Apple’s first foldable iPhone went on sale on Friday 23rd October, and by Sunday owners in Australia, the US, Canada, China and India had posted photos of the same fault. A thin crack appears on the inner screen, directly over the hinge, and a bright line of stuck pixels then runs across one half of the display. Some of the phones no longer fold.
The iPhone Duo starts at USD 1,999 for 256GB and unfolds into a 7.6-inch screen. When we rounded up the reviews earlier this week, one review unit had slid down a flight of wet steps without damaging either screen. Anyone who has just bought one now wants to know whether their phone is likely to be affected and what Apple will do if it is. Neither has a firm answer yet.
What owners describe
The case most often shared comes from an owner in Melbourne. He wrote on the r/iPhoneDuo subreddit that he “had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer than 20 times”. While opening it he felt something near the hinge under the screen, then heard “an audible crack”, and he said there were “no marks or damage on the inner screen’s surface”. The subreddit’s moderators marked his post as verified after he showed them photos and Apple repair paperwork, and an Apple Store replaced the phone on the spot.
Later posts follow the same pattern. A US owner says the crack appeared during setup, after about four folds, on a phone whose hinge already felt stiff. Others put it at three hours, seven hours or under a day. The crack almost always runs along the centre line of the hinge, and several owners say it happened as they were opening the phone. The subreddit now collects the reports in one pinned thread, and the problem has picked up the name “CrackGate”.
How common it is remains unknown, and Apple has given no figure. Many of the pictures from China show demonstration units in Apple Stores, which shoppers handle all day. The most shared posts on X also reuse each other’s pictures: the same photo of a cracked phone in a Chinese Apple Store appears in at least four of them. Some are not real at all. A wallpaper that imitates the crack and its green line is going round as a joke, and one widely shared photo of a damaged Duo carries a reader note on X saying the image was altered with AI. Still, the leaker Ice Universe posted photos from Chinese buyers on launch day itself, and new reports have kept coming from different countries since.
Some damage has other causes. JerryRigEverything, a YouTube channel that stress-tests phones, got dust into the hinge until it would not close, and a deliberate bend test left a permanent green line across the inner screen. In the other direction, a folding machine run by reporter Joanna Stern opened and closed a Duo more than 32,000 times over four nights without cracking it.
What could be causing it
Apple says the hinge is built from more than 100 components and “supports the center of the display to hold it flat when opened”. The folding panel sits between two layers of high-strength glass with a titanium plate underneath, and a polymer cover layer goes on top. Apple calls the phone “built to last” but has never published a fold-cycle rating.
Every theory so far points at the hinge. One holds that a hinge part is slightly misaligned in some batch of phones and pushes up into the screen as it opens. Max Weinbach, whose friend’s Duo cracked and then stopped folding, circled a part in the middle of the hinge on X and asked whether it had snapped, pierced the panel and locked the hinge. Chinese tech sites suggest assembly tolerances. A video shared from China shows a Duo after one day of use with a slight bulge on the inner screen just below its midpoint, roughly where the cracks have been appearing. None of these has been confirmed, and iFixit, the repair firm known for taking phones apart, has not yet published a teardown of the Duo.
Apple’s repair documents, published on launch day, show how it treats a broken hinge. Its hinge troubleshooting page lists “Bent or broken hinge” and “Device won’t open or close completely” as symptoms, says “There aren’t diagnostics or software remedies for hinge issues”, and tells technicians to “replace the inner display assembly”. Apple’s list of orderable parts has no separate hinge, which appears to mean the hinge and the folding screen are replaced together.
What happens if yours cracks
A crack that appears within hours, with no impact marks, should fall under Apple’s one-year warranty for manufacturing defects. Most owners who went back to an Apple Store got a new phone the same day. Others say stores in Shanghai and in Jacksonville, Florida, judged the damage to be their fault. Apple’s phone support has offered replacements by courier, but only with a hold on the card for the phone’s full price, and people who bought through mobile carriers have had a harder time because carriers have no spare stock.
Without cover, the bill is large. Apple charges USD 999 to replace the inner display outside warranty. With AppleCare+, Apple’s paid damage-cover plan, the inner display fee is USD 99, and replacing only the cover layer costs USD 19.
The claim on X that Duo screens “can’t even be fixed until JANUARY” spread alongside a TikTok clip of a US owner whose Duo broke within a day. The only account we can trace is from one US customer, who says T-Mobile told them it couldn’t replace any parts until January. Apple has said nothing of the kind. It published its repair manual and parts list on 23rd October, and its stores have been swapping phones. New Duos are another matter: Apple’s online store was quoting late January delivery dates within half an hour of pre-orders opening, and that wait is probably what got mixed into the repair claim.
The recall calls
Some posts now call for a recall and point to Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold. Samsung never recalled that phone from buyers. In April 2019, before it went on sale, reviewers’ units broke, and Samsung delayed the release after linking the failures to “impact on the top and bottom exposed areas of the hinge”. It took the review units back, extended the screen’s protective layer past the bezel, capped the ends of the hinge and launched in September 2019. Apple has no such option, because the Duo is already in buyers’ hands in more than 70 countries and regions.
So far the explanations are guesses, but the failures are consistent: new phones with no outside damage crack at the same spot on the hinge within hours. That fits a fault in some units better than it fits careless handling, which is what some Apple Stores have told owners. It is enough for Apple to say what it knows, even if that is only how its staff should tell a defect from accidental damage. Until it does, each store decides case by case, and buyers in 28 more countries and regions, where the Duo goes on sale on Friday 30th October, will be paying USD 1,999 without that answer.
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