Apple Offers Replacements for iPhone Duo Screens Failing Days After Launch

By Olivia Hart

Apple will replace iPhone Duo handsets whose screens failed within days of the £1,999 ($2,668) device going on sale. The company confirmed "an issue impacting the inner display on a small number" of the phones and urged affected owners to contact it for a replacement.

The fault reports surfaced almost immediately after the Duo's launch, which drew crowds to Apple stores worldwide last week. Social media photos show lines appearing across the screens of Apple's first-ever foldable. Some owners posted images of cracks along the screen's centre crease; others reported a crunching noise when opening the device.

How widespread is the problem?

Nobody knows — and Apple is not saying. The company did not disclose how many devices are affected. Some images of supposedly faulty units circulating online may themselves have been created with artificial intelligence, which muddies any attempt to size the defect from social posts alone.

For context, the failure reports concern a handset that starts at £1,999 in the UK and climbs to £3,199 for the best-equipped models — roughly £1,200 more at the top end than the entry price. That premium makes even a small defect rate expensive for Apple's reputation, if not yet for its balance sheet.

One owner, Justin Lokos, posted an image of a device with lines across the right side of the display. He later uploaded a photo of a new handset beside the broken one, thanking an Apple store in New York for its help. The replacement path, in other words, is already working for at least some customers.

Why the hinge is the hard part

The Duo's 7.6-inch (19.3cm) inner display is held together by a central hinge — a piece of engineering that has tripped up Apple's rivals before. Samsung's first foldable, the Galaxy Fold, suffered an early setback in 2019 when reviewers reported broken screens on the devices.

Android users, meanwhile, already have a broad selection of foldable phones to choose from. Apple spent years developing the technology before the Duo's release. That development time did not, apparently, eliminate a failure mode its competitors had already encountered six years earlier.

The plain takeaway: the hinge-and-crease problem is an industry-wide engineering challenge, and Apple's first attempt has not escaped it.

What is at stake for Apple?

The Duo is Apple's first major iPhone redesign in almost two decades, and the stakes run beyond one product. The launch is part of an effort to reinvigorate the company's device range and challenge the foldable phones made by rivals.

New chief executive John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook in September, unveiled the device at Apple's California headquarters last month. "Others have created foldables that just feel like two phones awkwardly stuck together," Ternus told the audience. The Duo, he said, would "redefine the experience of using a foldable phone".

Closed, the Duo looks like a wider version of an iPhone; opened, it resembles a small tablet computer. The concept has clearly excited buyers — the launch crowds attest to that — but the promise of a redefined foldable rests on hardware that, for some owners, has lasted only days.

Apple's pledge to replace affected units is the right immediate fix, yet the company has so far declined to quantify the fault, name a cause or say whether the issue affects a production batch or the design itself. Until Apple explains what is breaking and why, buyers of its most expensive iPhone ever are being asked to take that promise on faith.

Watch whether Apple discloses defect numbers or a hardware revision in the coming weeks — silence would itself be a signal.