Does the Mate XT tri-fold really school Apple at 3x the iPhone 16 Pro Max price?

We tested it and went away pretty impressed, and not only by the idea, but by the fact that Huawei carried it to fruition and actually has a multi-foldable phone on the market right now, albeit a rather expensive one. 

For all the brouhaha around the Mate XT launch and the excited dithyrambs that the current phone form factor paradigms are over, done, finished with ("are you listening Apple or Samsung?!"), and so on, there is little chance that the phone will actually catch on.

Apple, what are you thinking with your puny 2024 iPhone 16 Pro Max flagship given that the groundbreaking Mate XT is already out there? Samsung, your Galaxy Z Fold 6foldable phone mama is too fat!

That seems to be the mantra of almost every Mate XT preview that waxes poetic about true innovation and, above all, Huawei's ability to deliver. This is not to say that Huawei didn't pull off the most impressive handset in a decade, because it did.

The tri-folding phone, however, follows Huawei's cowboy philosophy of kicking the door of the saloon with pistols blazing and then failing to take the patrons' disposable cash. It was the first to deploy a periscope zoom camera on a modern phone, for example, placing one in the P30 Pro five years back. 

When we interviewed Huawei's CEO Richard Yu at the time, however, he advised that the novel at the time folded camera optics is so prohibitively expensive as a phone component that Huawei was forced to price the phone north of what even Apple or Samsung flagships cost and even that didn't suffice.

Then came the first Huawei foldable phone with unique out-folding design, again in 2019, or the year when Samsung released its OG Z Fold. Huawei mentioned that it is losing money on the Mate X despite its eye-watering price tag and in 2020, with its Mate Xs successor, it divulged exactly how much. Huawei's CEO Richard Yu revealed that the company has lost at least $60 million in the first month of Mate Xs general sales, despite that it peddled the phone at the whopping $2,800 equivalent, or about what it charges for the first tri-folding handset now.

Something similar is in play with the Mate XT. Huawei already admitted that it can make it in extremely limited quantities, relegating it to the proof-of-concept tier, rather than the retail stage, as the tri-folding phone is fetching many times its price on the scalpers market. 

This artificial scarcity shows hints that the Mate XT might be crazy expensive to produce, and Huawei may even be selling it at a loss again. Its display replacement pricing alone costs as much as the iPhone 16 Pro Max, while the motherboard will set you back even more.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max, however, is shaping up to be Apple's most popular phone in the series again, and will sell in the tens of millions despite its "stale" form factor and "lack of innovative features," as many reviewers put it. The Mate XT, in the meantime, will remain a water cooler topic not only because of its pricing, but also the whole multi-folding design concept itself.

Here we arrive to the second big hurdle before Mate XT's purported "obliteration" of flagship phones like the most popular iPhone 16 Pro Max, ergonomics. Granted, it can go from a 6.4-incher or 7.9-incher to a 10.2-incher when fully unfurled, but there is no going around the fact that it is a thick and heavy handset for all practical purposes.

Carrying the Mate XT in your pocket? That would be 298 g (10.51 oz) of heft. Using it when closed? That would be 12.8 mm (0.5 inches) of girth to hold and use with one hand. Studies show that the majority of foldable phone users are not using the main display nearly as much as they are using the cover screen, i.e. foldables remain predominantly closed throughout the day. 

The Mate XT? Well, the 10-inch display stage which is the added value of the tri-foldable phone concept will likely be of little everyday use, unless one loves living on the funny side of town. There is even a trend on Chinese social media that takes the Mate XT dorkiness to the extreme by trying to hold a call with the phone fully open in its tablet screen mode, just for giggles.

Overall, when the price and convenience are paired with the lack of general Mate XT availability, the claims that it rings the death knell for other bar-style or even foldable phone form factors seem to be greatly exaggerated, and Apple will likely be the one laughing all the way to the bank with the "stale" iPhone 16 Pro Max. As we said in our latest PA Show podcast, the iPhone 16 Pro line may just turn out to be "boringly great."