A teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro uncovered a potential repair issue around the display, with the plastic frame cracking on three of the four phones iFixit opened.
The damage occurred while removing the screen, a routine step required for many iPhone repairs.
Other teardowns haven’t reported the same problem, and Apple has used a similar plastic frame around the display since the iPhone 15 Pro, so it’s too early to know whether this is isolated to those units or something repair technicians will encounter more widely.
One possible explanation is the iPhone 18 Pro’s redesigned cooling system. Heat is normally applied to the display to soften the adhesive before removal, but the larger vapor chamber may be drawing some of that heat away and leaving the plastic frame more brittle.
If the frame cracks, the display may not sit completely flush when the phone is reassembled. That could also make it harder to restore the original seal protecting the phone from water.
For now, the iPhone 18 Pro has received a provisional repairability score of 7 out of 10 while further testing is carried out and more devices are repaired.
The new camera is considerably more complicated
Opening the phone also provides a much closer look at the variable aperture Apple introduced with the iPhone 18 Pro.
The main camera uses six tiny blades that physically open and close inside the lens, changing the aperture depending on the shooting conditions.
Electromagnets control those blades independently of the optical image stabilization system, which uses a similar mechanism to move the camera sensor.
The added hardware also introduces another potential point of failure. One of the aperture blades came loose during disassembly, showing just how small and delicate the mechanism is.
Repairing an individual blade is unlikely to be practical. If the aperture mechanism fails, replacing the entire main camera assembly would likely be the more realistic repair.
Face ID now sees through the display
Apple has also changed how Face ID is packaged on the iPhone 18 Pro.
The infrared camera now sits underneath the OLED panel rather than inside the Dynamic Island. To let infrared light reach the sensor, Apple removes every other row of pixels in the display section directly above it.
An IR-pass filter beneath the OLED blocks visible light while allowing the infrared system to work through the screen. The regular selfie camera and infrared dot projector remain inside the smaller Dynamic Island cutout.
The arrangement reduces how much hardware needs to occupy the visible opening without requiring Apple to move the entire Face ID system beneath the display.
A20 Pro gets a new cooling path
The other major internal change is how Apple packages the A20 Pro chip and its memory.
Instead of stacking the memory directly on top of the processor, Apple places the two side by side. That moves the memory out of the processor’s thermal path and lets the A20 Pro make more direct contact with the vapor chamber.
That chamber now stretches across much more of the phone’s interior, with Apple saying it has three times the surface area of the cooling system used in the iPhone 17 Pro.
Elsewhere, the repair story is more familiar. The glue-free battery tray and modular camera assemblies carry over from last year, while accessing the USB-C port still requires removing much of the phone’s internals. Most major repairs also continue to begin by removing the display.
