iPhone Duo Teardown – APPLE SHOULD APOLOGIZE

Apple's brand new iPhone duo appears to have a problem. Mine obviously has already been through some things, but it turns out even some of the brand new, undamaged iPhone duos that I haven't even been in the same room with have started spontaneously springing, green lines in the exact same places. They're calling it Green Line gate, crack gate. What about Green Line of Death? Oh, I know, Pixel Gate, maybe no, that's Google, it's gotta be the eye crack, look, we still gotta workshop the name a little bit. But the point is today we are going to take apart the new iPhone duo and see if there is something underneath that folding screen at that specific point. That is dis. Combobulating the display. And hopefully, if we find something, Apple will take care of all the customers that this has affected. Apple is worth 5 trillion dollars, after all, so you would think they would, but then again, you don't really get 5 trillion by being generous. The iPhone Duo is very similar to every other iPhone made in the last 16 years. In that there are duo pentalobe screws down at the bottom, this duo does have two halves, which means it has duo sets of screws. And in typical Apple fashion, both sides are different lengths, so keep them organized. I'm also curious if we'll actually find two sheets of ultra thin glass in this ten layer sandwich. Taken off, the display is pretty familiar. Samsung has been making these screens for the past eight years, and I've been taking them apart here on my channel for just as long. The raised plastic bumper needs to be removed first. This layer helps with the IP six eight dust and water resistance rating. We'll come back to that. I would bet that Samsung offered plenty of guidance to Apple on how their screen needs to sit in Apple's frame. Apple has very proudly declared that they themselves were responsible for designing the remarkable hinge mechanism, though, which contains over 100 tiny precision components, and it seems like one of those tiny components is failing internally. And if I was Samsung right now, I'd be pretty mad that Apple's hinge is making their screen. Look bad, slip in my thin pry tool below the titanium back panel on the rear. Most of the ten layers I can gently lift up on the flexible screen, taking special care not to bend it in more than one plane at a time. Flexible screens are pretty resilient as long as they aren't kinked, poked, or stabbed in the back with the first half of the flexible screen lifted up. I can use some isopropyl alcohol to help dissolve the adhesive. Between the titanium back plate and the aluminum inner frame of the duo, the titanium is just around the edges. And Samurai swiping a bit with my pry tool to scissor away any remaining adhesive. And look at that. There is an incredible amount of dust and dirt in here. Taking this much sand from the beach would be a misdemeanor in some states, and for a phone claiming to be IP six eight, water and dust resistant, this is pretty unacceptable. Obviously, my dust test is slightly excessive, but all it takes is one single grain of sand to puncture through and destroy that 1000 dollar flexible inner screen, and in my phone alone, for the very few seconds, it was in the dirt, the grains inside of here are literally uncountable. While it is sad to say, but if it weren't for all the dust that snuck through the hinge getting squished into the backside of my screen, my iPhone duo probably would have survived the durability test, and now we know each of those. Black dots we see on the screen and subsequent dead line of pixels is probably caused by one of those grains of sand that slipped in through the hinge. However, I don't think that dust ingress is what's destroying these brand new phones. I think we are seeing two totally separate but similar issues. Everyone else's dead Pixel lines are in one specific location, and like the exhaust port on the Death Star, our iPhone duo has a weak point. To get our eyes on that we must go deeper. I'll continue slicing around the edge of the display. At some point, we're going to encounter a ribbon cable that pokes through the frame and plugs into the motherboard, and yep, we just nuked it. The screen is now dead which we knew was gonna. To happen at some point. To figure out if Apple really had Samsung put two layers of glass in the screen, Samsung makes, we need to start delaminating some of the ten layers, starting with taking off the titanium on the back. You'll notice we have some of the same slatted mesh reinforcement layers that we've seen on other Samsung folding phone screens. We also notice immediately that this inner display is cracking under the matte nanotexture layer, so we definitely have at least one layer of glass. That's good. I'll pull off the rest of the titanium. Here's a better look at the metal mesh supports that provide reinforcements for the spine, which is the most vulnerable portion of the flexible display. Samsung has perfected this design over eight generations and millions of devices a year, so the duo screen failures are definitely not on Samsung's shoulders. And if we look closely at this forward section of screen, after the top few layers are ripped off, we do see more crackable glass back here. And going back to the upper layer of flexible AMOLED, right underneath the top two plastic layers, there's another layer of ultra thin glass. They're both definitely here. It's very cool that Apple has two layers of glass, but it's very not cool that their own hinge stabs it in the back. Speaking of which, now that we have the screen removed, every single iPhone duo that has spontaneously broken has broken right here, right at this specific component of the hinge. I call this the pixel pincher 9000. We'll have to take apart the hinge to get a better look. But somewhere right around this location, maybe a screw is coming loose, or one of these guiding slats is breaking off. Enough to poke the screen from behind, which is a big deal since the center screen replacement costs 1000 dollars to swap out, and that is a lot of money. To get access to the full hinge, we need to take apart the rest