Apple's Foldable iPhone Duo Draws Early Complaints of the Screen Cracking (yahoo.com) 71
Apple has acknowledged an inner-display defect affecting a small number of its new $1,999 iPhone Duo foldables after customers reported hearing a crunch while unfolding the device before cracks, lines and other display failures appeared along the crease. Apple is replacing affected phones and investigating the problem.
iFixit believes a failing hinge component may be pressing into and cracking the display rather than the panel itself being defective. Bloomberg reports: Reports of the problem first surfaced on Reddit and other social media sites. Bloomberg News has since independently verified the issue with more than half a dozen customers, who provided photos showing damage to their devices or evidence of their support conversations with Apple. Apple acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying it was "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 Cupertino, California-based company said. Most Duos aren't affected by the problem, and the units that are impacted exhibit the defect quickly, Apple said.
iFixit believes a failing hinge component may be pressing into and cracking the display rather than the panel itself being defective. Bloomberg reports: Reports of the problem first surfaced on Reddit and other social media sites. Bloomberg News has since independently verified the issue with more than half a dozen customers, who provided photos showing damage to their devices or evidence of their support conversations with Apple. Apple acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying it was "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 Cupertino, California-based company said. Most Duos aren't affected by the problem, and the units that are impacted exhibit the defect quickly, Apple said.
I say no to all foldable touchscreens (Score:1)
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What if they called the foldable screen material "gorilla 'glass'"?
Re: I say no to all foldable touchscreens (Score:2)
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Re: I say no to all foldable touchscreens (Score:2)
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I like the idea of a folding phone. I really like a flip phone for something smaller to carry around.
But I'd never go back to a phone with moving parts. Just way too much stuff to break. No phone I've had with moving parts ever lasted longer than 2 years. I'd much rather just carry around a regular slab phone. They last so much longer.
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a two-screen phone that only relies on minor radio connectivity with NFC or whatever should work fine, isn't that what people have their watches basically doing? a second screen?
a "two-device phone" is probably a better way to picture it, you won't be able to advertise inches or watch porn seamlessly across both but you'd have the same pocket wad with none of the desperate engineering, and maybe mobile would finally take a serious crack at multitasking
i mean, i've always been fine with my buddy alt-tab, but
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Re: I say no to all foldable touchscreens (Score:2)
Whaaaat?!? (Score:1)
Shocked! Shocked I say! Why you never buy the first gen of a new product.
Poetic justice (Score:2, Insightful)
Wankers paying 2 grand for a phone, jfc.
That was fast (Score:2)
Maybe foldable screens are not a good idea at this time?
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I've been using a Samsung Fold 5 (bought in 2023, I think --whenever it came out) pretty ruggedly .. haven't had an issue. I'm sure Apple will fix this problem quickly - I'm planning to buy one as soon as I hear they've put a fix in place.
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The foldable iphone spectacularly failed jerryrigeverything's test for a lot of reasons unrelated to this. iFans went apeshit on him, saying he's an Android fan, doesn't respect how much effort apple engineers put into it, etc. The usual shit they do when anybody doesn't give every last apple product a glowing review. This is despite the fact that it's the same battery of tests he puts all foldable phones through, including samsucks, which actually pass.
Besides that, Samsuck has been doing this for several
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So, skill-issue on the side of Apple. Interesting. Obviously, the cult-follower will deny their cult leaders could do anything wrong.
An initial crunch... (Score:5, Funny)
...is normally preferred with a good, crisp apple.
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That crunching sound means it's working!
Skeptical that this always presents itself quickly (Score:4, Interesting)
"Most Duos aren't affected by the problem, and the units that are impacted exhibit the defect quickly, Apple said."
I'm skeptical of this. This video shows the exact same damage occurring after 75,001 opens - https://gizmodo.com/iphone-duo... [gizmodo.com]
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As soon as I read that remark I felt that it was going to be used to deny claims for anyone not experiencing the flaw "quickly"
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I'm skeptical of this.
People who don't understand that wear out failures are a different statistical mechanism to infant mortality failures I'm sure are very sceptical. I guess you also don't believe any HDD can fail within the first month of operation because they have an MTBF of 600000 hours?
Devices get shipped with manufacturing defects and bad batches all the time. That has zero to do with wear out failure rate.
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What a moronic post.
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Found the recent AAPL shareholder
The thing that makes your comment especially stupid is that if you scrolled down one post you'll find me shitting all over Apple. Not only am I not a shareholder, I'm a proud hater.
Re:Skeptical that this always presents itself quic (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm skeptical of this.
People who don't understand that wear out failures are a different statistical mechanism to infant mortality failures I'm sure are very sceptical. I guess you also don't believe any HDD can fail within the first month of operation because they have an MTBF of 600000 hours?
Devices get shipped with manufacturing defects and bad batches all the time. That has zero to do with wear out failure rate.
