People queued overnight outside Apple stores for the iPhone Duo, the company’s first folding phone, priced at about $2,000. Two days after it went on sale, as Samantha Cole reported for 404 Media, photographs of the same phones were moving across social media with something new in them: a deep groove down the middle of the screen and, on some devices, a crack along the exact line where the glass bends.
The owners have already named it. They call it “crackgate.” When a company has not yet explained something, its customers tend to name it themselves.
Six hours, twenty openings
What the owners describe is small and ordinary. One of them wrote on Reddit’s r/iPhoneDuo:
Had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer than 20 times. I was showing it to a friend, and as I opened it, I felt something around the internal hinge, underneath the screen. As I continued opening it, I heard an audible crack, and the screen broke right along the hinge.
Another posted a photo of a wide, uneven gully across the display and asked: “How long before I join crack gang?” Others report a different symptom, a bright white line of stuck pixels running from the centre of the screen to its outer edge. Owners of broken units, Ryan Whitwam wrote in Ars Technica, describe the same sequence: an odd physical resistance as the phone closes, sometimes a click, and then the lines.
Inside the hinge
The repair firm iFixit ran CT scans of the phone and found that the failure begins just below the point where the ribbon cable passes through the hinge. At that spot the supporting mechanism changes width, which suggests a mechanical misalignment. iFixit’s best guess is that a support bar in this narrower section gets stuck. If it does not drop far enough to make room for the teardrop-shaped bend the OLED panel takes when the phone closes, the display is put under stress and its matrix is damaged.
iFixit’s teardown offered a second possibility as well. “Another involves the curved rails that guide the hinge’s movement, which rise above the surrounding components during folding and could, in theory, interfere with the screen if they fail to move as intended,” it wrote. The YouTuber CuriousHagi looked at the same area and found a place where a thinner link may be snapping during use. He speculates that the part is physically sticking to the support plate.
If that small hinge part is to blame, Ars Technica’s reading is bleak. An affected phone cannot be saved. It might fail after five minutes or after five days, but constant pressure on an OLED panel ends in permanent damage.
The company speaks
On Monday morning neither outlet had heard anything from Cupertino. Apple had not acknowledged the problem, and it did not immediately answer 404 Media’s question about the crease. Later that day the company sent several outlets the same short statement, as CNBC reported: “We are aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units. If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement.”
The statement says nothing about the cause and nothing about how many phones are affected. According to 9to5Mac, the fault seems to show up fairly soon after first use. Owners do not need AppleCare+ to get a replacement, and people who bought through a carrier should go straight to AppleCare. Outside the warranty, an inner-screen repair costs $999, The Next Web reported, on a phone that starts at $1,999.
“A small number” is the kind of phrase large organisations use to make a problem smaller, and here no one outside the company can check it. Apple sells so many devices that even a low failure rate could produce a flood of complaints online. The online record is also unreliable: both 9to5Mac and MacRumors warned that some of the crack images being shared are AI-generated fakes mixed in with the real reports.
Seven years late, the same fold
Apple is not the first company to stumble with its first foldable. In 2019 Samsung’s original Galaxy Fold, which had a much cruder hinge, showed OLED damage in reviewers’ hands within days, before it had even reached shops. In that case, openings in the design let particles get into the hinge and damage the screen from below. Samsung delayed the launch and redesigned the hinge. Its later foldables have had their faults, but they have not drawn widespread reports of defects straight out of the box. Smaller makers sell so few folding phones that their occasional failures rarely attract much notice. Apple’s size works against it here, because there are enough Duos in circulation for any fault to be seen.
The crease is a separate and older problem. Samsung’s Fold phones develop one too, and users say it gets more visible over time. Apple had prepared for it: in early October, 9to5Mac reported, Apple’s Kate Bergeron said the Duo’s folding screen has a replaceable cover layer to help with the crease. Testers have pushed the phone hard. TheCaseTester folded one 1,000 times and saw a crease by the end. Tim Pan folded his 11,500 times and got a similar result. CNET’s custom-built folding machine had passed 55,000 folds. Joanna Stern found that after 32,000 folds the phone felt “pretty much the same.”
Apple has not said whether a phone with only the centre crease, without the white line, will be replaced. Meanwhile it now faces Samsung’s $1,900 rival in a market where the crease has long been accepted as a cost of owning a folding phone. Some buyers have already accepted it. “Folks, it’s a foldable device. The crease is there. Just enjoy the fact that you have one,” one commenter wrote under a contented owner’s photo.