// ZDNET — MOBILE & WEB
iPhone Duo screens are already cracking: What buyers need to know
A handful of first-hand reports show similar damage, suggesting a bad batch of hinges. Here's what to do if your Duo screen fails.
The iPhone Duo started landing in customers’ hands last Friday, and it didn’t take long for the problems to start rolling in. And the most obvious — and urgent — of these teething troubles is a screen damage issue that leaves a block or line of bright pixels on the display.
Owners are seeing bright white lines appear on the display, sometimes within a few hours of ownership. And all the damage being reported seems to be the same — one or more bright lines running across the right-hand side of the display about a third of the way up, with a secondary line along the middle.
Bottom line: We don’t know, but there are some well-informed guesses out there.
There’s been a flurry of activity over the weekend related to what is, rather predictably, being called “Crackgate.” The teardown experts at iFixit have been busy — they completely disassembled a Duo, built a 3D model of the hinge, and identified several ways the hinge mechanism could be damaging the inner display.
It could be that the flexible display is coming into contact with a support bar that doesn’t retract properly, or that a rail that moves during folding is brushing against the screen, causing a pressure hotspot. Finally, the damage appears to start where a lot of edges, components, and moving parts converge, and that convergence could be stressing the display more than expected.
South Korean YouTuber CuriousHagi 궁금하기 also took apart an iPhone Duo to examine the hinge and posted a very informative video.
Another pattern I’ve noticed in reports from affected users is that their Duos initially opened and closed smoothly, but then they began to encounter resistance when opening and closing the handset, and after this, the display would break within a few open/close cycles.
The speed with which these damage reports began to appear — some within a few hours — suggests this is a manufacturing or assembly issue, not wear. It’s a complicated hinge made up of more than a hundred components, so there’s a lot of scope for things to go wrong.
Because this is a manufacturing or assembly issue, it’s ultimately not down to you.