After the unveiling of the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable has been taken apart by iFixit. The teardown lets us see how Apple manages to make its screen fold so smoothly, but also discover what secrets its design holds.
A hinge designed to protect every fold
The key to the hinge, quite impressive to watch in action in the video below, lies in its sophisticated set of gears, springs, and curved guides that distribute the tension. The mechanism allows the screen to bend by following a very wide arc, while its more than ten ultrathin layers slide slightly over one another to distribute the pressure, much like the pages of a book. A feat of precision that helps explain the years of development behind the device.
Apple complements this structure with a nanotextured surface that reduces glare and conceals the crease. Under the microscope, iFixit shows that the film’s small rounded bumps appear. The protective layer is a film that can be replaced independently.
A surprisingly accessible repair
Alongside this replacement, iFixit’s analysis also highlights how easy it is to remove the outer screen and extract the two batteries using electrically released adhesive, a technique we already knew from the iPhone 16 and one that makes repairs much easier.
The hinge remains the most delicate part: some dust particles got into the mechanism, as we see in the video, and may be related to the screen failures. All in all, the Duo gets a 5 out of 10 for repairability, the best score for a foldable to date and gives us a sense of how much tech is packed into a device as interesting as the iPhone Duo.
