Apple's First Folding iPhone Starts at $1,999. Some Owners' Screens Cracked Along the Hinge Within Hours.

Song "TWENTY FOLDS" — East Coast boom-bap, 3 minutes 39 seconds, one story.

Apple's first folding iPhone went on sale on Friday, October 23, 2026. The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 for 256GB and runs to $3,199 for 2TB, with a 5.4-inch outer screen, a 7.6-inch inner screen, 254 grams, IP68, and Touch ID in the side button instead of Face ID 1. Supply was the first problem: U.S. pre-order shipping dates slipped into January 2027 within half an hour, and Verizon apologized for pre-order delays 1. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman called the decision to open pre-orders when Apple did a "major mistake" 2.

By that evening, owners were posting photographs of broken inner screens. The Verge reported the damage appearing "at a similar spot" on affected units: a fault along the hinge and a bright line across the right side of the display 3. One owner in Australia had the phone for six hours and had opened it fewer than 20 times when he felt something under the screen, heard a crack, and watched the display break along the fold 3. MacRumors found almost all of the reported faults sitting right along the hinge 4.

How widespread it is has not been established. The reports are owner posts on Reddit and the MacRumors forums, plus demo units photographed in China, where the phone launched hours earlier 4. Apple has published no failure rate, announced no repair program, and did not reply to The Verge's requests for comment 5. Stores have been swapping affected units on the spot, according to owners who posted about it 3.

iFixit's teardown, published October 25, put the breaks where the gap for the flexible display cable meets the central hinge support. Its closing simulation shows the center support bar failing to drop far enough, so the folded screen comes down onto it and builds a stress hotspot near the reported break location 6. That is a hypothesis from outside the company, and iFixit says as much: several edges meet at that spot, so there are several possible culprits 6. The same teardown found that Apple's crease-hiding — a matte nano-texture cover that scatters reflections, and oval subpixels set at varying angles — disappears once you lift the cover layer, revealing a crease arguably more visible than the Galaxy Z Fold8's 6.

YouTuber CuriousHagi reproduced the crack in durability testing and then took the phone apart. He found a middle link of the hinge thinner than the links above and below it, snapped at a small notch, with marks where the hinge met the support plate 7.

The bill is the part that travels. A new inner screen without AppleCare is $999; the replaceable cover layer is $49, or $19 with AppleCare 6. iFixit scored the phone 5 out of 10 for repairability — the highest score it has given a foldable, which it framed as no endorsement at all 6.

Reporting cut off at October 25, 2026. If Apple publishes a cause, a failure rate, or a repair program, that is the next episode.