Apple’s First Foldable Phone Is Cracking For Some Owners – What Does It Show About Launching New Hardware To Stay Competitive?

Folding a phone in half is the easy part to show off on a stage. Doing it thousands of times without a crack is the part nobody can fake.

The iPhone Duo is Apple’s first foldable, arriving after delays to its foldable plans. An iFixit teardown published on 25 October gave the new device a provisional 5/10 repairability score.

Some buyers have already reported damage across the inner display. iFixit says the breaks cluster near the central hinge support, and one of its simulations suggests the hinge’s centre support bar may not drop far enough, which could create a stress point when the screens fold down on it. The teardown calls that one possible answer, not a confirmed cause, and doesn’t provide numbers on how many phones are affected.

Whatever the cause turns out to be, early problems like these show how much pressure comes with launching hardware in a competitive market. A new device faces intense scrutiny the moment it lands in customer hands.

Why Early Hardware Problems Are Hard To Undo

A software bug can be patched overnight, but a cracked panel or a stressed hinge is a trickier fix. Early hardware faults usually trigger repairs, replacement claims and long support queues. Naturally, those failures carry financial and logistical costs for the manufacturer and the customer alike.

They also shape how a brand is seen. The first owners of a new product tend to be its most invested customers, so what happens to them spreads quickly through reviews and social media. How a company responds, including the testing it changes,  how openly it communicates and the fixes and support it offers, often shapes whether that trust recovers.

We asked experts: what do reports of cracked iPhone Duo screens show about launching new hardware to stay competitive, and what can companies learn from early product failures?

Our Experts

• Mohammad Hijazi, Group Head of Marketing, Badami Holding
• Liam Lafferty, Co-Founder, Zentive
• Rodion Sorokin, Co-Founder and CTO, The Capital Index
• Aman Thakran, Founder, BharatFare
• Cache Merrill, Founder, Zibtek
• Nicolas Sartor, Full Stack Software Engineer, IndieDex
• Ryan Sabia, Founder and CEO, PILTA

Mohammad Hijazi, Group Head of Marketing, Badami Holding

“Early product failures don’t necessarily mean a device was poorly engineered. What they reveal is whether a company has confused competitive urgency with customer readiness.

“The technology industry has normalised a troubling idea: that customers should accept the risks of unfinished innovation simply because they want the latest product. But when consumers pay a premium, they’re buying reliability alongside novelty. They shouldn’t become unpaid beta testers.

“The reported iPhone Duo screen failures are still being investigated, and it’s too early to draw conclusions about their scale or cause. However, they illustrate a broader business challenge. Companies spend enormous resources creating excitement around launches but sometimes underestimate the reputational consequences when the ownership experience fails to match the marketing promise.

“I think technology companies overestimate the competitive advantage of being first and underestimate the advantage of being dependable. A spectacular launch might dominate headlines for a week, while an early reliability controversy can influence purchasing decisions considerably longer.

“My recommendation is to treat customer support, repairability, replacement procedures and crisis communications as essential parts of product development rather than afterthoughts. When problems emerge, brands should acknowledge them quickly, communicate what remains unknown and prioritise customers over protecting the launch narrative.

“Innovation earns attention. Reliability earns loyalty. And sometimes the bravest competitive decision is delaying a launch rather than releasing a product before it’s ready.”

Liam Lafferty, Co-Founder, Zentive

“Early product failures are not just technical defects; they are market signals about where a launch process placed speed ahead of uncertainty. In foldable hardware, the hinge and display interact as a system: components can pass isolated tests while the assembled product still creates a repeatable stress point.

“The lesson is to launch around the riskiest assumptions. Before scale, teams should test real assemblies across realistic cycles, temperature, dust, drops and user handling; instrument failures; and define a stop-ship threshold. After launch, they need one owner for triage, a fast path for repairs or replacements, and honest public language about what is known versus suspected.

“Competition creates pressure to be first, but a rushed launch can erase that advantage if early buyers become the testing programme. Companies should be willing to ship in controlled volumes, learn and expand only after the highest-risk failure modes are understood.”

Rodion Sorokin, Co-Founder and CTO, The Capital Index

“The cracked iPhone Duo screens are less a story about Apple than about what ‘first’ costs in hardware. Software ships, breaks and gets patched by Friday. A hinge can’t be patched. Apple’s foldable went on sale on 23 October at $1,999, and within days some owners reported inner displays cracking along the hinge, in one case after a few hours. Apple says only ‘a small number’ of units are affected and is replacing them, but the asymmetry is brutal: an out-of-warranty inner screen costs $999, roughly twice what iFixit says comparable Samsung and Google foldable repairs cost.

