iPhone 18 Pro Teardown Reveals Brilliant Upgrades And Costly Repair Traps

Apple and its retail partners are taking are accepting orders on the new iPhone 18 series and it took the folks at iFixIt all of two nanoseconds to put one of the models under the knife for a proper teardown. In doing so, we get to see the high-end guts of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, the brilliant engineering that went into the flagships, and some potent repair traps that could potentially be a big expense.

The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are powered by Apple's custom A20 silicon that is built by TSMC on a cutting-edge 2-nanometer manufacturing process. To harness that power, Apple retooled the cooling scheme—the custom system-on-chip (SoC) is mounted on the outside of the logic board for a direct thermal path, connecting directly to a new and improved vapor chamber that spans almost the entire body of the phone.

That, along with other key upgrades, gave the teardown gurus at iFixit "plenty to admire inside the iPhone Pro and Pro Max," though they also note "some uncomfortable repair tradeoffs," one of which is the variable aperture camera.

Getting inside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max still requires a special pentalobe screwdriver. Removing the back panel is relatively easy, but there is not much you can access from that alone. Instead, getting to electronic organs means going through the screen again, which is both fragile and expensive. It's also glued down tight, making it tricky just to get inside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max.

The good news is, once you successfully remove the display panel, accessing other parts gets easier. That includes the variable aperture, which is modular and "relatively easy to access."

"Aside from our complaints about the screen (are you interested yet?), we’re glad to report it’s painless to swap out a main camera module on both the 18 Pro and Pro Max," iFixIt says.

In the teardown, we get an up close and personal view of the camera assembly. A variable aperture camera in a smartphone is far from new, but the teardown shows us some of the "smart engineering and thoughtful design" that Apple brought to the table, such as half a dozen overlapping polymer composite leaf-like blades. each of which is roughly as thin as a human hair.

While accessing the camera gets easier once you get past the initial boss level (the display), performing a DIY repair is another story.

"The tolerances are tight, the glues are gummy. We’re reluctant to call a repair 'impossible', but this is about as close as it gets. That means any damage to your main camera will probably mean replacing the whole assembly, which is bound to be expensive," the site says.

Same goes for the battery, which is a part that users are more likely to want to replace over time. While it should be routine by now, getting to the battery also means navigating past the glue-down display. In three out of four different attempts, iFixIt cracked the plastic frame. The battery itself, however, is easy to remove and swap out, should you get that far.

That's pretty much the theme for a lot of the parts. In the end, the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max earned a provisional 7 out of 10 repairability score. Check out the full teardown for all of the gory details.