Kuba Klawiter’s Livestream Shows iPhone Duo Inner Display Fails After 75,000 Hand Folds

Polish YouTuber Kuba Klawiter bought a retail iPhone Duo with his own money and opened a livestream so viewers could take turns folding and unfolding it by hand. Volunteers rotated every hour. The plan called for a million cycles or the first clear failure, whichever arrived sooner. For the first fifty thousand folds the phone stayed in a relatively clean room and showed no real trouble. The hinge moved smoothly, the outer screen stayed intact, and the inner display continued to light up without lines or dead pixels.

Around the 50,000 mark, the team loaded the phone with regular household dust and fine dirt to simulate what would end up in a jacket pocket after a few days of usual use. The first few squeezes generated a crunching sound, but after a while, the noise subsided and the phone resumed normal operation. By sixty thousand shuts, the wrinkle in the middle of the screen had grown much deeper and more visible, both to the naked eye and under a touch. When the halves reconnected, a relentless crunching began. Fortunately, it was still functional, so they kept on.

At around 75,000 closes, the phone was placed in a bowl of ice for approximately 19 minutes. The temperature dropped from around thirty to six or seven degrees. The ice was essentially a cheap replacement for a frigid Polish winter, and a phone was stuffed inside a ski jacket pocket. After it was removed from the ice and dried, the following fold revealed a vertical white line across the interior display, followed by a horizontal one. The screen was no longer useable, and that was all. Final figures varied slightly across reports, but the phone stopped working somewhere between 75 and 75 thousand three folds.

Earlier on the same channel, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 5 were subjected to identical hand-folding sessions and survived well over 400 thousand cycles before displaying signs of wear and tear. Samsung claims that their newest foldables will last for 500,000 openings. Klawiter expected the Duo to cost between $3,000 and $4,000; the hinge felt firmer at first than on prior Samsung models. Other reviewers had fewer neighbors. Joanna Stern constructed a special robot to perform it and managed over 32,000 partial folds with a casing on before it broke, while Tim Pan did 10,500 cycles at room temperature and another thousand in the freezer. Both tests went as far as they could without breaking the phone, but they did not finish a full failure run.

Apple has stated that the screen difficulties experienced by some owners are isolated incidents and that customers should contact AppleCare to have them replaced. iFixit’s deconstruction work has shown a central support bar in the hinge that may not be lowering out of the way properly, dust in the mechanism, and a stress point at the flex cable that crosses the fold. Those findings correspond to where the white lines emerged following the ice and dust in Klawiter’s session. At fifty folds per day, 75,000 cycles would be equivalent to four years of normal use in a single session, or two years at one hundred folds per day.