Ahead of Apple, Caviar is showing off the foldable iPhone Ultra with a tinge of luxury

Apple has not announced its first foldable iPhone yet, but Caviar is already trying to sell a luxury version of it. The custom phone brand has revealed its “Flagship” collection for the rumored iPhone Ultra, giving Apple’s expected foldable a gold, silver, leather, and carbon fiber makeover months before the real device is likely to appear.

Caviar has made plenty of wildly expensive Apple accessories and custom phones before. We recently saw the company put a Tyrannosaurus fossil fragment into a $4,490 magnetic case for the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Its foldable iPhone Ultra collection is playing in the same absurdly expensive territory, only this time the luxury treatment is arriving before Apple’s own version.

A luxury iPhone before the real one

The collection includes four versions of the foldable iPhone Ultra. The Dark Cherry model uses purple crocodile leather and decorative elements plated in 24K gold. Caviar says the color is inspired by the Dark Cherry shade expected on the iPhone 18 Pro. The Titan model goes fully black, while the Silver version uses a silver upper panel, crocodile leather, and a three-dimensional Apple logo made from sterling silver.

Computer, Electronics, Pc — Titan Caviar

Electronics, Phone, Mobile Phone — Titan Caviar

The most lavish option is the Gold model, which uses carbon fiber and a three-dimensional Apple logo made entirely of 18K gold. Caviar says this version is dedicated to Apple’s 50th anniversary.

Some of the technical details on Caviar’s page appear to be based on rumors rather than official Apple information. The page mentions a titanium body roughly 4.5mm thick, an A20 Pro chip, 12GB of RAM, a 24MP under-display selfie camera, and two 48MP rear cameras. That camera detail is worth treating carefully, since other rumors have pointed to a punch-hole camera instead.

The expensive iPhone gets even more expensive

The regular foldable iPhone Ultra is already expected to be Apple’s most expensive iPhone yet. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has pointed to a price of around $2,300 to $2,500, and early supply could be extremely limited.

Caviar is pushing the price far beyond that. The Flagship collection will be limited to 19 units, and delivery is expected only after Apple launches the real iPhone Ultra. The brand has listed preorder pricing from $13,840, while the top Gold model with 1TB storage is priced at $16,270.

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Stephan Dorsey

Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.

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Recent Reviews

The post-warranty graveyard is filling up with working gadgets

I reluctantly upgraded from my Pixel 4a in late 2024, which means I spent four years clinging to a phone that still felt like a phone. Part of that was the size. The Pixel 4a was small enough to use without performing thumb yoga, a disappearing luxury now that flagships have settled into pocket-tablet territory. That’s an argument for another day.

The uglier issue is what happened after I moved on. In January 2025, Google pushed an automatic Android 13 update to Pixel 4a phones. Google’s own support page says the update reduced available battery capacity and affected charging performance on some impacted devices. Reddit users were less polite. One r/Pixel4a post said the battery suddenly had “around 40% of its former capacity” after the patch.

For poor ol’ 4a, that was basically the death knell.

When an update becomes the problem

A dying battery is normal. A four-year-old phone needing service isn’t exactly a scandal. Batteries age, screens fail, ports loosen, and gravity remains undefeated.

This felt different. The phone didn’t simply get old in someone’s pocket. Its usable life changed after a company-controlled patch, and the owner was left to deal with the result. The Verge reported that the update was tied to overheating-risk mitigation and reduced charging capacity by more than 50% on affected units. Battery safety is real. It still doesn’t erase the experience of waking up to a phone that suddenly can’t survive the day.

That’s what update death looks like. Software doesn’t just support aging hardware anymore. It can also decide when that hardware becomes miserable to keep using.

When every patch feels haunted

My wife, who’s rocking an S24 Ultra, has a different version of the same dread. She keeps running into Reddit threads about Samsung Galaxy phones and the dreaded green line, that bright vertical scar that makes a screen look like it has been reassigned to a cyberpunk prop department. One r/S23 user wrote that a green line appeared on a carefully maintained phone after about a year and a half, then said Samsung service quoted a screen replacement because the warranty was over. Another Samsung Community post claimed a green-line issue appeared after an August update, with the display allegedly working perfectly before it.

Reddit isn’t a forensic lab with avatars. A green line can come from boring hardware failure, not corporate villainy with a release calendar. Still, the anxiety is real. People don’t only worry that an update will move a button or ruin a camera setting. They worry it might be the thing that nudges a working device from “old” to “not worth repairing.”

Modern gadgets are never fully handed over. They keep phoning home. They keep asking for patches. They keep depending on decisions made long after the receipt has faded. Ownership now comes with a quiet asterisk.

The graveyard got software updates

Planned obsolescence used to sound like tinfoil-hat consumer paranoia, which was convenient for everyone selling the new thing. Then regulators started writing it down in boring official language. In 2018, Italy’s competition authority fined Samsung and Apple after finding that software and firmware updates caused serious malfunctions, reduced performance, and sped up replacement of older phones. Samsung was fined €5 million, while Apple was fined €10 million.

Apple’s battery-throttling mess made the suspicion harder to laugh off. In the US, Apple agreed to a settlement of up to $500 million over claims that it slowed older iPhones, while a separate multistate settlement required Apple to pay $113 million over alleged misrepresentations around iPhone batteries and performance throttling. Consumers weren’t hallucinating the pattern. The receipts were scattered across court filings, regulatory decisions, and phones that suddenly felt older than they had the day before.

Europe seems less willing to accept “trust us” as a product-lifetime policy. New EU rules for smartphones and tablets started applying on June 20, 2025, covering durability, repairability, battery life, and software updates. New labels put some of that lifespan math in front of shoppers before checkout.

The post-warranty graveyard used to be easy to recognize: cracked screens, swollen batteries, and charging ports full of pocket lint. Now the graveyard has paperwork, compatibility warnings, and software that slowly stops cooperating. The gadget can still turn on. It can still look fine on a desk. Then one day the company changes what “usable” means, and the thing you paid for starts practicing being trash.

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Stephan Dorsey

Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.