iFixit, the company known for completely tearing apart just about every product and device it can, has fully disassembled a brand new iPhone 18 Pro. The goal is to understand how all the parts fit together and find ways to fix anything that might break.
In the company’s post and teardown video, iFixit showed off how it took apart the latest iPhone, and what people who may someday need to fix theirs should look out for.
It gave the iPhone 18 Pro a repair rating of 7/10, citing easy-to-remove camera and battery assemblies. This matches the rating it gave the iPhone 17 Pro in 2025. That doesn’t mean the iPhone repair process is simple.
The Achilles heel of the iPhone 18 Pro may be a new feature: a variable aperture lens in the phone’s main 48-megapixel camera. It is the first variable aperture in an iPhone (though not the first in a smartphone). It uses six rotating aperture blades the width of a human hair to allow for different apertures for photo and video.
Courtesy of iFixit
The problem with the aperture is that Apple is introducing moving parts—therefore more parts that might need repair. Given the size and intricacy of how the blades are positioned, iFixit called trying to fix the individual blades an almost-impossible task. That means if the camera does break, you’d probably have to replace the full camera assembly. That will undoubtedly be pricier than paying for individual pieces. Luckily, the assembly itself proved easy enough to remove.
A stickier situation is repairing the iPhone 18 Pro’s battery, which requires prying open the glued-on screen. Once that is removed, though, the battery isn’t glued down but secured by screws, so it’s simpler to extract.
All in all, the iPhone 18 Pro is about as straightforward to repair as it has been for a few years—not a totally easy fix, but one with some tangible improvements. This comes after Apple’s long, contentious relationship with repair advocates, which made it a target of European Union legislation to make its products easier to fix.
Apple introduced a self-repair program in 2021. It got off to a bumpy start as the company withheld or made it difficult to access certain tools. After pressure from US state lawmakers, Apple made it slightly easier to repair its phones and eventually introduced a repair assistant to help guide users through the repair process. Still, just this year, the ownership advocacy group PIRG gave the iPhone 17 a D- rating for its repairability.
