Some iPhone Duo screens are already failing

The iPhone Duo launched last week, offering anyone willing to spend $2,000 a chance to experience Apple’s first foldable phone. For some early buyers, the morning after isn’t going great. Despite the company’s big talk about its “precision-engineered” hinge, some devices appear to have a hardware flaw that destroys the device’s impressive internal display within hours (or minutes) of use.

The Internet is currently overflowing with images of busted iPhone Duos, all sporting almost identical damage. The OLED is marred by several bright lines originating just below the midpoint of the display. These bands of damaged pixels extend all the way to the bottom and right edges. Some units also show lines of dead pixels following the crease from the top to the area where the bright lines begin.

Anyone who has seen a damaged OLED panel will be familiar with this type of defect. When the layers of the display are damaged, the pixels no longer receive the correct voltage to illuminate them. Instead, they get the full driving voltage and are permanently on at maximum brightness. Some pixels can get no voltage, leaving them totally black. The only fix is to replace the OLED, but swapping the iPhone Duo’s screen reportedly costs half as much as the device itself.

It sounds like most affected devices are failing within about a day of use. But a few unlucky buyers note they only opened and closed the phone a few times, and in some cases, they hadn’t even finished the initial setup process. Some customers have reported success taking their defective phones to Apple stores for replacement, but spares may be in short supply right now.

A look inside

In the absence of any official explanation, iFixit may be the next best thing. The site has already torn an iPhone Duo apart and taken a close look at the affected area. After years of seeing other foldables fail, there are a few suspects to check. Since foldables need to pass data and power across the hinge, there’s always a cable tucked in there that could press on the screen. The iPhone Duo has a wide cable with “accordion-like pleats,” according to iFixit, but this doesn’t quite match the accounts of the damage.

People with broken $2,000 iPhones say there’s unusual physical resistance and sometimes even a clicking sound as the device closes. After that, the lines appear. Using CT scans of the phone, iFixit has shown that the point of failure starts below where the ribbon cable passes through the hinge. The width of the supporting hinge mechanism changes in that spot, suggesting a mechanical misalignment.

The animation above shows iFixit’s best guess at what’s happening. The support bar in that narrowed section of the hinge may be getting stuck, preventing it from dropping far enough to accommodate the waterdrop bend in the OLED panel when the device closes. This creates stress on the display that ultimately damages the matrix. YouTuber CuriousHagi also zeroed in on that region, identifying a place where the thinner link may be snapping during operation. He speculates the component is physically sticking to the support plate.

If this fiddly little hinge piece is the culprit, there’s no way to prevent the OLED on an affected device from failing. It could happen after five minutes or five days, but continuous pressure on an OLED panel will eventually lead to permanent damage.

Same old fold

Apple has yet to acknowledge the issue, and it probably won’t have anything to say until the problem is fully investigated. The scale is impossible to know—Apple sells a lot of devices, so even a low failure rate could see a flood of reports on social media. Adding moving parts to a phone will lead to at least some increase in hardware issues. Apple certainly wouldn’t be the first device maker to have problems with its first foldable launch.

In 2019, Samsung released the original Galaxy Fold with a much more primitive hinge design. Even before launch, reviewers began seeing OLED damage after a few days of use. The issue in that case was a design with openings that allowed particulates to infiltrate the hinge, where they damaged the screen from underneath. Samsung delayed the release while it re-engineered the hinge.

Samsung’s foldables have not been bulletproof by any means, but there have not been widespread reports of defects immediately after unboxing. Other makers of foldable phones move so few units that occasional defects may not make waves online. Apple is just lucky that way.

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