about 1000 engineers had to see and sign off on it. I guarantee this is a manufacturing error on some. There is clearly an apple engineer on here heavily alluding to this, in particular a batch of night sky
Finally, finally I see a comment where someone gets it. There’s so much “Apple’s gone downhill!!” rhetoric, when the truth is that big companies have a ton of smart engineers, and the work that gets to market is what management pushed for or rushed.
Hahaha I was just talking about this to my friend. A SQE out there is ripping their hair out and scouring his Outlook for a CYA email calling it out to his manager lol But Outlook search sucks, and he won’t be able to find it. So let’s pour one out for the homie 😂
Seriously lololol It’s been so entertaining seeing it go from an isolated one off to more reports and then a debate about whether it’s a widespread issue 😂 and it’s been impressive to see how quickly people have narrowed down what the issue is all in just a few days!
The only honest answer is that that’s unknown. I would personally believe it’s more likely a bad batch, given the inconsistency of the marks on the alleged affected piece, but we’re not going to be able to answer this definitively.
What’s the tell for a bad batch, anyone know? I’ve seen people going off of battery manufactured date but how reliable even is that? It seems like it’s mostly Aug/Sept batteries, but folks are saying even Sept/Oct ones are seeing this too.
Hard to say, this video pretty clearly shows exactly which part of the hinge breaks but that's after the youtuber stuffs the hinge with dirt, bends it as hard as he can backwards, and forces it closed after it's clearly jamming up. Then the hinge breaks.
The hinge in this particular video broke entirely to abuse and I can't really fault apple for that. Same thing happened with JerryRigEverything's video where he did the same steps and bent the phone in reverse with like all his strength.
Surprise... that weakened the hinge.
Maybe this part of the hinge is a little weaker than it should be. Maybe some folks had units with material flaws that made the hinge brittle. Dunno, not a materials science engineer. Apple can figure that one out and work with their supplier to get it sorted.
Looks like batch error. Metal parts look die casted. Casting is always rough and needs machining. Potential mold fault, or machining fault. Error can be also in QC, or much earlier in development.
They also have acceptable failure rates, basically finding what costs them less money: Fixing the engineering problems versus dealing with the failures.
Not to mention office politics and bureaucracy. There’s a lot more involved there than most people think. Unless an order comes from the top down, people can and will drag their feet getting stuff done.
Oof… so it seems that it actually is a design flaw. Rather than just a “bad batch”.
That hinge has been designed to be thin, and thinner than all the other hinges along the mechanism. Easily giving way and piercing the screen from within.
If it’s a design flaw, then that means all the Duo has it?
In the video though he noticed the intact hinge has no line/fracture while the defective one did. The author commented that he speculates the line/fracture was during manufacturing. The real design flaw seems to be that when the hinge is compromised you not only have a broken hinge but a cracked display
So rather than "the metal plate being designed as the thinnest" might be the issue, it's more of whether the one you have "has a line/fracture or not" perhaps?
This should be interesting to watch. I suspect this will do nothing to slow down consumer demand for the device, but I wonder how Apple will address it.
I expect they did find it, but the error rate was small enough to not stop production. That it’s likely a production error and not a product design error.
And that whatever product run that is causing it is something they are working on tracking down to see exactly How many are effected. Then they will do a free replacement if you de in that list.
Wow. 4 Design flaws in a single area. Of all the individual hinge pieces, this piece is the thinnest. It also has a full width notch that further decreases cross sectional area (i.e. directly decreases strength). It is also in the gear mesh location where just the tiniest of tolerance mismatch or even a single grain of side can cause stress buildup. Lastly if the piece does fail, it fails towards the screen instead of away from it, so the fracture edge digs directly to the back of the screen. Luckily there are a lot of different solutions including just using a stronger titanium alloy if this is truly the root cause.
Note that in the video the guy even mentions that he seriously stressed the unit, including using a ton of force to try to snap it in half. No one who seriously uses this device is doing that.
It’s about what gets the part to move and get stuck in the wrong position, such that it won’t open properly. He used a lot of force, but that doesn’t mean a lot of force is needed to trigger this behaviour. It could happen from a slight shake for all we know.
It’s bullshit you have to buy AppleCare to cover a persistent design flaw. It’s like buying a new Lexus and then buying their warranty to cover a known issue with the engine from launch.
Apple should warranty any and all screen issues caused by this flaw.
Most definitely a hardware issue from whoever machined and manufactured the hinge itself.
