Skip the upgrade? iPhone 18 Pro aperture about as unrepairable as it gets, iFixit finds

iFixit has torn down the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max and found both wanting on repairability.

Fiddly mechanical bits around the new camera, and a repeated design choice forcing internal repairs to go through a screen with a potentially fragile frame, led the iFixit team to conclude that, even with some improvements, Apple’s latest iPhones come with uncomfortable repairability tradeoffs.

"This year’s updated camera is a good place to start," iFixit director of sustainability Elizabeth Chamberlain stated in the teardown review.

"What does its new mechanism buy you, and how difficult and expensive will repairs be if one tiny blade gets stuck?” The answers to those questions are "not much" and "very", based on what iFixit found.

The iPhone 18 Pro series’ main camera has an aperture made of six tiny blades, each about as thick as a human hair, according to iFixit.

The tolerances are so fine and the mechanism so fiddly that iFixit said: "We’re reluctant to call a repair 'impossible', but this is about as close as it gets." "Any damage to your main camera will probably mean replacing the whole assembly, which is bound to be expensive," Chamberlain said.

That’s not new; iPhone camera assemblies have long been a single replaceable unit, but they’re not cheap.

"Apple hasn’t released parts yet, but the camera assembly for the 17 Pro is $249, and the variable aperture will only up that cost." It’s not even clear if the component will be more than a one-off experiment that gets dropped in future models due to the fact that any moving parts only make repairs harder.

"Samsung tried it and dropped it, citing ‘limited functional benefit at smartphone camera levels,’ and we basically agree," Chamberlain said.

As iFixit notes, the aperture doesn’t do that much for picture quality because even at its widest the opening is still small, while the tiny sensor and short focal length limit the amount of background blur compared with a larger dedicated camera.

Pictures included in the teardown review demonstrate this, showing that the wider aperture has only a limited effect on depth of field and background blur.

"This isn’t the signature wide aperture heavy bokeh look," Chamberlain noted.

Scratchgate, meet framegate? As was the case with the iPhone 17 Pro, the 18 Pro series' battery sits in a screwed-in metal tray and is relatively easy to replace - a big plus considering it’s one of the most likely bits to need swapping out.

Unfortunately, getting to it still requires going through the screen, and therein lies the problem: iFixit damaged the plastic frame that holds the screen in place in three of its four teardowns.