The hinge for Apple’s new foldable phone was built with AI
In Brief Posted: 12:21 PM PDT · September 9, 2026 Image Credits:Apple Lucas Ropek The hinge for Apple’s new foldable phone was built with AI Duo, Apple’s long-awaited foldable phone announced at the company’s Surprise and Shine event on Wednesday, contains a number of surprises, including a…
In Brief Posted: 12:21 PM PDT · September 9, 2026 Image Credits:Apple Lucas Ropek The hinge for Apple’s new foldable phone was built with AI Duo, Apple’s long-awaited foldable phone announced at the company’s Surprise and Shine event on Wednesday, contains a number of surprises, including a critical hinge that was designed and built with the help of AI and 3D printing. The new phone represents Apple’s first entry into the foldable phone genre — a category of devices that has seen significant consumer enthusiasm but whose form factors haven’t always lived up to the hype. As you might expect from a product that, by design, undergoes twice as much wear as a traditional device, most foldables suffer significant degradation and don’t have the durability of other smartphones. Apple claims that it has integrated innovative protections into the Duo’s design to keep the phone from falling prey to the typical wear and tear associated with foldables. That includes the hinge, according to Johny Srouji, the company’s chief hardware officer. “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,” Srouji said during Wednesday’s event. Srouji also shared that Apple gave the foldable phone “a custom nano-texture finish that significantly reduces glare and reflections,” as well as a multilayer lamination strategy designed to increase the device’s durability. Of course, it remains to be seen whether those protections will be enough to keep the Duo in peak physical condition in the long run. Topics AI, Apple, Duo, In Brief, iPhone October 13 – 15 San Francisco Don’t miss out. The startup community will gather to answer a pivotal question: How do you build sustainably in the AI era? REGISTER NOW Newsletters See More Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Related Hardware Everything Apple announced at its fall iPhone event, from the foldable iPhone Duo to an always-listening Apple Watch Aisha Malik 4 hours ago Gadgets Apple unveils its first foldable, the iPhone Duo Ivan Mehta 6 hours ago Hardware How to watch Apple’s foldable iPhone announcement Amanda Silberling 1 day ago Latest in AI AI OpenAI adds a prominent AI doomer to its board of directors Tim Fernholz 1 hour ago AI Massachusetts hits data centers with new clean power rules Tim De Chant 2 hours ago AI Apple Watch’s new AI features are normalizing the idea that technology is always listening Sarah Perez 3 hours agoSource: TechCrunch — Published — Category: Business