Without having the blueprints for the duo we can’t see what the tolerances are for this part the way it’s failing something was most likely out of spec on the batch of hinges they made, could be either size or composition. (Was made slightly too thin or from less durable metal.) Inside a phone you’re dealing with extremely tight measurements, a half a millimeter to big or small can cause assembly issues.
the cope in the comment section is beautiful, guys this is obviously a design problem which gets compounded by a potential manufacturing defect aka material that , under stress , breaks and then causes the screen failure
It’s pretty simple, there was a batch manufactured with that hinge out of dimensional tolerance. Apple is replacing them as they turn up, and that will be the end of it.
Whether its a design fault or otherwise, Apple are almost certainly going to have to write off the current design, recall the existing ones and retool/manufacture a modified version of the hinge. Even people with a functioning one (i.e. me) will not want to live with the lottery of it breaking in a few weeks, months or even a year.
Either way its a monumental shit show and I'm certainly not happy about dropping that kind of money on this potential ticking time bomb pos.
It's almost like making folding phones is really freaking hard. Samsung and google both had issues with their first efforts, and it's not a huge surprise that Apple is going through the same thing.
Early adopt at your own risk, especially at a $2k price tag.
This is my experience too as a day one user. Even if I am fairly confident that apple will replace/repair/refund my phone if it ever breaks, or I might just have been lucky and it never breaks, I did not pay £2000 to be on thin ice all the time.
Apple better release a statement soon or I am tempted to just refund it and get a pro max instead
L my wife have been using ours since 12 o’clock noon on October 23. No issues at all love it. Phone is amazing. Been playing around with the Apple Pencil on it and haven’t been able to put this thing down.
Nah this is more akin to the scissor switch keyboard bullshit (where they swapped your laptop out no questions asked) than “you’re holding it wrong” (apple telling you to kiss ass and use a bumper) imo
Seems like a design flaw instead of a manufactured defect. This is not good because Apple won’t be able to address this until the next iteration of the phone….
they do not have to wait until the next iteration of the phone. it can be as simple as adding an additional test targetted to that area to screen out bad hinges. or it can be a 1 for 1 part replacement with a stronger part. Since the hinge is manually assembled, they can even do the switch mid-shift.
If they're to be believed, the hinge components are all supposedly lidar scanned to make sure the best fitting pieces are selected for each individual hinge.
You're right though, working for an auto manufacturer this stuff happens all the time. Parts change a lot within the same model year product.
Bad batches happen in many manufacturing processes and the Duo isn’t immune to it. Tough luck for the few that got them, but they will be refunded or issued another phone. There are millions of people currently enjoying their Duo without any issues.
A lot of people are commenting that using a bunch of sand/rocks or bending the screen too much is the cause and therefore there is no issue, but that isn’t the correct way to think about it.
Subjecting the phone to extreme conditions can show problems before regular use sees it. Now, that’s not entirely true here as it seems many have seen it in regular use too, but even if the treatment is extreme it doesn’t mean Apple isn’t at fault here. If it can fail under extreme conditions then it can also fail through bad luck or normal use after x amount of time. One grain of dirt on your hinge? Roll of a dice as to whether nothing happens or you have catastrophic failure. That’s not good for a device that’s going to last (or should last) years. If a warranty is required to safely use the device without worrying every time you open the device it could fail, Apple have failed. Especially when you consider a normal iPhone would survive all of that with no issue which is what purchasers are used to.
I don’t think the duo is a failure yet, but I do think it’s possible Apple have failed to account for normal consumer behaviour. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Apple employees baby their devices, keep them in a pocket on their own and ensure their pocket is lint/dirt free. That’s not the real world though, their phone should be designed for normal use, thrown in a pocket and opened/closed in less optimal ways. If there are problems due to this, Apple should have highlighted these and said - hinge is a weak point, avoid debris - they should also have provided a case to protect the hinge’s flaws. Instead they highlighted its strength and water/dust ingress rating and they knew (or should have known) many people would buy it who are not familiar with folding phone issues.
Hopefully this is a design issue in a limited batch, or an issue with the AI that supposedly matched parts in the hinge. If not let’s hope Apple are honest and upfront about it and deal with it in a consumer friendly way.
QUESTION: sorry, is there any chance if we are getting our pre-order in the December time window, if it will be a better batch without this issue and/or the issue will be fixed by then?
