As consumer technology has become more complex over time, it has tended to become correspondingly more difficult to repair: miniaturisation has made components fiddlier and more intricately entwined and concealed. With this in mind, it would be natural to expect the iPhone Air, Apple’s thinnest ever smartphone, to be among its most repair-unfriendly devices. But a surprising new teardown of the device indicates that this is not the case.
In a video published this weekend, iFixit awards the iPhone Air 7/10 on its repairability scale and some broadly positive comments on the ease with which the site’s experts were able to get inside and disassemble the ultra-slim handset. It also notes that counterintuitively, “thinner can actually be more repairable because we don’t have to dig through multiple layers for basic repairs.”
Most of the teardown proceeds smoothly. Some internal elements have moved, such as the logic board “spilling partially into the raised camera plateau and making room for that gigantic battery,” but once repairers become familiar with the new layout (and with Apple’s repair manuals), this won’t present any additional obstacles. And crucially, the company has “retained the dual-entry system that provides near immediate access to the battery through the back glass and also makes screen repairs pretty easy.”
The dual-entry system, introduced in 2022, enables repairers to get into an iPhone either through the front or the back. As we noted at the time, “The internal components for the iPhone 14 are all mounted onto a new midframe that lets users replace a broken screen or cracked back—two of the most common iPhone repairs—without needing to disassemble the entire phone.” This is obviously a great help in helping repairers to avoid having to wade through components to get to the thing they care about.
When iFixit tore down the iPhone 16e earlier this year, the site complained that the USB-C port was very difficult to remove and replace. The USB-C port on the iPhone Air presents some similar issues; it can be removed as a modular piece, which is good, but it has an attached cable that runs up the left side of the chassis and seems tricky to extricate.
There were a few other headaches. Apple’s proprietary pentalobe screws came in for the usual criticism, and it proved difficult to remove the rear-facing camera–so much so that iFixit’s expert decided to go and work on something else and come back to it. But other than these issues, the teardown was relatively straightforward.
One last point of interest comes when the titanium has been completely removed, and the teardowner decided to do an impromptu bend test on that part alone. Without the rest of the phone there to provide additional resistance, the frame does yield to hand strength alone, but the interesting thing is where it gave way: not in the middle, where the tester would be exerting the most leverage, but at one end. And it proves, after checking with a microscope, that the titanium frame is separated into four sections and therefore has very slight weak spots close to the corners.
“With Apple, our concern is parts pairing and software locks,” iFixit concluded the teardown, “though in recent years that has been getting better. Our initial tests suggests that parts pairing is still there but it might not be the repair boogeyman of years past. Pair that with Apple’s recent commitment to release spare parts and day-one manuals and we’re left with a fairly modular smartphone earning a provisional score of 7/10.”
Where does 7/10 sit on the scale? It’s decent, and I’m pretty sure it’s the joint-highest score an iPhone has ever received. All of the 15- and 16-series iPhones got 7/10; most of the iPhones before then scored 6/10. It’s also good by the standards of the industry at large: the Fairphone 5 scored 10/10 back in 2023, but that’s very unusual; the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro each got 5/10 last year, the Pixel Fold just 3/10, Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra 4/10, and so on. Read more scores here.
Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld
David has been writing about technology for well over two decades, and got on board the Apple hype train when covering the original iPhone launch in 2007. He is an enthusiastic Apple Watch evangelist and feels that the HomePod is misunderstood.