Apple’s new Vice President of Hardware Engineering, Tom Marieb, sat down with TechRadar for an interview all about iPhone Duo. Here’s what he said about iPhone Duo’s durability, the hinge, display crease, and more.
Apple put ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ into making iPhone Duo’s hinge durable and versatile, per interview
iPhone Duo will launch next month, bringing an all-new software experience to iPhone (see examples here) but also several hardware innovations.
Anyone interested in iPhone Duo may have questions about three key hardware features especially:
- durability
- the display crease (or lack thereof)
- and the hinge
Today Axel Metz at TechRadar published quotes from an interview with Tom Marieb, the Apple’s new Vice President of Hardware Engineering. That’s the same role current CEO John Ternus once held.
The full interview is well worth a read, but here were some highlights.
When asked about the crease in iPhone Duo’s folding display, Marieb pointed to nano-texture as a great solution that he said would continue to minimize a visible crease even after extended use.
“Hold us accountable to that, please. The choice of a matte finish — apart from it being beautiful — is part of that equation. When you look at glossy displays, their specularity makes it very easy to pick up topology differences. That’s part of the reason we picked the matte finish — it’s not only beautiful in terms of preventing glare, but it’s also more forgiving of [hinge] changes over time.”
On the subject of iPhone Duo’s hinge, he said:
“We really worked on the torque profile very heavily, and that means changing a lot of the mechanical properties of the hinge to have it feel solid, like a high-end automobile’s car door, when you shut it. That was design intent, so people would have a feeling like, ‘Oh, it’s okay. This is well crafted, and it’s safe for me to use and not worry about it.’
And then, as you said, we have a lot of use cases where the Duo is [in a half-folded state]. And so we also had to think, ‘Can people interact with this [device] and not have it feel floppy?’ So getting those torque profiles right at both those ends, as well as in the middle — not having it feel like you’re pulling something open, and not feeling as if it’s floppy — we spent a lot of time optimizing that. So thank you for noticing, because a lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into that.”
Marieb also praised Ceramic Shield 2 as an incredible technology that makes third-party screen protectors unnecessary. He said, “Personally, when I see someone put a screen protector on their iPhone, it makes my skin crawl, because we work so hard to make beautiful front screens.”
You can read the full interview here on TechRadar.
How do you feel about Apple’s claims of durability for iPhone Duo? Let us know in the comments.
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