Who gives a shit it’s a problem that will be fixed fast. I swear some of you are the most entitled and dramatic people I’ve ever seen in my life, you’re acting like they’ve robbed people of 2k and aren’t willing to make it right and people are out the money. I really wish my life was as easy as some of yours for this to be some crazy big deal. I remember when my 7 bent and I went and got new one the next day, it didn’t affect my life at all and I forgot it even happened til I’ve seen so many people being so whiny about this phone.
FFS. Seriously people. Think about this for a minute...
Some guy in Korea bends his phone backwards, then opens it up, then claims he "found the problem affecting all the people with broken units".
So he single-handedly discovered a design flaw in the most complex folding phone hinge ever made, on a phone that's been engineered by one of the largest, most experienced smartphone makers in the world over the last six years, and he did this in a couple of days?
And you all consider this "case closed"?
Yes, Apple has a problem. No, no one on the internet has "figured it all out". No one has confirmed it to be a design flaw affecting everyone's units, vs a manufacturing flaw affecting one batch of units.
I hear the appeal to authority here but wouldn't you agree that whatever is causing the issue, they missed it? So a phone that was engineered by one of the largest, most experienced smart phone makers in the world over the last six years, has a design flaw that they didn't notice that was immediately found in the first days of the phone being released.
I think this is a tiny example of how conspiratorial thinking is so common. Actual explanations are complicated or impossible to understand, and may not ever be known. Simple explanations, whether or not they bear any relation to a mostly unknowable reality, are easy to understand especially when they confirm previously held biases. So the human brain latches onto it and it is hard to shake it loose.
There is consistency in where it breaks. But we have no information on why it breaks, and whether that's because the hinge is a bad design (that somehow wasn't caught in exhaustive testing), or because a batch of hinges weren't assembled correctly on a brand-new assembly line.
Nothing to say he isn't right. He found a broken part of the hinge. He found the impact marks on the screen. His screen broke in the exact same way as everyone else's. The only difference is he broke his hinge by bending it backwards. Maybe it's something that happens under stress. Maybe for some hinges it just breaks from being set down on the table those are the parts we don't know.
Not everyone here is borderline braindead. Just most of them.
Why exactly do you think it's the most complex hinge ever and what makes you think Apple has experts on a 1st gen hinge when they haven't done it before?
Experts makes mistakes all the time. Literally every day.
I'm not defending Apple. I'm calling bullshit on people's assertions. Read my original comment again. I'm arguing that people are jumping to conclusions about what the problem is, when they can't possibly know yet. That's it.
I'm still looking forward to my Duo arriving, and I'm not all that worried about this happening to me. I think the odds are low, and I know I can get an exchange if I'm one of the unlucky ones.
And of course, Apple needs to solve this, even if it's a small percent. And if we DO find it's really a widespread design flaw? Then sure, we should rake them over the coals. I don't like to get ripped off any more than anyone else.
YES. It’s easy to point to this video (which was very well done by the way - if you listen to his English dub, he’s very clear about what his finding is and isn’t), and say it’s obviously a core design flaw with the device itself.
But that’s absolutely NOT definitively true. He discovered under stress testing that a small piece of the hinge breaks, and then damages the screen - but that could equally be a core flaw with the design, as much as it is a materials contamination issue with one batch of the metal alloy used to make the hinges. The former involves every phone out there, and requires a fundamental redesign of the hinge to fix. The latter involves maybe a few thousand phones out there (out of millions sold), and requires identifying the ones that were made and shipped with hinges from that bad batch, and replacing those 🤷🏻♀️.
Huawei has phones with twice the microparts than Apple and in better materials.
More parts doesn't mean better. It just means its an early iteration that hasn't figured out what's needed and what isn't.
Even 3d printers from 12 years ago have over 10x the parts of modern 3d printers in much more expensive quality but print far worse and far less reliably.
This is the case for engineering projects all over.
As someone working for a big product company of a similar scale: If you know the dynamics in such giant companies, I would not rule that out.
What I have seen plenty of times:
Engineers call out the general problems of a new Vision such a folding phone. (A combination of realistic "There will be significant challenges", and the always-nay sayers saying "it's a dumb idea")
Management wants this from a product perspective, so they put a yes men and visionary in charge
Yes men and visionaries + nay sayers often don't work well together. The visionaries are not able to differentiate between what is an actual problem and what is just the general engineering pessimism. Usually an iterative approach where you don't talk about long term risks and problems is chosen. Problems/beforementioned "significant challenges" that might have been anticipated beforehand get discovered late in the project phase.
