I was going to write today about the Endgame ticket app meltdown. My buddy Raj spent forty minutes on Thursday night trying to get the AMC app to load so he could grab seats for a Friday preview showing, and by the time it finally cooperated half the good rows were already gone. Fandango was apparently just as bad all week. Cute reminder that "unprecedented demand" always seems to catch these companies by total surprise, every single time, like it's never happened before and nobody could've possibly planned server capacity around the biggest movie release in years. I ended up going to a 10:15pm Saturday show instead and the theater was maybe two-thirds full, so evidently not literally everyone in America was fighting over the same three hundred seats at once.
But that's not actually what's been stuck in my head this week. What I can't stop thinking about is the Galaxy Fold.
The $1,980 beta test
Samsung was supposed to start selling the Fold this past Friday, the same day as Endgame, for $1,980. That's not a typo, by the way. Two thousand dollars for a phone. About a week and a half before that launch date they sent review units out to a stack of tech journalists, which is completely normal, that's how embargoes work. Except within a day or two several of those units just started dying. Screens flickering. Bulges forming right at the hinge. Whole sections going black.
Mark Gurman at Bloomberg had his stop working. Steve Kovach at CNBC too. Dieter Bohn over at The Verge posted a video of his unit basically failing by day two, hinge making a weird clicking noise and a chunk of the display just gone.
Part of the problem, and this is the detail that got me, is that the top layer of the display looked exactly like the plastic film you peel off a brand new phone screen before you use it. On every other phone that's precisely what it is, a protective sheet you're supposed to remove on day one. On the Fold it wasn't. It was structural, actually part of the screen itself, and peeling it off wrecked the display underneath. Several reviewers did this because there was nothing anywhere telling them not to. No sticker, no warning screen, nothing.
Samsung killed the launch that Monday. Postponed indefinitely, no new date announced.
I know this opinion isn't popular with the "I back the future no matter what" crowd, but here it is anyway: this is exactly why I don't buy first-generation anything anymore. I owned a Galaxy Note 7 in 2016, the one that caught fire, and I learned that lesson the expensive way (mine never actually caught fire, for the record, I just got the recall notice and a very stern email). I don't think folding screens are a dumb idea. I'd bet a decent number of phones look like this in five years. But paying two grand to be Samsung's unpaid public beta tester was always a bad trade, and this week proved it in the most literal way possible. If the review units going to professional journalists can't survive forty-eight hours of completely normal handling, the thing wasn't ready to leave the building, let alone somebody's back pocket.
What actually gets me is how avoidable a chunk of this was. Not a redesign, not new hardware. A sticker. A little tab that says "do not remove, this is your actual screen" instead of an edge that looks identical to the screen protector on literally every other phone anyone's owned for the last decade. The biggest failures in tech usually aren't the hard technical ones. They're the dumb, obvious ones that nobody in the room happened to flag before the boxes went out the door.
Huawei's got a folding phone in the pipeline too, the Mate X, and it's been pushed back as well, so this isn't only a Samsung problem. It's more of a "this whole product category is younger than the marketing wants you to believe" problem.
If you preordered a Fold, I'm sorry, and I hope Samsung gets you a fast refund, because as of right now nobody, including apparently Samsung, seems totally sure when this phone is actually shipping.