Xiaomi Beat Apple by 48 Hours and Sold Out. Forecasts Still Hand Apple a Quarter of the Market.
Xiaomi's first wide foldable landed two days before Apple's event, thinner, cheaper, on its own 3nm silicon, and pre-orders emptied on day one. Then the arithmetic: it stops at China's border.
Vincent JiangSeptember 9, 2026 · 3 min read
Xiaomi put its first wide foldable on stage on September 7.1 Apple opens its own event on September 9. Two days.
The hardware, side by side
The Xiaomi 18 Fold weighs 219 grams and measures 5.02mm open. Closed, it is 117.8 by 83.6mm. The inner screen runs 7.58 inches at 4,000 nits, the cover screen 5.38. A 6,000mAh cell takes 67W by cable and 50W without one. Leica tuned the 200-megapixel main camera and a 50-megapixel periscope.2,3
Apple's foldable is expected near $1,999, with two rear cameras, no telephoto, and 25W wireless charging.4
The price, and the sellout
Xiaomi's starts at 10,999 yuan, about $1,540.2 Pre-orders emptied on day one, with first-sale demand running 310% above the previous generation.5
On X, Ice Universe flagged it as the first phone anywhere to carry the O3 chip.6 Ben Geskin, holding one at IFA in Berlin, described a mini tablet that shuts to passport size.7
The chip is the real story
The engine is Xiaomi's own. The Xring O3 is a 3nm TSMC part carrying 24 billion transistors and a 200 TOPS neural engine. Xiaomi has committed 50 billion yuan, roughly $7 billion, to chip design over a decade.8
Then the arithmetic
Then the arithmetic. That silicon run is earmarked for 200,000 to 300,000 handsets9, and the 18 Fold stays inside China. Counterpoint puts Apple at 25% of 2026 foldable shipments, second to Samsung Electronics' 38%, on as many as six million units.10 IDC models more than ten million.11
“Supply, not demand, is expected to cap the early ramp.”
The sentence fits Xiaomi too, for a different reason.
Still a rounding error
Foldables are still near 2% of all smartphones. Xiaomi booked 108.9 billion yuan in second-quarter revenue on a record handset selling price of 1,351 yuan.12 Huawei answered the same Monday with the Mate XT2 trifold at 19,999 yuan.1
Xiaomi got there first, thinner, and cheaper. It stops at the border.
How this brief was made
01Gathered & sourced256 channels · 1,642 articles▾
Agents swept 256 channels and ingested 1,642 articles, then de-duplicated and ranked them for signal.
02Verified & cross-validated12 claims · 18 data feeds▾
Every one of 12 load-bearing claims was checked against primary sources, with 18 live data feeds reconciling the figures and charts.
- 1Reuters (Huawei and Xiaomi launches).
- 2MacRumors (18 Fold specs).
- 3GSMArena, full specifications.
- 4Tom's Guide (JPMorgan estimate).
- 5Gizmochina (first-sale demand).
- 6Ice Universe on X.
- 7Ben Geskin on X, from IFA.
- 8TechWire Asia (Xring strategy).
- 9TNW (O3 allocation).
- 10MacDailyNews on Counterpoint's foldable forecast, Sep 8 2026 (Apple 25% share, behind Samsung's 38%).
- 11IDC (foldable tracker).
- 12Xiaomi Q2 2026 earnings call transcript, via Investing.com.
03Reviewed & edited1 human editor▾
One editor read the draft against the evidence, tuned the framing, and signed off before it shipped.
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Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
