Apple’s Foldable iPhone Uses Its Hinge to Help Manage Heat
Has turned a design challenge in its foldable iPhone into part of its cooling strategy: the iPhone Duo’s hinge contains a flexible graphite pipe
Apple has turned a design challenge in its foldable iPhone into part of its cooling strategy: the iPhone Duo’s hinge contains a flexible graphite pipe intended to help manage heat. The detail emerged as company engineers discussed how they adapted the A20 Pro chip for a phone with two screens.
In an interview with PCMag, Dan Murray, Apple’s vice president of silicon engineering, and Banafsheh Barabadi, the company’s senior manager of thermal product design, described the chip’s architecture and the Duo’s added hardware. The device uses a version of the A20 Pro that includes a second display engine, allowing its inner and outer screens to operate at the same time.
Two displays, a different thermal problem
A foldable phone gives thermal engineers a different set of constraints from a conventional handset. Apple’s solution, as described in the report, makes use of the hinge rather than treating it only as a mechanical component: a flexible graphite pipe runs through it as part of the cooling system.
The A20 Pro also powers the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Apple designed the chip with all three phones in mind, but the Duo’s configuration adds support for simultaneous screen use. Murray said the company also worked to maintain a smooth experience across the displays as CPU and graphics performance increased.
That combination matters because the Duo must run two displays while fitting its components into a folding design. The hinge’s flexible structure offers Apple a place to incorporate thermal management without giving up the movement the device needs to open and close.
A 2-nanometer chip at the center
The A20 Pro is Apple’s first iPhone processor made using a 2-nanometer process. The technology first appeared in the company’s M6 chip for the Mac mini in August, according to the source material.
Apple has not, in the details provided, disclosed specific cooling performance figures or explained how much heat the graphite pipe can move. The engineers’ comments instead offer a glimpse of how the company is addressing the engineering demands of a foldable phone: pairing a chip variant tailored to two screens with a cooling component built into the hinge.
The next measure will be how that design performs in everyday use, particularly when both displays and the processor are working hard.
Source: 9to5mac.com
