https://youtube.com/live/JZzB5HzQfII
A lot of people seem to be angry. YouTube is full of really harsh comments, along with videos telling people to cancel their preorders right now. Some of you may be upset too, but let’s leave that to the channels where everyone gets angry together and take a calmer look at the situation here.
Technical analyses and explanations are coming out, and Apple is taking this seriously, so we should know the precise cause soon. Apple has also promised appropriate repairs for this issue, so if you’ve bought one, I don’t think you need to worry too much.
Personally, I think problems like this are to be expected with any device that has moving joints. That’s why I’ve been hesitant about foldable smartphones.
Every mechanism has similar issues with its moving parts. Laptop hinges are simply a little less sensitive to things like precision, lubrication, and dust, while a display is the part most sensitive to tolerances and environmental conditions. I haven’t taken the product apart myself, but let’s talk about what I’ve noticed from the videos raising this issue and the various teardowns.
Why the displays started cracking
I see two reasons for this problem. First, some units appear to have defects out of the box. Second, there also seems to be a durability issue. I think we need to make a clear distinction between the two.
The first type is the case where someone says, “It cracked before I’d even unfolded it a few times.” That’s clearly an initial defect. Reading the accounts, people say the hinge suddenly stopped moving smoothly, felt stiff, made a noise, and then the screen cracked as they folded it. The design uses four hinges to hold the screen at the same angle. Each hinge isn’t a single piece, though. Think of a metal bracelet watchband. Each individual joint moves only a little, and those joints mesh in a two-stage hinge arrangement to produce the full 180 degrees.
The individual parts mesh through gears, and those gears are linked by dampers that provide the appropriate resistance. That’s what lets the device open smoothly and also hold its position partway through, like a free-stop hinge. But it seems that one of those gears can mesh incorrectly. The angle gets twisted, and the explanations seem to be converging on this: part of a gear ends up engaging incorrectly, or a component breaks and protrudes, pressing against the screen and cracking it.
I suspect this is an initial defect related more to component machining and assembly. If there’s no problem at the outset, I don’t think there’s much need to worry. Still, it’s disappointing to see such an extreme failure in a device that, as Apple emphasized, even uses 3D scanners to find the most precise combinations of components.
That said, this doesn’t seem to be happening in enormous numbers. It may tie into defect rates and quality control, but it appears mainly to be an initial-defect issue, and Apple has announced its response. Let’s give it a little time.
Preparing for bends beyond 180 degrees
The other issue is tied to somewhat extreme situations. Most of the “Look how easily this breaks” content so far features YouTubers deliberately breaking the device, and display units also stand out. In the first case, creating extreme situations is the whole point of the content. The second, I think, represents somewhat rough handling that can happen in the real world.
This is partly just my personality, but I rarely put a device in situations beyond what the manual describes or what the device itself communicates. Its basic joint structure tells you to open it only this way, and at the end of its travel it clicks open and locks into place. It may not be written in the manual, but that’s what the device is telling you. Once products like this reach the outside world, though, they encounter much harsher conditions.
In any case, the iPhone Duo doesn’t seem particularly resistant to what’s called reverse bending: bending it backward beyond 180 degrees. This isn’t something we’re seeing for the first time. When Galaxy foldables first came out, plenty of devices broke after being bent backward. A mechanism is easily damaged when you bend it in a direction its joints weren’t intended to move.
The iPhone Duo is being subjected to fairly extreme conditions right now, too. What’s clear, though, is that it doesn’t withstand them. It does seem to take an enormous amount of force, enough to suggest someone is deliberately trying to break it, before it twists out of shape. But that seems to be encouraging YouTubers to break it and people in showrooms to try bending it a little harder. We’re not seeing enough reports of this happening to ordinary buyers in everyday use to really call it “Crackgate.”
The reason is obvious. If it were your own smartphone, costing anywhere from 3 million to 5 million won, you wouldn’t bend it backward just out of curiosity. Normally, as the hinge gets close to fully open, you feel it click firmly into place. That doesn’t really invite you to wonder whether you could bend it any farther.
Repeated failures in the same place reveal a weak point
The important thing is that both types of failure happen in the same place. Whether it’s an assembly issue or a durability issue, the third hinge from the top ends up applying force at that spot, cracking the display horizontally or vertically. That tells us this is a clear weak point, one that can break relatively easily.
