iPhone Duo Teardown

Apple’s folding iPhone finally made it to our teardown table. Some owners’ screens didn’t make it through setup. After fifteen years of patents and rumors, the iPhone Duo is here, and repair shops may not have long to wait for their first customers. Owners are already reporting cracks and bright lines along the fold. Though Apple’s offering replacement units for now, any out-of-warranty screen damage will cost $999. So of course we wanted a closer look at what’s happening underneath. First gen hardware teething pains aside, there’s plenty to admire in the iPhone Duo. Apple borrowed some of our favorite repair tricks from ordinary iPhones: batteries that release with electricity, an outer screen that’s pleasantly simple to remove, and lots of components you can reach without dismantling half the phone. Together, those choices make this the most repairable foldable smartphone we’ve ever taken apart. But that’s definitely not an endorsement of repairing the Duo. Fixing the phone’s inner screen is still going to be a bear. We took the Duo all the way down to the gears, followed glowing dust into its hinge, and put its crease-hiding nano-texture under the microscope. Here’s what we found. The Crease Has a Very Good Disguise Every foldable, well, folds. Repeatedly. Materials fatigue with repeated mechanical stress, and over time you’d expect to see evidence in the way of marks, creases, or wrinkles along the fold. It’s a real engineering magic trick to make a folding OLED look flat when it’s fully open, and no foldable phone has solved that problem completely. Not even the Duo, no matter how many Apple fans call it “creaseless.” Don’t get us wrong. The Duo’s inner display looks remarkably smooth. Its hinge and supporting layers help it open flat, while the matte nano-texture finish scatters reflections across the surface, further concealing any evidence of a crease. Under our Evident DSX2000 microscope, that finish looks like tiny rounded bumps packed together, a little like bubble wrap. They scatter light, softening the reflections you see on the screen. The diffusion effect of the nano-texture is obvious when we zoom into the camera cutout: on the left, pixels shining clearly through the smooth, untextured circle in the nano-texture layer. On the right, the pixel grid is fuzzed by the bubble wrap. When lights reflect off the screen, they bend as they cross the crease. Scattering that reflection helps hide the dip. When we take off the nano-texture layer, …