You think the Galaxy Z Fold 7 looks cheap.
It’s plastic. It’s ugly. It screams “mid-range.”
Enter Vertu.
The Alphafold exists solely for people who find a six-bedroom house to be a reasonable entry ticket to adulthood. This device wraps its screens in calf leather or alligator skin. Sometimes actual diamonds. Prices start at $6,880 but that’s just the base rate for showing up.
Want to go higher? Fine. Vertu lets you customize everything until you run out of money. Six-figure phones happen regularly here. The Motorola Razr costs less than Vertu’s packaging.
What do you get? Mostly vibes. And gold.
Inside though there are screens and chips. It unfolds like a book showing an 8-inch panel they claim is free of creases. The battery is big—a beefy 6,500 mAh silicon-carbon slab. On the back sits a triple camera array featuring a 50MP main sensor flanked by ultrawide and telephoto lenses.
Under the hood sits a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip.
Wait. Not the Elite. The previous gen.
It’s a step behind the current flagship tech. The specs are mediocre. Barely acceptable if you’re ignoring them completely. Vertu knows this. Their clients aren’t benchmarking frames per second while their driver navigates the ring roads of London or Dubai.
Who needs high frame rates when you have empire?
To keep the billionaires busy, Vertu stuffed the phone with AI tools. Agentic AI. It’s supposed to analyze corporate data. Offer strategic recommendations. Tell the boss what to do.
Sort of.
Vertu is quick to draw lines. The AI doesn’t have keys to the kingdom.
“It should function as a trusted execution partner… not as an unrestricted autonomous system.”
Your phone won’t liquidate your assets on a whim. It won’t vote itself into the boardroom.
Relieving news. Mostly because who actually has to worry about this stuff.
Once the gold and the AI pitch stopped being funny my attention faded anyway. Just like school textbooks used to do when I stared long enough into the page.