Wear-out failures aren't always different from infant mortality failures, though. If the defect is caused by a design flaw in a component resulting in a structural weak point, that same weak point could fail after one use or a thousand, and it could just be a ticking time bomb. Someone could get very unlucky and find one that is slightly weaker, and it could break much sooner.
Case in point, I recall a machine where some people would have to have their laptops replaced every couple of months for motherboard failures, while others lasted for years, and it turned out to be dependent on how people closed their laptops at the end of the day and whether they pressed on the bottom of the case in a particular spot that wiggled the GPU. But if you handed one that had been working for five years to someone who used their left hand under the laptop while closing it, it would be dead in two or three months. If you replaced it with a brand new one, the brand new one would be dead in two or three months. And so on.
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"Wear-out failures aren't always different from infant mortality failures, though."
That are completely different issues, always different.
"If the defect is caused by a design flaw in a component resulting in a structural weak point, that same weak point could fail after one use or a thousand, and it could just be a ticking time bomb. Someone could get very unlucky and find one that is slightly weaker, and it could break much sooner."
That would be reflected in a low MTBF rather than the example "MTBF of 6000
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"Wear-out failures aren't always different from infant mortality failures, though."
That are completely different issues, always different.
Only in the most utterly pedantic sense of the word "different" wherein you mean that by definition, infant mortality occurs early and wear occurs later. But they can both stem from the same root cause, which is a component not built with adequate tolerances. In other words, they can be the same fundamental issue, just expressing themselves at different times.
That would be reflected in a low MTBF rather than the example "MTBF of 600000 hours".
Most products don't have an MTBF. And things that do have MTBF are based on accelerated wear testing on a small number of units, and can have almos
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In this case it appears to be a design flaw. They all break in the same place, in the same way. iFixIt found that there is a part of the hinge right under the screen there, and it appears that sometimes it gets misaligned and damages the screen.
My memory of a systemic failure was HP laptops. They had a deal with Nvidia that meant they all used Nvidia chipsets, and they would all eventually fail as the repeated heating and cooling cycles caused the BGA soldering to fail.
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In this case it appears to be a design flaw. They all break in the same place, in the same way.
That doesn't mean it's a design flaw. A manufacturing defect would result in failures breaking the same way in the same place. Others have tested the hinge design and found it happily folds for some 75000 goes before failure (which I may note is an abysmal number compared to Samsung's Fold phones). If it were truly a design flaw I suspect the problem would be far more widespread than it is. It may be a combination of both. Things don't typically misalign themselves.
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True, but I wouldn't read much into the 75,000 figure. Folding it repeatedly isn't the same as keeping it in a pocket, exposed to normal dust and lint, and folding it repeatedly. In other words, it's likely to be optimistic.
I'd say the flaw is that the tolerance is so tight that the manufacturing yield is unacceptably low.
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Folding it repeatedly isn't the same as keeping it in a pocket, exposed to normal dust and lint, and folding it repeatedly.
Your problem is you used the word "normal" and "pocket". These are standard use cases, and if that were an issue for the design we'd see far higher failure rates than the ones we are seeing. Even women have pockets in their dresses these days.
I'd say nothing. Not a thing. I'd guess a lot, but that's all we can do here, make assumptions because we lack the detailed information to say anything with any kind of certainty. Even the iFixIt crowd who had some extensive analysis tools stopped short of saying anyth
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That is absolutely true, however these mechanisms do undergo extensive stress testing before being put out. I would bet you my first born that Apple stress tested their design, and early tests on the foldable iPhone put the stress number at around 75000 actuations.
While infant mortality and end of life wearout typically present indifferent ways, there's no reason that they actually need to do so, especially if the manufacturing fault is part of a component that wears over time.
What you're describing however
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MTBF calculations are a bit of a scam in of themselves.
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MTBF is not a calculation, although it may be estimated using one.
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MTBF calculations are a bit of a scam in of themselves.
No they aren't, they are a statistical analysis. People just don't understand how they work and they think they are a lifetime estimate. If you want to understand the problem you need to know that a Western 25 year old male has a MTBF of 800 years. If that sounds absurd to you it means you need to go back to reliability and understand that it's a measure of the likelihood of a random failure in a year. Key word is random. To calculate MTBF you need to know the failure rate and the population. To know those
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Conditions that happen with a wear-out can still happen early without. It's possible this flaw will show up more in real-world use as the device ages that didn't show up in lab conditions. For insurance, nobody is going to open and close that hinge in the same way, every single time, and they can close it in ways apple didn't test for. Hence the apple saying "you're bending it wrong" followed by Steve Jobs demonstrating, in front of a live audience, different failure modes of different devices that have not
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instance*
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Conditions that happen with a wear-out can still happen early without.
Then it ceases being wear-out. The failure mechanism for both can present the same, but the underlying cause is different from a reliability point of view. Infant mortality is typically a case of manufacturing QA/QC. Real world use is presented as a constant failure rate with a failure distribution that is affected by how you use it. By all accounts this isn't the case here as people either experience rapid early failure or have no issue at all.
