iFixit's teardown suggests the iPhone Duo's hinge center support bar may be behind its cracked inner screens. Apple is reportedly replacing affected phones.
iFixit has torn down the iPhone Duo and given it a provisional 5/10 repairability score. That might not seem great, but it is the highest score it has awarded a foldable to date, which tells you a lot about the complexity of these devices. And it is partly that complexity that seems to be leading to multiple reports of cracked screens from around the world.
First off, let’s look at what iFixit found. The inner display has a matte nano-texture finish that scatters reflections in an attempt to hide the crease. With it removed, the crease looks arguably more visible than on, say, the Galaxy Z Fold8. Looking at the area under a microscope reveals that some subpixels are oval and point in different directions. iFixit points to an Apple patent application on reducing diffraction artifacts as a possible explanation.
The nano-texture finish sits on a replaceable polymer cover. Replacing it costs $49 ($19 with AppleCare+) at an Apple Store, while replacing the inner display costs $999 without coverage, half the price of a new device.
The hinge itself uses metal joints, springs, and synchronization gears around a teardrop-shaped curve, so the closed screen follows a gentle curve inside the hinge. If that sounds simple, it’s actually not, as the display’s layers also need to slide against each other while it curves round.
So, what’s causing the cracks? To find out, iFixit built a 3D model of the hinge based on a combination of teardown footage, patents, and CT scans. It then compared this with the reported damage locations, which mostly follow the same pattern: a thin line along the fold and a brighter, thicker line extending horizontally across the right-hand side of the screen just below the halfway point. Users also report hearing a loud pop just before the screen breaks.
iFixit’s model places the breaks slightly below the cable’s path through the hinge, and its simulation shows that the center support bar can fail to drop far enough to accommodate the folded screen. This would create a stress hotspot near where the breaks have been reported.
It’s worth pointing out at the moment that this is a hypothesis, but iFixit’s testing and stellar track record in this area show that it’s a reasonable one. The question is, what happens next? Is this a small manufacturing defect affecting a tiny sample of new iPhone Duos, or a larger problem that will eventually affect most units? Given the extensive testing that the Duo went through you have to hope the former, but we’ve already seen some high-profile devices such as the Sony FX5 hit problems that you think would have been caught before release, so you never know.
Apple has yet to officially respond to what online wags are calling Crackgate, but so far reports are that Apple is replacing affected devices wholesale rather than trying to implement repairs.