Apple's First Foldable Is Cracking Along the Crease on Day One
Within hours of the iPhone Duo going on sale, users in China and Australia were posting photos of split inner screens — damage that runs along the fold line and, in one case, appeared after fewer than 20 open-and-close cycles.
Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, went on sale on October 23. By the end of the first day, the internet already had a problem to point at: photos of cracked inner screens, posted by buyers in Australia and China, with damage following a suspiciously similar pattern — a crack running from the fold line toward the center of the display, and in several cases a row of what look like dead pixels along the right edge. Sina's aggregator counted multiple confirmed cases within hours. (@新浪热点)
The timing is what stings. An Australian user reported that his unit failed about six hours after unboxing, before he had folded it 20 times: while showing a friend the unfolded screen, he felt something odd below the inner hinge, heard a distinct click, and watched a crack open along the crease. Apple replaced the phone on the spot at an Apple Store. A Chinese user described a nearly identical sequence — a click while unfolding normally, then a black vertical split roughly three centimeters long, plus a thinner crack crossing the right half of the screen. In Hong Kong, HK01 gathered the complaints under a headline translating roughly as "happiness lasted five minutes." (HK01)
On Weibo, where the folding-phone market has been contested for years, the reaction ranged from schadenfreude to engineering talk. The tech blogger Chen Zhen, traveling in Spain, posted photos of his own Duo next to a terse "What the hell — why is this happening?" (@陈震同学) Another tech account offered a theory that many found persuasive: domestic phone makers have been shipping foldables for years and their suppliers have learned the failure modes, while Apple's key folding-screen supplier is a first-time mass producer of the component. "Foldables from Chinese brands are very mature. This kind of thing is really rare on them," the account wrote, dubbing the Duo a "quick-fail machine." (@科技疯汇)
The criticism extends past hardware. On Zhihu, the question-and-answer site, users are swapping notes on how many everyday apps still render badly on the unfolded screen — a reminder that Apple is entering a form factor Chinese manufacturers and app developers have spent four years tuning. The network carriers, meanwhile, are dealing with a more mundane bottleneck: China Unicom says it has stationed more than a thousand staff at Apple stores to help buyers set up eSIM service, the first iPhone to drop physical SIM slots.
Apple has not yet commented publicly on the cracked screens, and the reports remain a handful of individual cases rather than a confirmed defect rate. But for a device marketed as the company's long-awaited answer to Huawei and other Chinese foldables, the first 24 hours delivered the exact optics Apple did not want: the newcomer's screens breaking along a crease the incumbents learned to reinforce years ago.
