Apple's $1,999 folding iPhone is already cracking along the fold

$1,999. That is the starting price of the iPhone Duo, Apple's first folding phone, which went on sale this week. In the UK it starts at £1,999. In South Africa it starts at R47,999, climbing to R76,999 for the biggest storage, around 27% more than the US price once it is converted.

Hours after launch, owners started posting photos of cracked screens. The cracks run along the fold, the one part of the phone that bends every time it opens.

Apple had not said anything about it in public as of Saturday, 24 October. People online have already given it a nickname, "Crackgate", echoing "Antennagate" on the iPhone 4 and "Bendgate" on the iPhone 6 Plus.

What are iPhone Duo owners saying about the cracks?

A handful of owners in the United States, Australia and China say their inner screen split along the crease within hours of taking the phone out of the box, according to Mashable. One owner says their screen broke after fewer than 20 unfolds. Apple replaced that phone right away, free of charge.

Nobody has shown how common the crack actually is. It could be a small number of unlucky units out of the hundreds of thousands Apple has sold this week, or it could be an early sign of something bigger. Right now, only the people who got a Duo on day one can say which.

How many folds did Apple actually say the hinge could handle?

Apple's own newsroom page describes the Duo's hinge as grade 5 titanium, with a 3D-printed hinge cover and a "precision hinge" built to support the middle of the screen. The phone carries an IP68 rating for water and dust, and Ceramic Shield covers both the outer and inner screens.

What Apple has not published is a fold-cycle number, the figure that says how many times a hinge is built to open and close before it might fail. Samsung publishes one for its folding phones. Apple has not, for the Duo or for any iPhone.

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Independent testers have put review units through thousands of machine folds. One test ran a Duo through 10,500 continuous folds, then another 1,000 folds inside a freezer at -4°F, and the hinge kept opening smoothly. Reviewer Joanna Stern folded her own unit more than 32,000 times and said it felt just as stiff as on day one. Even in those tests, the crease in the screen got a little deeper the more the phone was folded.

What does it cost to fix a cracked iPhone Duo screen?

On a normal iPhone, a cracked screen is annoying but fixable. On a folding iPhone, the screen is the hinge. There is no separate part to swap out, because the glass, the soft top layer and the folding mechanism are built as one piece. That one fact is why the Duo's repair bill runs so much higher than a flat iPhone's.

Apple's own repair price list puts a number on that. Fixing the Duo's inner, folding screen costs $999 without a protection plan. Fixing the outer screen alone costs $379. "Other damage" tops out at $1,499, which is about three-quarters of what the cheapest Duo costs new.

Buy AppleCare+ for the Duo, at $19.99 a month, $199.99 a year, or $399 as one payment, and that same inner-screen fix drops to $99.

Here is how that compares to the other folding phones, and to a regular iPhone.

Every maker treats a cracked screen as accidental damage, not a factory fault, and bills for it unless you bought the plan. All three folding phones cost more to fix than a flat iPhone, because the part that breaks is the same part that lets the phone fold.

Photo: Matabalt / Wikimedia Commons, CC0

Does Apple's warranty cover a crack like this?

Apple's standard one-year warranty, the one that comes free with every iPhone, covers manufacturing defects. It does not cover accidental damage, and a cracked screen is normally filed as accidental damage no matter how it happened.

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That is the grey area the first wave of owners are sitting in. If Apple's technicians decide a crack came from a flaw in the hinge, the fix should be free. If they decide it came from how the phone was handled, the owner pays the full $999, even on a phone that is days old. Apple replaced at least one cracked unit for free in the first days after launch. Whether that becomes the rule is still open.

Why is the iPhone Duo suddenly hard to pick up in store?

The same week the first cracks appeared, Apple's online store was telling shoppers in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Singapore to check back on Saturday for an in-store pickup slot, according to MacRumors. Pickup briefly opened for a few minutes right after pre-orders began on 16 October, then disappeared. It has only partly returned in Australia, China, Japan and South Korea, with very few slots.

Apple says demand for the Duo has been "nothing short of extraordinary," and new online orders are now shipping in late January 2027, three months after launch. Whether the tight stock has anything to do with the hinge reports is not something Apple has said.

Early breakdown reports do not always predict how a product looks years later. Owners of Chinese-made cars found that out too. Their engines held up fine, and the real pain showed up later, in parts and resale. The Duo is only days old, and its own pattern is still being written.

Photo: John Baker / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Is AppleCare+ worth it on a phone like this?

For the Duo, the maths is blunt. AppleCare+ costs $399 once, or about $20 a month. One inner-screen repair without it costs $999. Break the fold screen even once in the first year, and the plan has already paid for itself twice over.

The Duo arrived as the headline act of Apple's busiest product season in years, weeks after a separate home hub launch the company barely teased in advance. Right now, the fold is the part everyone is talking about. On this phone, the fold is not a feature next to the screen. The fold is the screen.