It seems as though the durability was designed to meet a target of exactly 100. Once a product is out in the world, some people will push that to 200 or 300 in reverse-bending tests, and plenty will throw it off a rooftop. At the same time, unexpected things happen. Even something as mild as holding it by one end puts force on the hinge because of the weight on the other side. Someone might give it a playful tap. And given its shape, if you’re holding it by one end, something could fall onto it or press down on it. There are all sorts of accidents we might never imagine.
Engineers normally build in a design margin for this. They analyze things along the lines of, “If it can withstand 1 newton of force, it shouldn’t break in everyday use.” Once they decide that 1 newton is the requirement, they design around it. Then they build the actual product to a higher standard, so it can withstand more force than expected.
A larger design margin makes a product stronger, but it also tends to make it heavier and more complicated. Ultimately, it costs more. Reduce that margin a little, and you can make it lighter, thinner, simpler, and ultimately cheaper. Apple seems to have set that margin relatively low. It’s easy to think, “Who would bend this backward?” But some people deliberately create extreme situations, as the testers are doing now, and sometimes extreme situations arise even when we never intended them.
Apple’s troubled history with durability
We’ve seen similar things a few times before. The iPhone 6 Plus was one example. With its aluminum frame and larger surface area, you get what’s called a bending moment. Even with the same force applied, the forces and stresses acting on the device are completely different. The regular model held up reasonably well, but the larger Plus model twisted in the middle.
That was initially discovered by people making videos about breaking devices, too. But in real life, we put smartphones in our back pockets. If you sit down, even without sitting directly on the phone, the pressure from the pocket can bend it, using your backside as a fulcrum. It bends surprisingly easily. We didn’t see a flood of everyday cases, but it’s certainly something that could happen.
The same thing happened with the iPad Pro. The iPad is even larger, so stress is concentrated more heavily. Put it in a bag with a pencil case between it and your back, and other books pressing from behind, and you create a bending moment like a seesaw. It can simply bend.
Then the next generation gets extensive internal reinforcement. Apple now has plenty of data on everyday iPhone use. If you look at the iPhone 18 Pro, for example, the vapor chamber and battery enclosure are integrated into one unit. It dissipates heat and protects the battery, while also serving as a brace that strengthens the entire frame.
The iPhone Duo was probably evaluated against roughly that level of force as well. There would have been reference values for how much force it takes to bend an ordinary iPhone. The iPhone Air was stronger than expected in that respect. Apple probably felt confident. But hinges are inherently more vulnerable to impact, and as word spreads that this one breaks, more people seem to be applying even greater force, resulting in more broken devices.
The fate of foldable smartphones
We don’t have to look far for a comparison. It was the same when the Galaxy Fold came out. Even now, whenever a new Galaxy Fold arrives, people say they’ve folded and unfolded it tens of thousands of times in just a few days, or try bending it backward. Out in the market, devices are subjected to even more extreme testing than in development labs. It’s provocative and entertaining. And when a product passes, people trust it more.
The Galaxy Fold really went through a lot. From a manufacturer’s perspective, though, this is an awkward issue. “I made it plenty strong. Who would fold it backward like that?” It’s a bit like saying, “I bent my arm backward and the bone broke.” You can’t simply declare that the manufacturer did something wrong or that it’s a design defect. Still, when the goal is to make a device durable enough to last several years, I think a design that overlooks this is missing something important.
It depends on how you look at it. To a consumer, this is something that could happen. To a manufacturer, it makes no sense. But the manufacturer can hardly come out and say, “Who on earth bends it backward like that?” Ultimately, accounting for these situations in the design is the right approach from an engineering standpoint, too.
Samsung may not have said so, but I suspect it put considerable emphasis on solving this problem in the Galaxy Fold’s hinges. Current models show features such as shock-absorbing structures that stop the hinge from bursting apart when bent backward. As a result, recent models are relatively capable of withstanding that kind of reverse bending.
So many things in this world reach maturity through painful lessons like these. The next-generation iPhone Duo will probably arrive with this issue taken more seriously, and Apple is likely already thinking about improvements.
