iFixit’s latest teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max highlights a mix of repair-friendly design choices and highly delicate, complex components such as the variable-aperture camera, emphasizing both technological advancements and repair difficulties.
iFixit’s latest teardown suggests the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max remain among the easier flagship phones to open, but one of Apple’s most ambitious components is also one of the least serviceable. The repair site gave the phones a provisional repairability score of 7 out of 10, praising the modular approach to several internal parts while warning that the display remains the main weak point in a repair.
The centrepiece of the new models is the variable-aperture main camera, and iFixit found a mechanism built from six overlapping polymer-composite blades inside a module that occupies roughly the same space as the iPhone 17 Pro’s camera. According to Mac Observer, the system uses electromagnets to move the blades across a range from ƒ/1.48 to ƒ/4.0. The parts are extremely small, and the tight tolerances, slots and pins needed to keep them aligned make component-level repair highly impractical. In one teardown, a blade reportedly came loose during disassembly, underlining how delicate the assembly is.
That said, the camera module itself is modular, which makes replacement easier than a full component rebuild. iFixit said that is a meaningful advantage for repair shops, even if the mechanism is close to impossible to fix at the blade level. Tom’s Guide’s review of the phones also points to the camera system as one of the biggest upgrades, alongside the A20 Pro chip and improved battery life, giving context to why Apple appears to have prioritised capability over repair simplicity.
The internal layout has also changed. MacRumors reported that the NAND storage now sits inside a dual-layer logic board, which makes storage-related work more difficult and could complicate data recovery. The same report and iFixit’s teardown both point to a larger vapour chamber and a thermal pad described as a kind of chainmail interface, intended to maintain better contact with the cooling system around the A20 Pro. iFixit also noted that the U.S. version of the iPhone 18 Pro Max does not include the C2 modem.
Other design choices are more repair-friendly. The Face ID infrared camera now sits beneath the display, with a special pixel pattern and infrared pass filter allowing it to function without a visible cut-out. MacRumors said the display still looks largely normal in everyday use, despite the hidden hardware beneath it. iFixit found that the under-display camera assembly can be removed without screws or adhesive, while the battery remains mounted in a metal tray and can be released with an electric current. The bad news is that the screen still has to come out first, and that process can damage the frame around it. Even so, the combination of a removable camera module and a screw-mounted battery tray helped keep the overall repair score relatively high.
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