Apple's first foldable just had a rough week on YouTube. Zack Nelson, who runs the durability-testing channel JerryRigEverything, put the iPhone Duo through his usual gauntlet of scratches, bends and grit, and the phone came out looking like a fairly ordinary first-generation foldable rather than something that had solved the category's oldest problems.
The headline failure involves the hinge. Apple rates the Duo IP68 for dust and water resistance, but Nelson buried the phone in sand, dirt and soil anyway. Afterward, it wouldn't close all the way. Debris had worked into the titanium hinge from several points, and the magnets that normally snap the two halves shut couldn't overcome the grit wedged inside. It's not a scenario most owners will hit on a daily basis, but it's a real one for anyone who takes a foldable to a beach or a construction site.
The inner flexible display didn't fare much better once Nelson moved past scratching into bending. The screen carries a nano-texture coating that, according to Nelson, does a decent job hiding scratches compared with the glossier panels on many rival foldables. That held up fine under normal testing. But when he bent the open phone backward, against its natural fold, the titanium frame itself stayed intact. The AMOLED panel didn't. A green line appeared first, then more lines, and eventually the display stopped responding altogether. Nelson's video notes that replacing that inner screen reportedly runs around $1,000.
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