Apple built its new foldable phone's hinge with AI

Apple’s long-awaited foldable phone, Duo, was announced at the company’s Surprise and Shine event on Wednesday. Among its more surprising features: a hinge that Apple says was designed and built with the help of artificial intelligence and 3D printing.

Duo marks Apple’s first entry into the foldable phone category — a segment that has generated real consumer enthusiasm, even as its form factors haven’t always lived up to the hype. Because a foldable, by design, undergoes twice as much wear as a conventional device, most foldables on the market suffer significant degradation and fall short of the durability of standard smartphones.

Apple says it built protections into Duo specifically to avoid that fate, starting with the hinge. “During manufacturing, we use AI algorithms to precisely match each individual hinge with its best-fit housing to ensure perfect alignment, and a confocal laser progressively scans the topology of every single unit and 3D prints up to 25 micro layers of a custom photopolymer to eliminate residual waviness,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, during Wednesday’s event.

Srouji also described a custom nano-texture finish meant to significantly cut glare and reflections, along with a multilayer lamination strategy intended to boost the device’s durability further.

Whether those measures are enough to keep the Duo in peak physical condition over the long run remains to be seen.

Why it matters

Durability has been the industry’s central knock against foldable phones, so Apple pairing AI-driven manufacturing with its most failure-prone component is a bet that reliability — not just form factor — will differentiate its first foldable.