Mark Gurman: iPhone Duo has a real manufacturing defect, Apple shakes up M&A leadership to get more aggressive

Apple's iPhone Duo Has a Real Defect — and Its M&A Setup Is Changing

Mark Gurman confirms the iPhone Duo display cracking issue is a genuine manufacturing defect, not user error. A bar inside the hinge gets stuck beneath the display and punctures the screen when the phone is opened. Gurman says he put out a tweet asking for affected users and woke up to an inbox full of photos, videos, receipts, and Apple Support correspondence — enough to publish. Apple responded 18 minutes after his story went live.

Apple has acknowledged "a small number" of affected units, but Gurman notes that at Apple's scale, that could mean tens of thousands of devices. The defect appears to manifest quickly: current evidence suggests that if a unit is going to fail, it does so almost immediately, which is why Gurman believes his own device is likely in the clear.

The customer experience around repairs has been its own problem. People who waited in line for hours are being turned away from Apple Stores with no replacement inventory. Gurman describes a friend whose Duo shipped with a broken camera — the phone flagged a "foreign part" warning from day one — and who still hasn't been able to get a replacement unit despite inventory showing up online.

“There's this one bar in the hinge that gets stuck under the display and then just punctures the screen and creates that crack... I broke the news a few weeks ago that they bounced their head of M&A. Ternus and the hardware engineering guys have had gripes for decades that this guy buys no one... I don't know if they'll buy Instinct, but I think they have a better chance of buying Instinct than they did three months ago.”

Software quirks the reviews missed

Gurman argues the early reviews misjudged the iPhone Duo. The three criticisms that dominated — app optimization, camera quality, and Touch ID — have largely resolved themselves within a week. App developers didn't receive the SDK until a week or two before launch, which explains the initial gaps, but the most popular apps were updated quickly. Touch ID has been a non-issue for him after enrolling multiple fingers.

The real problems are software bugs that Apple needs to patch. Picture-in-picture FaceTime doesn't work on the inner screen, and pulling down a notification to reply inline also fails on the inner screen — both features that work fine on a standard iPhone. He expects software updates to fix these, though he flags Apple's slow update cadence as a structural concern.

On usage, Gurman says he's on the inner screen roughly 75% of the time and would never go back to a non-foldable iPhone. The outer screen, which reviewers were skeptical of, he finds perfectly usable for quick interactions and calls.

MacBook Pro

The new MacBook Pro uses the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips from the March release but drops from 4.7 pounds to 4 pounds. New additions include a touchscreen, OLED display, and Dynamic Island. Gurman is skeptical that touch will see heavy use — Apple spent two decades arguing against it and has done nothing to address the ergonomics problem they themselves raised — but treats it as table stakes rather than innovation. The OLED is the more meaningful upgrade. He also notes the return of the illuminated Apple logo on the lid, which he suspects may be enabled by the thinner tandem OLED panel.

Next chip generation, M7 Pro and M7 Max, is expected toward the end of next year.

M&A leadership shakeup

The more consequential Apple development, which Gurman broke a few weeks ago, is that Apple replaced its head of M&A. Adrian Parika, who ran M&A under Eddy Cue, has been moved into a broader services business role — partly as part of succession planning as Cue eventually approaches retirement, with Oliver Schusser as a likely co-successor on the content and music side.

But the harder push came from John Ternus and the hardware engineering team, who have long complained that Apple's M&A function does essentially nothing. The pattern has been small acqui-hires that go unannounced, while larger strategic targets — Sonos, Ring, Nest-style acquisitions — never happen. Gurman says the hardware team's frustration is chronic and that Ternus wanted new leadership who would actually move.

Whether Apple will pursue something like Instinct (valued at over $30 billion) is still an open question, but Gurman argues the odds are meaningfully higher now than they were three months ago.