“Samsung learned this in 2019, when early Galaxy Fold review units broke and it delayed the launch by about five months. It learned it harder in 2016, when the Note 7 recall cost at least $5.3 billion.

“Three lessons for anyone launching hardware to keep up. First, test the real world, not the lab: iFixit found fine dust reaching the hinge despite an IP68 rating, and a grain of sand is a use case. Second, stage the rollout: a constrained first batch with fast feedback beats a sold-out launch you can’t recall. Third, own the problem in public, early. In hardware, trust is the one component you can’t source twice.”

Aman Thakran, Founder, BharatFare

“Early failures are rarely about the headline feature. They show up where the new thing meets the old world: a hinge meeting a screen, or in my case, our flight search meeting dozens of airline systems.

“When we launched BharatFare, we tested the happy path hard. What we under-tested was what the customer sees when something upstream breaks. When we dug into our own data, we found that when an airline supplier timed out, our page showed a polite ‘no results’ message. To a customer, a supplier hiccup looked exactly like ‘there are no flights on this route’. Nothing was broken from an engineering point of view, but the customer was getting the wrong answer.

“The lesson I’d take from the iPhone Duo reports is the same one we learned at a much smaller scale. Competitive pressure pushes you to ship the new capability first, but trust is lost at the failure points, not the feature list. These things help: measure how often real customers hit an error, not just whether the feature works in testing; make failures honest and recoverable, so people know what happened and what to do next; and treat the first few thousand users as your real test lab, with someone reading the data every week.

“Shipping fast is fine. Shipping blind is what hurts.”

Cache Merrill, Founder, Zibtek

“A company can’t afford to treat an early product failure as just a public relations problem. It needs to understand what went wrong and whether the issue points to a design weakness, a testing gap or a decision made to meet a launch deadline.

“In hardware, that can be difficult because a product may perform well in controlled testing but behave differently after months of everyday use. Reports of cracked foldable screens are a reminder that testing needs to account for repeated movement, pressure and the small variations that emerge outside the lab. At the same time, reports of damage don’t automatically establish the cause, so companies need evidence before changing the design or assigning blame.

“At Zibtek, we build software, and I see a similar lesson in product development: getting something to market quickly is only part of the job. Teams need ways to collect feedback, reproduce problems and respond without letting launch pressure override quality. Companies that investigate early failures honestly can use them to improve the product and make better decisions on the next release.”

Nicolas Sartor, Full Stack Software Engineer, IndieDex

“The toughest challenge in building a product is anticipating how people will actually use it in the real world. That challenge begins on the first day a product is available for sale.

“Almost all companies are motivated to release the best products that benefit and delight customers. Occasionally, product teams push the limits of how quickly they can bring an innovative product to customers. Product teams should validate the reliability of a product they bring to the market. Those that don’t ultimately undermine product trust and customer loyalty.

“The failure of the iPhone Duo’s screen appears to be caused by a software defect. However, failure is often caused by multiple factors and sometimes a combination of failure of several subsystems. Stress on the hinge may be the root cause of the Duo’s screen failure and until that stress is fully understood, engineers need to evaluate systems-level thinking, combining multiple lines of evidence.

“Once failures of a product occur, quality of response is as important as the failure itself. Therefore, a company should validate the root cause of a failure and respond to customers who were affected by the failure.

“In the product development process, freedom to take risks is essential. While failure is sometimes unavoidable, negative consequences should not be borne by customers.”

Ryan Sabia, Founder and CEO, PILTA

“First-generation hardware is most exposed where it does something new. A new hinge or housing can pass lab testing and still show a weak point once thousands of units are in daily use. Catching that before launch takes knowing the regulations, compliance requirements and test methods for your category, and running them inside a quality management system. Launching without them is a recipe for fines, disaster and audits.

“In medical devices that means ISO 13485 and FDA’s quality system regulation, risk management to ISO 14971, electrical safety and EMC testing to IEC 60601 for powered devices and validated sterilisation with lot testing for sterile products. As COO of Tivic Health, maker of the FDA-cleared ClearUP device, I moved final assembly to an ISO 13485, FDA-registered partner and ran a vendor scorecard; quality issues fell by half, with zero FDA audit non-conformances. At LumeNXT, an FDA Class II surgical lighting company, every production lot includes bioburden samples sent to an independent testing lab. At Yondr, I managed the contract manufacturers directly and cut design-to-production time 40%.

“Lessons from early failures:

“1. Test new moving parts at production volumes. Even accelerated ageing and usage testing doesn’t find everything that will fail in the wild.

“2. Hold suppliers to measured quality data. Even the same parts from the same supplier can change enough over time to throw a validation off.

“3. Read field returns and complaints daily and fix the part or process fast.”