The iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable, is already an incredibly expensive phone, rolling in at $1,999 to start. While the buy-in price is high, it’s also going to be extremely expensive if it breaks.
Ahead of the iPhone Duo’s release next week, the foldable’s repair costs were found by 9to5Mac, and they’re staggering if you don’t have AppleCare+. They range from damage on the glass back of the phone costing you $199 to inner screen damage costing $999 to repair. Apple will apparently also charge up to $1,499 to fix “other damage,” though it’s not clear what exactly that means.
All of these prices will be drastically lowered by having AppleCare+. Because the iPhone Duo is such an expensive and complicated device, anyone dropping the cash to buy one should seriously consider bundling AppleCare with it. I’d even go further and suggest picking up an iPhone Duo case on top of that.
As scary as these high repair prices look, Apple basically skipped the era of fragile foldables. Back when the first Samsung foldables were coming out, they were notoriously prone to damage, with displays that had gaps when folded, allowing particles of sand to get in there and wreak havoc on the inner screen. You could even peel the outer layer of the display off, a problem so bad that Samsung actually had to get around by putting out a statement telling people that the outer display layer was not a screen protector.
To Apple’s credit, the iPhone Duo probably won’t be quite as fragile as the foldables of yore, but it is still a phone with plenty of moving parts, which can always lead to unforseen damage. But we probably won’t know exactly how durable it is until it actually makes its way into people’s hands later this month. There’s also a chance that the Duo’s unique display aspect ratio will make it one of the first foldables that’s actually good for gaming.
