This guy independently tested a Flip 3, getting authentic humans to perform the folds rather than an automated test rig, and the hinge was the first component to give up after 418,500 cycles with the display itself surviving.
The 200,000 figure isn't super meaningful unless they report average folds to failure and standard deviation.
From that article, it could be that they test to 200,000 folds because at that point 99.6% have failed, and the 50% failure rate might be at 100,000. Or 20,000. Or 190,000.
I don't think they're saying that 100% of phones will last to 200,000 folds. That would be a bold claim indeed.
If it's 0% failure at 200k folds, that means the 200k is about six standard deviations away from the mean, so I think (statistics gurus please correct) that says the average device will last for 1.7m folds.
Product lifetime is generally modeled using the Weibull distribution[1]. Depending on the parameters, a normal distribution is a reasonable approximation. Without data on the parameters, and just discussing whether "tested to 200,000 folds" means that every device will survive 200k folds, I think it's fair to use a normal distribution.
Agreed that they probably expect some percentage of RMAs. In fact, I'd argue that "tested to 200k folds" means that 200k gets them enough failures to model the lifetime distribution, so the average lifetime is probably considerably less than 200k.
That's the same Fold that everyone had to RMA repeatedly due to display failures. The story visited the HN front page at least once, and then Samsung did absolutely nothing to fix it.
I'm sorry, but I don't trust anyone claiming they've solved it until they've proven after 2 or 3 gens that there are no elevated failure rates.
Maybe this Google phablet will be the first that solved it, but I can't press X any harder for doubt.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14136/samsung-galaxy-fold-can...