The iPhone 18 Pro display frame broke on three of the four units iFixit openedThe iPhone 18 Pro display frame broke on three of the four units iFixit opened

iFixit published its teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max on 20 September 2026, and gave both a provisional repairability score of 7 out of 10.

The provisional marking matters more than the number. iFixit says the score is held open while it waits for parts, runs further tests and watches one finding in particular: the plastic frame that surrounds the display cracked or separated on three of the four phones its team opened. That is a new failure. 9to5Mac notes that Apple has used the same plastic display frame since the iPhone 15 Pro and that other teardowns published this week did not hit it. iFixit is careful about what four devices can prove, writing that four phones are "too few to establish a failure rate".

Three possible causes are named and none is settled: variation in the strength of the adhesive, differences in how the technician applies heat, or the phone's improved cooling pulling heat away from the seam faster than the heating pad can soften the glue there. Because the cause is unknown and nobody has shown the failure repeats, iFixit has not yet let it pull the score down. The consequence if it does repeat is described plainly: a cracked frame can leave the display sitting less than flush after reassembly, which puts the phone's water resistance in question.

What the teardown found inside

The variable aperture, the headline camera change on this generation, turns out to be the part of the phone nobody will repair. iFixit counts six blades driven by electromagnets, operating independently of the optical image stabilisation system that works the same way. One of those blades flew out of the lens stack during disassembly. iFixit's judgement is that very few enthusiasts anywhere will have the tools or the technique to put one back, so a stuck aperture means replacing the whole main camera assembly, a part that on the iPhone 17 Pro costs 249 dollars.

MacRumors adds a detail the video does not dwell on: the NAND flash now sits inside the dual-layer logic board rather than on its surface, which makes any repair or data recovery that needs storage access harder to reach. The USB-C port is a similar story in a different place. It is modular in principle, but its flex cable runs up the side of the phone behind screws, adhesive and other components, so replacing a port means taking most of the phone apart first.

The teardown also settles the battery figures for the eSIM-only models: 4,288 mAh in the iPhone 18 Pro, against 4,252 mAh in the iPhone 17 Pro, and 5,567 mAh in the iPhone 18 Pro Max, against 5,088 mAh last year. That is a rise of under one per cent on the smaller phone and about nine per cent on the larger one. eSIM-only hardware is what Apple sells in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait; everywhere else keeps a SIM tray, and those capacities differ. What has not changed is the good news: the battery still sits in a screwed-in tray rather than under adhesive, and the camera assemblies remain modular.

Our take

A provisional score is an unusual thing for iFixit to publish, and it is the most useful part of this teardown. The organisation has spent years being criticised for scoring phones on the day they arrive, before anyone knows how the design behaves at volume. Marking this one open, naming the specific thing that would move it, and saying out loud that four units cannot establish a rate is the right way to report an anomaly you cannot yet explain. It also means the 7 out of 10 should not be quoted as settled, and we would not quote it as settled.

The display frame is worth watching for a reason that has nothing to do with home repair. If the cause is the phone's own thermal design, as one of iFixit's three hypotheses suggests, then it will show up in authorised repair channels as well, on the same heating equipment, with the same adhesive. That is not a DIY problem. It is a screen replacement that leaves a water resistance rating nobody can verify afterwards, and the person paying for it will not be told which of the four outcomes they got. We would expect an answer from repair volumes long before anyone gets one from a teardown.

The aperture is the more interesting long-term signal. Apple has added a mechanically actuated part to the camera stack, and mechanical parts are the ones that wear. Everything else in an iPhone camera either works or does not; six electromagnet-driven blades have a middle state where they stick, and the fix for that middle state is a camera module replacement priced like a small phone. Nobody yet knows the failure rate, because the hardware is a fortnight old. The point is that a category of repair exists now that did not exist last year, and the only available response to it is the most expensive one.

For anyone building camera features, the practical reading is that the aperture is a moving part you should not assume stays healthy across a device's life. Nothing in Apple's APIs reports a mechanically failing aperture, and nothing in this teardown suggests one is coming. If your app depends on a specific aperture behaviour rather than on the image that comes back, treat that as a preference rather than a guarantee, and make sure the fallback path is the one you have actually tested.