of the phone, no complaints here. I'll heat up the exterior rear Star White ceramic shield glass panel, it comes up easy. Enough, and it looks phenomenal in here. With the metal encased battery, silver camera units and singular ribbon cable snaking down to the main board, this connects the rear wireless charging and camera flash. The back panel comes up with the Mag safe magnets and copper coil still attached. Lookin amazing poppin the exterior ceramic shield two cover glass off the screen. Next, using the same heat and pry tool method, we get the other half of the duo exposed. And I'm not gonna lie, this might be the coolest lookin iPhone Apple has ever made, silver and black and everything lookin super clean. You might be like, Hey Jerry, that doesn't look like what you showed on the tear down skin, and you're right. We didn't know what the insides of the phone look like when I perform my durability test. I'm seeing the insides for the first time right now. So Dbrand, I just put a placeholder image on the grip case until we could get it opened up for real. And it looks way cleaner in real life than I anticipated. Anyone who orders one of the iPhone Duo Tear Down Skins will, of course, get the true to life representation of the internals. Don't worry. We cover pretty much every mainstream smartphone with my tear down skin, so there's a good chance I have one for your own phone as well. Link is down in the description. Where was I? Ah yes screwing. There's around 95 different sized screws inside of this iPhone duo, and if you find yourself in this position, you should really pause and think about your life choices before attempting any repairs, especially if it's your first time. Luckily, Apple does have a full, complete repair guide for the iPhone Duo that they've already posted online. It's probably around 300 pages though. You can always go check it out yourself if you're bored, but I'll skip ahead to the good parts. This guy right here is the invisible under screen camera that peaks out from underneath the center screen. It's estimated at four megapixels. I do say estimated because Apple doesn't ever come out and tell us directly, which is interesting. There are some antennas around the main camera units. Apple's using the camera bump to hold some of their electronics and make the rest of the phone appear a little thinner, which is fine. The main camera is a. 48 megapixel unit here in the center and the guy off to the left is a 48 megapixel wide angle camera. There's no telephoto camera and on the outside, it does not appear to have any optical image stabilization. But long time subscribers of the channel already know that Apple got rid of OIS in favor of sensor shift stabilization a long time ago. We can pop this guy open to take a look and verify it's still in there. Gotta keep Apple on their toes. This ah does kill the camera, but in the coliseum of phone repair, some sacrifices must be made. With the metal housing removed, you can see the back side of the sensor here, and indeed, the sensor is shiftable. It moves around to counteract the vibrations and movements of your hands while you're holding the phone. Other smartphones, like Samsung and everybody else, shift the glass camera lenses, which is heavier and not quite as responsive as Apple's sensor shift. You can see the big old magnets that react with the coils next to the sensor to initiate those minute movements. Pretty cool technology. Now for the battery. Another really cool thing Apple's doing lately is adding electrically induced adhesive debonding, which means if you clip on a nine volt battery for about 90 seconds, the adhesive just lets go. No prying required. The battery is made with 95% recycled lithium and 100% recycled. Cobalt thumbs up for that. Now I am doing this wrong. Apparently there are two strips of adhesive under each battery, and I'm supposed to debond each individually instead of clipping onto both terminals at the same time. My method still worked a little bit, but maybe I should have read that 300 page repair manual first. Next time. Either way the batteries are out. The first battery, the L shaped unit and the smaller of the two, is 1921 milliamp hours. The Big Boy is 2962, for a total of 4883. Apparently the old school magic pull tabs would just stop working after a few years, but this electrically debonding stuff can last five to ten years. Making repairs easier down the road, which is great. But it seems like right now, Apple's having some problems with the iPhone duos, even lasting five to ten hours. And we're still on a mission to find out why the culprit is still definitely this guy here. Since this is the only portion of the hinge located exactly where all of the damages have been occurring, but it's not unburied yet. I'll unsnap three more ribbons off of the main board, just like little Legos, then the motherboard comes free. This is the entire brains of the iPhone duo, about the size of a thumb, it is single stacked. And if we flip it over, we can see the a 20 Pro chip that rests right above the graphite pad that bridges the air gap onto the very cool looking vapor chamber. I recently toured a smartphone factory and we got to see how flagship smartphone motherboards are assembled. The machines handling that process are fascinating. Definitely check out that video after we're done here. The vapor chamber is a recent invention of Apple's. It effectively allows vapor inside the chamber to evaporate on one end and condense at the other, helping move heat around and cool the processor through the magical properties of liquid phase change. You can literally see the diionized water disappear into the air now that I've cut it open. And I'm sure someone's down in the comments, saying that Samsung did vapor chambers first ten years ago on their Galaxy S seven and. To that, I say, luck, apple's having a hard time right now, their phones are self destructing, and I know Samsung does everything first, including self destructing phones, RIP Note seven but we gotta stay positive. While we help Apple figure this out, Apple's vibrator is decently sized, about the same width and length as we see in a regular