If Samsung’s next-gen foldables are any cheaper, you’ll have the Galaxy S25 Edge to thank

With Samsung’s Galaxy S25 series out of the way, all eyes will now be on its upcoming high-end foldables when they are announced later in the year. Potential buyers will be hoping for a bigger upgrade on the Galaxy Z Fold 7 than what its slab-style sibling brought, or at least a reduction in its price. We don’t know enough about the upcoming Samsung foldables, but if we understand this situation correctly, they should be cheaper to produce. Whether those benefits get transferred to the end user is a different topic.

Why does the S25 Edge even exist?

Samsung broke its tried-and-tested triple-phone lineup with the S25 series, adding an interesting fourth model: the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge. Specific details are yet to be shared, but its key selling point is that it will be one of the slimmest phones when it launches. While thinner phones have existed, there wasn’t much to get excited about. It generally meant that the phone had average battery life and performance.

However, things might be different with the S25 Edge. First, it is likely to be a more complete package than other slim phones of the past. This is primarily because processors have come a long way. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is well-tuned to balance performance and battery life, even without dedicated efficiency cores. If we are lucky, the S25 Edge will use the 7-core variant of the SoC, making it even more efficient and cool.

At the same time, battery densities have gotten higher, cameras produce great results without giant sensors, thanks to better optics, and smartphone design has become more sophisticated. Together, these changes enable making volumetrically smaller phones without significant corner-cutting.

It’s all about economics

I don’t think Samsung decided to create an S25 Edge from scratch because it was easy to do or because it had a crystal ball that said slimmer phones would suddenly become popular again. I’d wager the reason is more fascinating but also disappointing. The S25 Edge probably exists only to subsidize the development and production of Samsung’s foldable phones. Let me explain how.

When a new product is designed, the maker incurs millions in R&D and setting up production lines. These are called “fixed costs,” as they must be spent even if no phones are manufactured. These costs are higher when a device drastically differs from what is generally made or when the new product is more complex. Foldables fall into both categories.

Since fixed costs are usually unavoidable, the only way to lower them is to produce more units to spread the initial capital expenditure over more units. The inverse is why unique or high-end products (not only phones) are more expensive: R&D costs are split between fewer units.

The cost of innovation

These development expenses are the main reason any OEM (again, not only smartphones) would prefer as few changes in a new product as possible. The impact is compounded over time as supply chains also get optimized for products with time and scale, and changing them means going backward a few steps.

Have you wondered why Apple’s iPhones have slowed down on “innovation” over the last decade? It’s because it chooses to reuse the same component over multiple generations. For instance, changing the screen one year, cameras in another, and battery in the third. Older components are preferred on the software and firmware front, as they can be better optimized.

With the economics lesson out of the way, I feel the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge’s sole raison d’être is to make the foldables cheaper. When you look at the rest of the S25 lineup, they are incremental upgrades over their respective predecessors, but they don’t share that many parts with the foldables. The screens, cameras, batteries, and internal design — always the most expensive phone parts — differ on the Z Fold and Z Flip families. This is largely because the foldables have different space constraints that the slab phones are not subject to.

Two birds with one phone

Do you know what kind of slab phone would have a lot of space constraints, especially those of thickness? Yep, you guessed it right: extremely slim phones. They have the same battery, camera, and cooling concerns that plague foldables. Solving those design issues in one form factor could enable the creation of another. Think of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge as one-half of the Z Fold 6 or a non-folding Z Flip 6.

Samsung was already ordering many of the components that would go on the S25 Edge and had the expertise of wisely using the volume inside a sub-7mm device. By making the S25 Edge available separately, Samsung can achieve higher volumes for many of the components that would be used on its foldable, helping bring down the cost of the device (or the bill of materials, to be precise). Similarly, the R&D and testing expenses for these parts could be shared between the two form factors.

I’d go as far as saying that most product line extensions make better use of existing efforts and competencies. This is why “affordable flagships” have come up as a category, among other case studies. The next time you see an SE or an FE member in the family, you can guess why.

To innovate or not to innovate?

Looking closer, you can identify many more examples of how economics dictate product innovation. But when you are a multi-billion-dollar company producing millions of smartphones every year, every dollar saved adds up and aids the bottom line. While it’s easy to point fingers at tech companies for being slow to innovate, it helps to understand the other side a little bit. If Samsung does the S25 Edge right, it potentially can make the Z Fold and Flip 6 (or 7) for less — a symbiotic relationship between the two lines, and potentially a win for consumers as well.