Summary

iFixit’s teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max finds a highly compact six-blade variable-aperture camera, a screw-held battery tray and a larger cooling system. The phones receive a provisional 7/10 repairability score, with screen removal creating the main repair concern.

iFixit’s teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max reveals a technically intricate variable-aperture main camera, a larger cooling system and a battery tray secured with screws. It also identifies a repair trade-off: reaching the battery requires removing the display, and the display’s surrounding plastic frame broke or separated in three of the four phones iFixit opened.

The teardown, published on September 20, 2026, gives both models a provisional repairability score of 7 out of 10. The score reflects useful modular components, but also the risk and labour involved in opening the phone from the front.

Contents

A tiny variable aperture with limited practical gains

The iPhone 18 Pro’s main camera is built around six overlapping polymer-composite aperture blades. Each blade is about as thin as a human hair, and the mechanism uses magnetism to open and close the aperture. The blades move around pins and slots while maintaining an almost circular opening.

The camera app provides four aperture settings: ƒ/1.48, ƒ/1.8, ƒ/2.8 and ƒ/4.0. At ƒ/1.48, the opening is 4.6 millimetres across. The widest setting allows about 7.3 times more light to reach the sensor than ƒ/4.0, but the phone’s small sensor and 6.8-millimetre focal length limit the amount of background blur available compared with a dedicated camera.

iFixit’s comparison images showed visible differences between the settings. The background became softer at wider apertures, but remained sufficiently sharp for objects such as toolkits to stay legible. The teardown therefore treats the feature as a modest photographic adjustment rather than a substitute for the depth-of-field effects of a larger camera system.

The mechanism is difficult to service as an individual assembly. Removing its lens cover caused the blades to separate, and reassembling the tightly toleranced parts requires specialised tools and technique. The complete camera module is modular and relatively accessible, so replacing the whole assembly is more practical than repairing a single blade. iFixit notes that Apple had not yet released parts for the iPhone 18 Pro camera when the teardown was published; the iPhone 17 Pro camera assembly cost $249, providing a reference for why a more complex replacement could be expensive.

The battery is easier to replace after the screen is removed

The phones retain a metal battery tray held down by screws. Once the tray is accessible, it can be removed with the battery, avoiding the adhesive typically used to secure a battery directly inside a phone. The cell itself remains attached to the tray with electrically releasable adhesive.

The eSIM version of the iPhone 18 Pro battery is labelled 16.76 Wh, or 4,288 mAh. The Pro Max battery is labelled 21.751 Wh, or 5,567 mAh. Physical-SIM models have smaller batteries, according to the teardown.

The main drawback is the route to the tray. The back glass opens relatively easily, but the battery is not accessible from that side; the screen must be removed first. The display panels in iFixit’s teardown continued to work, but the white plastic frame around them cracked or pulled away in three of four openings. That frame is part of the display assembly, so new perimeter adhesive cannot restore damaged plastic or guarantee a flush seal.

One display came apart intact, and iFixit says the four-phone sample is too small to establish a failure rate. Heating conditions, adhesive strength, removal technique or differences in the plastic could have affected the results. The observation nevertheless makes screen removal the central repair concern in the teardown.

Cooling improves while board access becomes harder

The A20 Pro system-on-chip has moved to the outside of the logic-board sandwich, with memory positioned beside it rather than stacked above it. This creates a more direct thermal path to the cooling hardware. A conformable thermal interface material sits between the chip and a vapor chamber, which spreads heat across a larger area through evaporation, condensation and capillary return of its working fluid.

Apple specifies the new vapor chamber’s surface area as three times larger than before. iFixit found that it extends across much of the phone’s body and works with the aluminium enclosure to provide a substantially larger cooling system.

The layout change makes some board-level repairs more difficult. NAND storage is now inside the logic-board sandwich, so reaching it requires separating board layers before work on the storage chips can begin. That adds heat, labour and another opportunity for damage during repairs. The distinction is also relevant to data recovery because the iPhone’s data protection relies on encryption, meaning storage cannot simply be transplanted as a shortcut to recovering data.

The teardown also shows an infrared Face ID camera positioned beneath the display, while the selfie camera and infrared dot projector remain in the central opening. Above the infrared camera, gaps in the OLED pixel pattern allow infrared light through. The effect is much less visible to the naked eye than under a microscope, reducing the hardware that must be hidden in the Dynamic Island area.

Sources