Apple’s first foldable is also the most repairable one yet. The iFixit team tore down the iPhone Duo, revealing its internals and assessing its repairability.
Surprisingly, the Duo sets a new standard for repairability in the foldable category, earning a provisional repairability score of 5 out of 10.
Apple’s best repair tricks go foldable
With the iPhone Duo, iFixit says Apple borrowed some of the best repair tricks from its regular iPhones. These include batteries glued into place with electrically conductive adhesive, an easy-to-remove outer display and modular components.
These minor changes make the iPhone Duo the most repairable foldable iFixit has ever tackled. But that doesn’t mean the Duo is easy—or quick—to fix. The iFixit team estimates that DIYers will need around 3–5 hours to replace the inner display.
The teardown makes it clear that the nano-texture protective layer on the iPhone Duo’s foldable screen helps hide the crease. Interestingly, that’s not the only trick Apple has used on the Duo.
Photo: iFixit
Some of the red, green, and blue display pixels are oval. An Apple patent application describes “varying subpixel shapes and orientations to make reflected light produce less conspicuous patterns. It’s a kind of geometric dithering, changing the repeating pattern so its optical artifacts don’t all reinforce one.”
A crunchy hinge complicates the picture
The iPhone Duo also shares an unwelcome weakness with other foldables: dust getting into its hinge. The iFixit team placed the phone in a bag of fluorescent powder and repeatedly opened and closed it. The hinge soon started making a crunching noise.
While the powder is finer than typical beach sand, iFixit says it found similarly sized particles in office dirt.
Photo: iFixit
Worse, cleaning the hinge requires removing the flexible display and its supporting components.
Still, Apple deserves credit for making several common repairs easier. Both batteries use adhesive that releases when an electrical current passes through it, reducing the need for prying.
Their metal shells also provide extra protection against accidental punctures during removal. And unlike the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s inner display trim, which crumbled during iFixit’s teardown, the Duo’s trim came off intact.
For now, the repairability score of 5 remains provisional while iFixit waits for replacement parts.
Even if you don’t plan on getting the iPhone Duo, definitely check out iFixit’s teardown. It reveals a lot about the phone’s design and how Apple worked around some of the challenges that come with making a foldable phone.
Rajesh has been writing about consumer technology for over a decade, with a strong focus on iPhones, Macs and Apple’s ecosystem. He enjoys digging into Apple software updates, hardware changes, and discovering new Mac apps that make work faster and more enjoyable.
You can reach out to him at mail[at]rajeshpandey.me.
