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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Every repair starts with taking the display out.
- Battery repair is easy — once you’re inside the handset.
- Cooling has been improved to help eliminate hotspots.
While Apple does a marvelous job of weaving a story around a new product, it’s not until we get a teardown that we really get to see the literal nuts and bolts. And it just happens that a hot-off-the-production-line iPhone 18 Pro has landed in the hands of the best teardown experts on the planet — the folks over at iFixit.
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And once again, it’s a mixed bag of tech wonderment and new repair headaches.
Variable aperture brings new headaches
The first bit of wonderment I was interested in seeing how it ticked was the new variable-aperture lens. Having taken apart lenses for film, DSLR, and mirrorless cameras — with a mixture of success and failure — I knew that this would be incredibly small.
And small is what we have here.
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The iris consists of six tiny overlapping magnetically operated “polymer composite” leaf-like blades that are the same thickness as a human hair.
And just as with big lenses, the biggest enemy of this sort of mechanism is going to be dirt, dust, and moisture. And because of its small size and tight tolerances, it’s incredibly vulnerable to being gummed up.
The iFixit team, rather optimistically, says they are “reluctant to call a repair impossible,” but I’m here to tell you that touching this will almost certainly require a new camera module.
Over the years, I’ve replaced a lot of camera lens covers on iPhones, and a problem I foresee is that this sort of damage will let dirt, dust, schmoo, and other contaminants get at the delicate components, causing further damage.
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Break a lens cover — which I can buy for about $10 — and you’ll be looking at replacing the whole lens assembly. And while Apple hasn’t yet released parts for the iPhone 18, a non-aperture camera assembly for the 17 Pro is $249.
Replacing the battery is easy – once the display is out
Take perfect care of your new iPhone, and within a few years, you’ll still be looking at replacing the battery. And it’s always been a bit hit-and-miss whether a new iPhone release makes battery repairs easier or harder.
The iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max is both.
The bad news is that in order to replace the battery, you’ll have to go through the front. And that means there’s a real risk of damaging the display or tearing a ribbon cable. I, along with pretty much every repairer I’ve talked to, would prefer not to have to remove a display because a small chip or hidden crack can become a big, obvious crack, and people then start pointing fingers.
If you’re going to try this repair, you’ll need heat (iFixit said they heated the iPhone at 158°F/70°C for 15 minutes and then at 162°F/72°C for another 10 minutes, which is a lot), copious amounts of isopropyl alcohol to soften the adhesive, and a lot of patience.
And possibly a new display.
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Once the screen is off, the battery is held in a metal tray and secured with 13 tiny screws, just as it was in last year’s iPhone. This is the easy bit, so if you avoid breaking the display and mangling the display frame too much, it’s downhill from there.
Better cooling, but it makes data recovery harder
As chipset speeds and overall performance increase, so does the amount of heat that needs to be dissipated. And that heat needs to leave the iPhone without causing the person holding it to panic.
For the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple has taken the cooling present in last year’s hardware and made it larger. The vapor chamber is three times larger and covers almost all of the back of the iPhone, a move that allows more heat to be shifted without creating uncomfortable — and possibly alarming — hotspots.
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But every upside has a downside. Here, the downside is that reaching the circuit board requires digging through multiple layers. While not many people will need to do circuit-board-level surgery, it’s the sort of thing that data recovery specialists will need to do.
Overall repairability
iFixit has given the iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max a repairability score of 7 out of 10. It’s a shame that every repair starts with taking out the display. No matter how experienced you are, there’s a chance of a breakage, and at a minimum, that’ll add $150 to $200 to the repair cost.
Other than that, Apple has clearly put a lot of effort into the cooling and beefed it up to not only accommodate more heat but also dissipate it better without creating hotspots.
