Apple’s first foldable has now been opened and closed more than a quarter of a million times by a machine that never sleeps, and it is still working. CNET’s Fold-a-Phone rig passed 260,000 folds during its weekday livestream on November 5, and a later count put the total past 281,000. The hinge still moves, the crease looks no worse than it did out of the box, and the test runs until at least November 20.
That number matters because the iPhone Duo’s durability was the biggest open question at launch. Foldables live or die by their hinge, and Apple has never published a fold rating for the Duo. So independent tests, run in public, have become the closest thing buyers have to an answer.
A machine that folds the Duo 900 times an hour
CNET built the Fold-a-Phone rig in Louisville, Kentucky, and picked up the test phone at an Apple Store on launch day, October 23. The Duo sits in a 3D-printed sled, held with heavy-duty tape, while the machine opens and closes it around the clock. Each cycle takes about four seconds: one second opening, one second fully open, one second closing, one second fully closed. That pace, roughly 900 folds an hour or 20,000 a day, was chosen to limit heat and to avoid slamming the hinge the way a speed-first torture test would.
The folding is livestreamed on YouTube every weekday from 1 pm to 5 pm Eastern Time, while the robot keeps going overnight. According to CNET lab director Matthew Murray, the plan is to keep folding until the Duo can no longer open or close. November 20 is the stated minimum, not the finish line.
Every iPhone Duo fold test so far, in one table
CNET’s is the fourth public fold test of the Duo, and the methods could hardly be more different. Here is how they compare:
| Tester | Method | Folds | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tim Pan, MediaStorm | Machine at room temperature, then 1,000 folds at -4F | 11,000 | Deeper crease, no screen damage |
| Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal | Servo machine, opened to about 130 degrees, in a case | 32,640 | No noticeable wear, hinge slightly stiffer |
| Kuba Klawiter | By hand on a livestream, dirt at 50,000 folds, ice bath at 75,000 | 75,001 | Inner display failed on the fold after the ice bath |
| CNET Fold-a-Phone | Machine, running 24/7 since October 23 | 260,000+, now past 281,000 | Still going, no damage seen |
The spread is the point. A hand-folded test with dirt and an ice bath broke the screen at 75,001 folds. A clean machine test has now passed that mark more than three times over without visible damage. The fold count alone does not tell you how tough the phone is. The conditions do.
What 260,000 folds means in years
Samsung Display uses 100 folds a day as its yardstick for endurance claims. At that pace, the numbers convert like this: 32,640 folds is about 11 months, 75,001 is about two years, 260,000 is about 7.1 years, and 281,000 is about 7.7 years. Most people fold a phone far less than 100 times a day, so in ordinary use the years would stretch further still.
For scale, Samsung rates its latest foldables for 500,000 folds. Apple has published no fold rating for the Duo at all, which is why independent counts like CNET’s carry so much weight. If the Fold-a-Phone rig keeps its current pace, it would reach Samsung’s 500,000 mark in roughly another 11 days, some time around November 16, well before the November 20 minimum.
The number this test does not answer
Here is the caveat that matters most. A machine folding a clean phone in a lab says nothing about the early inner-display cracks some owners reported within days of launch. Apple acknowledged on October 26 that an issue affects the inner display on what it called a small number of Duo units, and we covered what owners should do about it. A hinge that survives 260,000 folds and a screen that cracks in the first 20 openings are different failures, and only one of them shows up in this test.
The buying picture has not changed much either. The Duo starts at $1,999 in the US and $2,999 CAD in Canada, and wait times are still around 89 days, though the 256GB model has started appearing in stores. Meanwhile Samsung is benefiting from the wait: Galaxy Z Fold 8 sales jumped 20 percent in Korea as Duo buyers looked elsewhere.
What to watch next
Two numbers matter from here. The first is whether the Duo reaches 500,000 folds, Samsung’s rating, before the test ends. The second is whether the crease deepens in the final stretch, since the crease is the part of a foldable that ages visibly even when nothing breaks. CNET’s stream runs weekdays from 1 pm to 5 pm Eastern, and the counter keeps climbing overnight. If the phone is still folding on November 20, Apple will have the strongest durability evidence of any foldable launch so far, earned by a machine in Kentucky rather than a spec sheet.
