--- title: "iPhone Duo: iFixit gives it 5/10 and eyes the hinge over cracked screens" description: "iFixit has torn down the iPhone Duo and given it 5/10 for repairability, the best score it has ever handed a foldable. The teardown shows how Apple disguises the screen crease and offers a theory for the broken screens and hinges reported by early buyers." canonical: https://inyourgeek.com/en/articles/2026-10-26-iphone-duo-ifixit-note-5-10-et-soupconne-la type: article author: "Sébastien Soulier" publisher: "InYourGeek" language: en datePublished: 2026-10-26 dateModified: 2026-10-26 section: "Hardware" tags: ["apple", "iphone", "pliable", "reparabilite"] --- # iPhone Duo: iFixit gives it 5/10 and eyes the hinge over cracked screens > iFixit has torn down the iPhone Duo and given it 5/10 for repairability, the best score it has ever handed a foldable. The teardown shows how Apple disguises the screen crease and offers a theory for the broken screens and hinges reported by early buyers. October 26, 2026 · Hardware · 3 min Like clockwork, the iPhone Duo was barely out of the box before iFixit pried it open and spread its parts across the workbench. The verdict, reported on 25 October 2026 by [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/tech/1018233/ifixit-iphone-duo-teardown-repairability-hinge), comes down to one number: 5/10 for repairability. On its own, that's a C grade. For a foldable, it's the best score the site has ever given, which tells you as much about the iPhone Duo as it does about how low the bar is for the whole category. ## A crease disguised, not deleted The crease down the middle of the screen is the Achilles' heel of every foldable. Apple hasn't made it disappear. According to iFixit, it hides it in two ways. The first is the matte nano-texture coating on the inner display. It makes the screen easier to read in direct sunlight, and it has a useful side effect: because it scatters reflections, the crease is much harder to spot, when it would otherwise catch the light. The second only shows up under a microscope: oval-shaped subpixels set at a variety of angles. According to iFixit, this layout is meant to reduce visual artefacts and blur the centre line a little more. In other words, the screen doesn't hide its crease so much as lose it in the crowd, like a dodgy commit buried in a pull request so long the reviewer gives up halfway through. ## The surface, sure; the panel, good luck The good news, such as it is: the outer nano-texture layer is fairly easy to replace without touching the OLED panel underneath. A scratched matte finish doesn't mean you lose the whole screen. On the panel itself, though, iFixit doesn't sugarcoat it: as with other foldables, repairing it is still an expensive nightmare. The 5/10 mostly rewards what surrounds the most fragile part, not the part itself. The glowing-dust test didn't go perfectly either. Particles reached the USB-C port, the speaker grilles and the hinge, which came out a bit gritty. Still, noticeably less dust got inside this phone than inside the Z Fold8 or the Pixel 11 Pro Fold. It's not a gold star, but cleanest kid in the sandpit is still a win. ## Hinge and ribbon cable: a lead on the cracked screens This is where the teardown becomes more than a show-and-tell. Early buyers are reporting damaged screens and cracking hinges, and some describe an "audible crack", according to accounts reported by The Verge. iFixit offers hypotheses, not a diagnosis. The iPhone Duo's hinge is very complex, and the site suspects that part of the mechanism doesn't always settle back into place. An accordion-style ribbon cable runs right through that spot, near the edge of the battery. Together, they could focus pressure on one small area, which would explain both the noise and the shattered panels. Keep the caveats in mind: this is a theory drawn from one teardown and reported by a single source, and Apple hadn't immediately responded to The Verge's request for comment. iFixit isn't the only one on the case. A YouTuber has also taken an iPhone Duo apart and thinks they've found the cause of what The Verge is already calling "crackgate". If several independent teardowns point to the same area, that starts to look like a pattern. For now, though, the only definitive answer about what's going on inside that hinge has to come from Apple. Apple has made the crease almost invisible. Next, it needs to make the hinge stop talking. ## Sources - [iFixit’s look inside the iPhone Duo may explain those broken screens and hinges](https://www.theverge.com/tech/1018233/ifixit-iphone-duo-teardown-repairability-hinge) — theverge.com _Article written with AI assistance from the cited sources, reviewed and approved by a human before publication._ --- Equivalent HTML page : https://inyourgeek.com/en/articles/2026-10-26-iphone-duo-ifixit-note-5-10-et-soupconne-la Published by InYourGeek — https://inyourgeek.com/en/a-propos Method and safeguards : https://inyourgeek.com/en/methode All articles : https://inyourgeek.com/en/archives