On July 9th, Samsung held its latest Galaxy Unpacked event, showcasing its new smartwatches and new folding phone lineup. The Flip is a small but impressive upgrade that makes the Flip a more compelling phone than ever before, as you can read about in my preview piece. The Fold is a far more comprehensive and impressive update, but an even harder recommendation than before.

This has little to do with the phone’s hardware, which ranks among the most impressive on the market, and everything to do with the price, which starts at an outrageous $2,000. That’s for 256GB storage, and Samsung hasn’t said how much the 512GB or 1TB storage versions will cost, but expect close to $2,500 for the top-of-the-line version; or the same price as a MacBook Air and a 1TB iPhone 16 Pro Max.

There’s an old expression that “there’s no such thing as a bad product, just a bad price,” and no matter how good this phone looks, $2,000 is a terrible price. If you can get a great carrier deal and a good trade-in value, then it might still be worth considering. But even so, I would save a lot of money and go for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold or the OnePlus Open instead.

But if $2,000 is pocket change to you and you just want to buy a great phone, then Samsung has made an impressive phone. Every Fold since the third generation has been an iterative upgrade, but the Z Fold 7 is dramatically thinner and lighter than previous generations, down to 8.9mm thin, from 12.1mm on the Z Fold 6.

For reference, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is 8.25 mm thick, and actually weighs more than the Fold 7; and where previous Folds used a slightly narrow cover screen, this is wider, so closer to a classic phone screen. That cover screen also has Gorilla Glass Ceramic 2, a new form of ceramic-coated glass, and the inside folding screen is tougher too, courtesy of its new Armor FlexHinge and improved screen durability. It comes with the same flagship chips as you get in other flagship Galaxy phones — as you would need for the price — and it shares the same fine IP48 water and dust resistance of last year’s model.

There are changes to the cameras though. On the inside, the Fold now uses a standard punch-hole camera, rather than the under-screen camera of the previous generation, which was innovative but blurry and bad. My view is that the inside screen shouldn’t have a selfie camera, and then this large folding screen could go uninterrupted, but this is at least usable. On the back of the phone, the camera display is broadly the same as before, except for the primary camera, which now can put out 200-megapixel photographs. That sounds impressive, but large megapixel counts don’t say a lot about photo quality — which is why they’ve left the outdated ultrawide and zoom cameras at 12-megapixel and 10-megapixels respectively — so it will come down to testing.

It’s hard to complain about the phone’s hardware, and the software is great too. It comes with seven years of software updates, the latest Samsung UI — running on Android 16 — and a ton of AI features, powered by Google’s Gemini assistant. The only downgrade from previous versions of the Fold is that it no longer supports Samsung’s S-Pen stylus. Samsung’s defense is that, although some users loved it, it was rarely used by those customers, and never by most others; and by removing support, Samsung could make the Fold 7 thinner.

I think that, if you’re paying $2,000 for a phone, you should be getting all the features, even if you don’t use them. Then again, I would never pay $2,000 for a phone, so I’m the wrong person to say.