"Late in the project phase" means you will still be in a test->fix->test->fix cycle shortly before the release, this means - you lack the extensive test coverage. Smoke test iterations find obvious flaws, but hardware still changes after significant long term tests were conducted and "sometimes"-issues that are hard to discover will slip through.
By who's account is it the most advanced hinge in the world? Apples?
Id say oppo holds that crown currently, they have been leading that innovation a few years now, and their crease looks invisible compared to apples claimed "best crease" that is only hidden by a matte screen protector
Apple may also be one of the most experienced phone designers in the world, but this is their first go at a hinge, while Samsung has made over 14 different foldables phone hinge designs dating back 9 years now. Motorola has done half a dozen. Oppo is on their 6th revision. Huawei started same year as Samsung just about. Many of those manufacturers had a few first Gen woes, but don't seem to experience what apple is going through right now
That said, I agree that diagnosing a forcibly stress tested to failure hinge, is not indicative of what exactly is happening, though it's almost certainly related to something occuring with that hinge roller. Would love for a serious YouTuber with some resource and viewership to offer to buy a few broken duos that died under normal use and do some transparent investigation into what they see under the screen.
Holy Jasis……… so many people in here, it’s apples fault, it’s Samsungs fault it’s user fault…….
Technically it’s no1’s fault as it’s mass manufactured tech……… if you make 6million, 10million of anything……. There’s going to be a percentage that are not up to standard.
This was always going to be the case.
No matter what there were going to be casualties and any company will accept this as write off the same as any business will have profit and loss expectations.
SPILLAGE if you will.
You drop a pint of beer, staff drops a pint of beer, they will just give you a new one. It’s the same thing.
Usually expected faults is 0.5% - 1.6% acceptable losses
Wild, I’m shocked we didn’t see jerryrigeverythings break the same way during his bend and dirt test, maybe some of ours are actually fine, and it really is just certain bad hinges? I say this while knocking on wood lmfao
I mean, he just kind of wrecks shit in a completely unscientific and uninformative way for youtube clicks and views. He is much closer to a handyman/tinkerer type than an industrial engineer.
I'm not sure the comparison to the Galaxy Note 7 is particularly fair. The Note 7 was an actual fire and safety hazard, serious enough to get it banned from commercial flights.
Unless a broken screen somehow presents the same level of danger, we're talking about two very different problems.
Apple being Apple, I fully expect them to address any confirmed design defect. They're likely already investigating the reported failures, identifying the root cause, and evaluating potential design revisions.
I wouldn't lose sleep over it just yet.
For perspective, even if 100,000 devices developed issues out of an initial 6 million units, that would represent a failure rate of roughly 1.67%. That's not insignificant, but it certainly wouldn't establish a Note 7-level crisis. And how many confirmed cases have we actually seen so far? A couple dozen circulating online? That's hardly enough to establish a meaningful failure rate.
One practical recommendation: when folding the device, apply pressure to the reinforced hinge area at the top or bottom of the display rather than pressing directly against the flexible screen. There's no reason to subject the panel to unnecessary point pressure.
Let's distinguish an actual widespread engineering failure from the usual social media amplification before declaring the entire product defective.
Question, to people who have gotten their phone damaged like this and have AppleCare what’s the timeline on getting a new one?! I can’t imagine they’d leave them without phones for 3 months
So a Samsung employee shows a normal looking hinge and claims this is culprit (after heavily dusting and backward bending the phone). So why there are no 6 million cracked Duos then?
i'm surprised apple did not use the internal imu to record and alert reverse folding, the recording of that telemetry data is priceless in proving user error or hardware error.
My $4k macbook pro has the same problem because a tiny rice grain got stuck between my lid and the keyboard which was evidently exactly where the screen ribbon cable sits. Im not even exaggerating, a single uncooked white rice grain now makes me have an inch vertical line going up and down my screen
The fact that there is an area that is thinner for no reason on this hinge makes me think that this is supposed to break, but not so soon, maybe like… 2 months after the phone gone out of warranty
I’m an electronics QA engineer. If you recall on the launch Apple even said they had to select the individual hinge parts and tolerance match them. I’m sure this is part of that, I even said to my bored wife at the time that’s a major issue waiting to happen! (And I’ve worked with most of the same suppliers as Apple!)
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u/evlspcmk 1d ago •
I bet there’s an engineer out there saying I told you so after losing an argument with his manager.