The iPhone 18 Pro teardown puts Face ID's infrared camera under the displayThe iPhone 18 Pro teardown puts Face ID's infrared camera under the display

A teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro published on Friday 18 September shows the infrared camera used by Face ID sitting beneath the screen rather than inside the Dynamic Island.

The video came from the YouTube channel REWA Technology and was picked up the same day by MacRumors, iClarified and AppleInsider. The camera now sits under the display in the top-left corner, and the pixels directly above it carry a special pattern that lets infrared light pass through. MacRumors reports that the area looks fairly normal at typical viewing angles. iClarified adds two details the other accounts leave out: the repositioned camera sits farther from the rest of the front camera module than before, and it is connected by three separate cables. This is the mechanism behind a change Apple has been advertising since 9 September, a Dynamic Island that is physically smaller on both the iPhone 18 Pro and the Pro Max.

The unit in the video is a physical-SIM model, which matters for the battery figure. MacRumors and iClarified both give it as 4,056 mAh, and iClarified puts that at roughly 1.7 per cent more than the cell in the iPhone 17 Pro. The eSIM-only versions sold in the United States, Canada, Japan and several other markets use a larger pack, so the number is a floor rather than the headline. REWA also noted a larger battery connector, which it suggests may relate to faster charging, a multi-layer flex cable, and a change of battery supplier.

On cooling, the teardown shows the A20 Pro moved to the surface of the motherboard so that it makes direct contact with the vapour chamber through a new thermal pad material. Apple's own product page claims the next-generation vapour chamber has three times the surface area of its predecessor, and that together with more thermally conductive materials and the A20 Pro design it delivers up to 40 per cent better sustained performance than the iPhone 17 Pro. Apple's specifications page describes the chip as a 6-core CPU with two super cores and four efficiency cores, and a 7-core GPU with Neural Accelerators.

What Apple does not say

Neither Apple's iPhone 18 Pro page nor its specifications page states that the infrared camera has moved under the display. The specifications describe Face ID as enabled by TrueDepth technology in the Center Stage front camera and give no placement at all. The marketing page offers a redesigned Dynamic Island that shows up to three Live Activities at once, which is the result. The cause is only in the teardown, and it is the more interesting of the two.

What it does to a repair

REWA's own conclusion was that the phone has become harder to fix. The relocated infrared camera cutout is described as a new challenge for aftermarket display manufacturers, since a replacement panel now has to reproduce an infrared-transparent pixel region in exactly the right place. Inside, the NAND storage and the power management IC are sandwiched between motherboard layers that have to be separated to reach either. A logic EEPROM chip on the surface has lost its shield, leaving it more exposed to physical damage. Against that, the charging port flex has been reduced from two cables to one, and REWA found no major changes to the frame or back cover structure.

Our take

Apple shipped its first under-display sensor on an iPhone and did not announce it. That is the story, and the omission is not an oversight. A company that has spent three years selling the Dynamic Island as a feature rather than a compromise cannot easily say out loud that it has started dismantling it, because doing so concedes the direction of travel and invites the obvious question about when the rest follows. So the phone is sold on a smaller island and the engineering that produced it is left for a repair channel on YouTube to find.

It is also worth being precise about what has and has not moved, because the coverage is looser than the hardware. One sensor is now under the glass. Face ID is a system, and its flood illuminator and dot projector are still in the cutout, which is why there is still a cutout. The correct reading of this teardown is not that Apple has solved under-display Face ID; it is that Apple has proved out the hardest optical part of it, infrared transmission through an active pixel region, on a shipping product at volume. That is a materially bigger deal than a few millimetres of island, and it is the reason to expect the cutout to keep shrinking rather than to disappear in one step.

The repair consequence is the part we would watch. Moving a Face ID sensor behind the panel puts it on the wrong side of the most commonly replaced component in the phone. Every cracked screen on an iPhone 18 Pro is now a job that has to preserve or correctly reproduce an infrared window, and none of the reporting so far establishes whether a third-party panel can do that and keep Face ID working. That is the open question, nobody has answered it, and we are not going to guess at it. What can be said is that the aftermarket has historically solved harder problems than this one and has generally needed a year to do it.

For anyone shipping an app, the practical change is small but real, and it is geometry. The island moved and shrank on both Pro sizes, and a layout that hard-codes offsets around where it used to be will look wrong on the phone that went on sale this week. Safe area insets have been the correct answer to this since 2017 and they are the correct answer again; the point is simply that this is the year the value changed. The other half is that three simultaneous Live Activities is now the advertised behaviour, so an app that assumed its own activity would be the visible one is making an assumption Apple has stopped supporting.