The iPhone Duo’s hinge has begun to wear. In a continuous test, the phone now stops a few degrees short of fully flat when it opens, after more than 451,000 folds.
The phone still works. The screen shows no crack and no deeper crease, it holds other angles normally, and a person can push it flat by hand. It just lost the firm snap it had when new.
The test belongs to CNET’s labs team, which built a machine it calls the Fold-a-Phone and has run one Duo on it around the clock for three weeks, with a daily livestream of the rig. Lab director Matthew Murray dates the first shift in how the phone opens to roughly 390,000 folds, on Tuesday. By about 440,300 folds, early on Friday morning, the machine was closing the screen again before it had finished opening.
The shortfall is small, between 5 and 10 degrees. The lab’s failure conditions are a dead phone, sensors that miss the screen’s position in time, or a blank display, and none has happened. The lab’s view is that an owner might not notice the change at first.
For scale, at 100 folds a day the total equals roughly 12 and a half years of use. Apple has published no fold rating for the Duo, so the lab’s staff have only guesses, from 500,000 up to 1.5 million. The test carries on until the phone meets one of those conditions.
The hinge is a separate matter from the screen faults seen earlier. Owners had reported cracked inner screens, and Apple has acknowledged a fault there. One test unit cannot show how every Duo will age.