smartphone. And over here, in the upper right corner, is the twelve megapixel exterior hole punch selfie camera that takes pictures out through the front glass. Taking out the lower board near the charging port, you would think that the charging port would be attached to this, but nope. Apple has made the us BC port modular. This time around. Kinda nice. I'll use another screwdriver bit to get this guy out. It's a t four and I'll link my smartphone toolkit in the description if you're into that kind of thing. Taking apart smartphones is rather satisfying though not gonna lie. Plus the ladies love a guy with skills. The upper stereo earpiece comes out next. This guy definitely has balls inside. And finally, with most of the guts removed, we can take out the remaining 20 screws, holding the hinge in place as the center spine, acting as the backbone of the phone. Now, technically, an IP rating, like the IP six eight water and dust type rating Apple has, is performed in a laboratory environment while the phone is stationary and not moving. Fine particles are just blown around inside of an enclosure. And if nothing gets inside the test is successful. As you can see, these metal shields did a good job of keeping my own dust test from getting inside the circuit board compartment, even while the phone was moving. However, as you can see, as I lift up these plastic shields on the hinge mechanism itself, we have a whole litter box worth of debris build up in here. It's like there's a whole Thanos snap person filling up the cavities inside of the hinge. If even one grain of sand sneaks into that area behind the display, it will cause 1000 dollars worth of destruction. And here in my phone, after about ten seconds worth of dirt, we have a million grains of sand. Personally I think that the. IP rating, Apple told everyone is a bit misleading. People are going to assume that their phone is dust resistant in everyday life, and it is most definitely not. In my slightly unprofessional opinion, Apple should be warranting all of their inner displays until the end of days with how big the back door is for dust. It's like the Spartans didn't even have to use a Trojan horse because Troy just left the gates open. Remember, each black dot you saw back when my phone was alive was a pressure point from a grain of sand entering my phone? You can't even watch Moana on this thing without it filling up with the beach. The iPhone Duo does not appear to have any real world protections against dust or sand, which you can see right here with your own eyeballs in real time. And once dust is in that hinge, it has direct access to the backside of your soft, flexible screen. Now, to be fair, I do think Crack gate and the sand issue are two separate but complementary problems. Sand will crack your screen anywhere, while this particular component here, that I call the pixel pincher 9000, it only cracks your screen in one spot, and it's the only consistent variable across all of the spontaneously broken phones, as you can see for yourself. I'd have to take apart one of those broken phones to be sure, but I imagine this component is breaking and stabbing the screen from the back, and you might be like, Hey, Jerry, that hinge as a whole looks super robust. There's no way it can break. I'm sure it can handle a whole lot of force. And not really. The back chunk of titanium on the iPhone Duo's hinge is mostly aesthetic. It's a cosmetic shield over the top of all the moving components, with about the same wall thickness as a pop can. Which is like not a big deal. I'm just showing you how much stress these much smaller, much tinier little hinge mechanism components are under. All of the stress. I genuinely believe that Apple has a pretty big problem on their hands, and I really hope that Apple will do the right thing, and warranty these first generation iPhone duos for the rest of forever, since dust is probably gonna get in, no matter what. It was dirtier than. A playground at recess up in there, and all it takes is one grain to drain ten bins. No you're not folding it wrong Apple built it wrong. Here in my hand, I have the three hinge segments from Samsung's new Fold eight. This is nearly the same form factor as Apple's iPhone Duo, and you'll notice that, for whatever reason, Samsung did not include a pixel pincher 9000 in their own design. Either way, now this is all kind of my problem, since my last video got more than 200,000 likes, I have to switch to an iPhone duo like I promised I would. I'm gonna use the Night Sky variant that I removed the nano texture screen protector from, it still works great, and now you can see where that hinge lines up and where my duo will probably break in the future, right at the bottom of that third row of apps. I can't do anything about that potential catastrophe of course. The best I can do is to try to keep dust out of my phone. You'll notice that none of Apple's cases are built to provide full body protection, which is weird. The 130 dollar folio case leaves the sides exposed, and the 80 dollar regular duo case just leaves the hinge, totally popped out, like those cowboy chaps from the Fifties. Protecting a phone with moving parts is hard. And while Dbrand is one of my long time channel sponsors, I do think their grip case has the best all around protection that I've seen so far. With magnets built into the customer spine cover, it'll clamp to your iPhone duo without any moving parts of its own. That could fail. No case is 100%, of course, but full body protection is way better than you know what the other guys have. With my cloudy nano texture screen gun, the fingerprints and glares are way more visible. You can see the difference between my glossy display and this matte dis. Oh, anyway, you can get a d brand case in my tear down skin at a link in the description. Even if your phone doesn't have moving parts or self stabbing components, it's worth taking a look for now. I'm stuck with this iPhone duo for the next 30 days and you can bet I'll keep you updated on how it holds up. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. And thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.