Even so, I hope those of you who bought one won’t worry too much. Unless it has an initial defect, I don’t think it’s at the point where normal everyday use will make it crack like that. And Apple has said it will provide appropriate repairs if it does break, regardless of AppleCare coverage, so it’s not as though there’s no recourse.
Still, I keep wondering why Apple didn’t learn from the Galaxy’s experience. Take this nano-texture film. I’m not sure why it attracts so much dislike, but peeling it off keeps becoming a talking point. In a sense, that’s natural: Apple called it a film from the outset, and although replacement is expensive, the replacement price is published. No matter how flexible something is, repeated folding and unfolding leaves marks and eventually causes it to split and tear. That’s even more true of film. It should be replaceable, and making that replacement easy matters too.
And this flexible display is actually OLED elements attached inside a film rather than glass. That makes it more fragile than glass. It scratches easily. Samsung also shipped its devices with another layer of film on top. But people peeled it off, assuming it was protective packaging film, something the developers probably never imagined. The idea was that after using it for a while, if the creases grew or scratches started bothering you, you could easily replace it. The intended design, as explained in the manual, and the way consumers actually understood the product were different. That’s a UX mismatch.
New technologies refined through experience and data
That’s why Galaxy devices now tuck this film beneath the edge of the housing. The film is attached all the way to the edges without gaps, so consumers can’t easily peel it off. You have to go to a service center. Samsung arrived at its own answer by studying user habits.
Over eight generations, the Galaxy has been through just about every kind of ordeal, gaining the experience and design expertise to face those hardships and overcome them. Its refinement was earned through the sacrifices of earlier devices.
Apple could perhaps have talked to Samsung about these things, or benchmarked its products. So why did durability end up falling short? This is pure speculation, but perhaps that’s what the data told them. Data is usually accurate, but it can’t capture everything about people.
To take a brief detour, what did Microsoft do when Windows 8 came out? It removed the Windows Start button. Why? The data showed that people didn’t click it as often as expected. Microsoft concluded that large icons on the home screen would be more effective than the Start button’s menu tree. It boldly trusted the data and thought it had understood what the market wanted. Reality turned out to be very different.
I think the iPhone Duo may be a similar case. The next model will have a completely different hinge. But while watching all this, what struck me as a more serious concern was sand and dust. Every folding hinge has this problem. You don’t even have to look at smartphones: dust accumulates in the hinges of our front doors. It’s inherent in the structure, and lubricants can trap dust too.
With a foldable smartphone, though, dust getting into that space directly affects the display. Put one in a zip-top bag with colored sand and shake it, and quite a lot of grit gets into the hinge. From what I’ve seen, this happens not just with the iPhone Duo but with almost all of these devices. It’s said to be IP68-rated, but looking at the hinge in this condition, water can be handled through waterproofing and disappears once it dries, whereas sand and larger dust particles are hard to dislodge once they settle in. These tests have been going on for several years without a clear solution emerging. So if you go to the beach on your summer vacation, I’d suggest making sure you don’t drop it in the sand. The hinge’s dust protection needs improvement, but I do wonder how far that’s possible. A complete seal doesn’t look easy.
There’s no need to worry too much
So what should we do now? I hope we can avoid taking things to extremes. Smartphones matter, but they aren’t everything. Quite a few people are attacking buyers with comments like, “Why would you buy something like this?” Whatever your feelings, I don’t think that’s a reason to dismiss someone else’s purchasing choices, online or offline.
If you’ve bought one, I don’t think you need to worry too much either. Apple has announced a remedy, and if this becomes more serious, it will probably lead to a more fundamental response. This is a product selling in large numbers, and if incidents increase accordingly, the repercussions will grow. You don’t need to worry that you’ll be the only one left with a problem. If it develops into a bigger issue, an appropriate response will follow.
Unless it has an outright initial defect, though, it doesn’t yet seem to be breaking like that in everyday conditions. You don’t need to be overly protective of it, but if you respect the basic design and the limits the device communicates, “This is as far as I bend,” I don’t think you should have major problems.
There’s that saying people half-jokingly repeat: “With Apple, wait for the second generation.” I do think the next generation will probably have this problem well under control. Fundamentally, the current issue is one of hinge engineering, and at least when it comes to strength, it’s entirely something that can be addressed.
