Apple’s $2,000 iPhone Duo Faces a Hinge Crack Test
Apple’s $2,000 iPhone Duo Faces a Hinge Crack Test
The trouble surfaced almost as soon as Apple’s first foldable reached buyers. On launch day, early reports described inner displays cracking along the hinge, often followed by bright lines spreading across the right side of the screen. One Australian owner said the phone had been opened fewer than 20 times before they felt resistance, heard “an audible crack,” and watched the screen fail; an Apple Store replaced it immediately.
In the first wave of accounts, the damage looked unnervingly consistent: broken OLED panels, dead or overbright pixels, and failures reported within hours or days. Some owners said the hinge clicked or resisted movement before the display gave way, feeding suspicion that this was more than ordinary accidental damage.
Apple subsequently acknowledged the complaints, saying it was aware of “an issue impacting the inner display” on a “small number of iPhone Duo units.” The company urged affected customers to contact AppleCare for replacement, while maintaining that most devices were not susceptible and that defective units appeared to fail quickly.
The emerging technical explanations point in the same direction, though neither amounts to a confirmed diagnosis. iFixit’s scans and teardown suggest a narrowed section of the hinge support bar may stick rather than dropping enough to accommodate the folding OLED, placing damaging pressure on the display. The repair site noted that the suspected failure point sits below the ribbon cable path, making a simple cable pinch less convincing.
A separate durability test by YouTuber CuriousHagi reached a similar conclusion. After reproducing a crack, he found a thinner central hinge link that snapped at a small notch and showed contact marks where it met the support plate.
For now, Apple’s remedy is replacement, not an explanation. But the uniformity of the failures has turned a supposedly precision-engineered hinge into the iPhone Duo’s first major test.
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