple finally delivers in June or September or next year, it will probably be the best single-dolidding phone we've ever seen, and it still won't be as remarkable as what just happened in space.
Think about this: An iPhone 17 Pro Max traveled, along with the Artemis II crew, further away from where it was designed and built than any consumer technology has traveled before. Commander Reid Wiseman slipped it into his space suit (actually, the Artemis II ground crew slipped it in), and then probably patted the spot once before the Artemis II spacecraft rocketed up and off Earth to a rendezvous with the moon.
I knew astronauts were allowed to take smartphones with them, but it never occurred to me that they might be using them in space. After all, the Orion spaceship is already equipped with cameras on the solar arrays and a bunch of handheld DSLRs like the Nikon D5, along with some formidable 400mm lenses.
On the other hand, these four astronauts are products of a modern digital age. Of course, they took out their phones and snapped selfies with our home in the background. Naturally, Commander Wiseman used his iPhone 17 Pro Max's 8x optical zoom, which uses a sensor crop, to pull the moon's jagged surface close enough to almost touch.
It's clear that smartphone use, whether it's iPhones, Samsung Galaxy handsets, or Google Pixels, in space will now be a part of space travel. Every subsequent flight in our return to the moon and eventual colonization will feature imagery captured on mobile devices.
I won't argue that the images captured by Apple's 48MP main camera are better or of a higher quality than those captured with the Nikon D5 and its huge lens, but they tell a different, more personal story. When the camera can be held up with one hand to capture the astronaut and her environment, the entire mission becomes more relatable and human.
Remember this moment: the week the iPhone went to space, it matters, a whole lot more than whether or not you get to see an iPhone Fold in 2026.