The "you're bending it wrong" isn't a statistical failure mode.
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Then it ceases being wear-out.
Six of one, half dozen the other.
By all accounts this isn't the case here as people either experience rapid early failure or have no issue at all.
This hasn't been around long enough to say one way or the other. Some it happened the first time they closed it, some it took a few. That batch could have simply exhibited the problem much earlier. If was that big of a difference to matter, and this is just a one-off, then their QC must have been asleep at the wheel to not notice a big variance like that.
The "you're bending it wrong" isn't a statistical failure mode. It's a design defect that showed a device was not intended for use in a specific circumstance. It doesn't even qualify as a fatigue failure (constantly increasing failure rate).
I had an iphone 6, issued by my work at the time. It bent by simply keeping it in my front pocket, at a time when I wore l
"Most" is a very low bar (Score:1)
"Of every 2 million sold, less than 1 million are affected!"
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This video shows the exact same damage occurring after 75,001 opens
What does that equate to in terms of real-world usage? My smartphone tells me I average about 35 pickups/day. If every single one of those warranted opening the hinge, that'd be about 2000 days of usage - over 5 years.
Not that I'm buying a Duo (or any other folding phone) at any point. My current smartphone is 5 years old, and I don't plan to replace it until it fatally breaks.
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Right.. so we have reports from people who experienced the failure within the first hours, and we have reports of the failure happens after someone simulated 5 years of use. That's why I'm skeptical that "the units that are impacted exhibit the defect quickly" as Apple claims.
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Its not like they've had 18 months service to see if they also break after a certain amount of use or time.
BuT APpLE WaiTs UNtIL It'S PeRFeCt! (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay time for the Apple fanbois to find another excuse as to why they are late to the game, clearly their "Apple only launches tech once it is perfected" excuse aged like a bag of prawns in the Australian sun.
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To folding phones, of course. But some people haven't caught on to the fact that Apple copies literally everything. Everything people think was pioneered by the iPhone was actually introduced by the Samsung F700 [appleinsider.com] which was released months earlier.
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straw man central. You'd think bots wouldn't be so stupid.
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straw man central. You'd think bots wouldn't be so stupid.
Well, if they're trained on average forum users...
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The iPhone was a copy of existing smartphones. Apple copies it, then there's a relentless propaganda campaign, then Apple invented it.
But the F700 was not the original smartphone and no one even remembers it. Microsoft, in fact, made devices like that before Samsung or Apple. Nokia did as well. There was an entire market for smartphones prior to the iPhone.
Apple did do multi-touch, though, although only two touches and almost nothing exploited it. And Apple bought that from another company. Their touc
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its just a new cellphone
Exactly. The Duo is just like every other phone on the market. It has no unique features at all. (Note this was sarcasm intended to imply the stupid parent poster is in fact stupid).
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It's insane nonsense anyway, Apple is especially known for releasing lemons on the first try. It's axiomatic even among Apple's longtime fans that you never buy the first version of anything from Apple. Only the noobs don't know this.
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The Apple fanboys by the first version, and every version, of everything made by Apple. Only the noobs don't know this.
The question with this device is why you'd want one even if it was flawless. Overwhelmingly unappealing unless you're 7 and want the world's most expensive gameboy without the games.
anyone who buys these but skips (Score:2)
I have a lot of faith in Apple, but this is an entirely new product category for them. This is the situation where the extended platinum-plated warranty makes total sense. If you're spending 2k on a phone, an extra hundred bucks a year is gotta be pocket change, anyways.
I didn't think I would like it (Score:2)
But walked past the Apple store this weekend and saw them on display. Checked it out and they're pretty nice. Maybe v2
Yeah, that's not suprising (Score:2)
a) Foldable screen are very hard to get working reliably, and AFAIK nobody has yet managed to do so.
b) Apple is known for making fairly unreliable and hard to repair products. So much so that they actually drag down the market with them, lowering what is acceptable on the market.
Not a good start for the new Apple CEO John Ternus (Score:2, Funny)
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Ternus by name Temus by nature...
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But having the fold be IN THE SCREEN? That's stupid on the face of it.
I see what you did there.
Better PR this way. (Score:5, Funny)
Apple is replacing affected phones and investigating the problem.
They first tried telling people, "You're folding it wrong", but that didn't go over well. :-)
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Dammit! Someone beat me to it.
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You're only allowed to tell Android users that they're folding it wrong.
Oblig (Score:2)
You're folding it wrong.
Just had to be said.
Apple boo boo? (Score:1)
In the words of Steve Jobs... (Score:2)
They're folding it wrong.
Never buy the 1st gen of a product ! (Score:2)
Probably an assembly issue (Score:2)
It's hard enough to design hardware, and harder so to get manufacturers to assemble it correctly