An iPhone Duo folded by hand about 75,000 times has finally given out, and the failure was in the hinge rather than a spontaneous screen crack.
Creator Kuba Klawiter documented the experiment in a video posted Monday. Viewers in Poland took turns folding a retail 256 GB Duo for an hour at a time on a livestream, on the idea that a phone built for people should be stressed by people, not only by machines.
At a pace of 50 folds a day, he notes, 75,000 cycles would be a bit more than four years of normal use. That is more than double the 32,640 folds a robot test cleared, and this run added dirt and cold to the mix.
Through the first 50,000 folds the phone held up in a relatively clean room. The team then decided the test was too tidy compared with real pockets, so they added what Klawiter calls pocket dust before continuing.
The first opens after that break sounded worrying, then settled. Around 60,000 folds the crease started to look different and more concerning, but the rest of the phone still worked, so they kept going.
At 75,000 folds they put the Duo on ice to mimic cold Polish winters of about minus 10 to minus 20 Celsius, including the chance of a phone sitting in a ski jacket pocket. That is when the hinge failed. Klawiter says the damage is not mainly about the inner display, even though that panel has been in the news for other reasons, with owners reporting inner screens cracking soon after launch.
He had expected the Duo to last closer to 300,000 or 400,000 folds. Years earlier on his channel, Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Flip 5 units survived more than 400,000 folds through similarly rough tests. The Duo’s hinge felt tougher at first, he says, but something still broke. A separate teardown of the Duo’s hinge and an earlier dirt durability test have also pointed to grit and hinge stress, as did iFixit’s teardown.
For Canadians paying $2,999 CAD and up, a hinge that can survive tens of thousands of careful folds still leaves cold weather and pocket grit as open questions. AppleCare+ and a case that covers the hinge look more practical after a test like this.
Would 75,000 hand folds make you trust the Duo’s hinge, or does the ice failure change your mind?
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