iFixit iPhone Air teardown | Hacker News Reader

iFixit iPhone Air teardown

ifixit.com

360 pointszdw223 comments

> We tapped in some friends in the additive manufacturing industry, who said it wasn’t quite like any metal 3D printing they’d seen before. Their best guess is that Apple’s using a binder or aerosol jet process in addition to some after-printing machining.

I’m curious who they talked to. I’m no expert but this photo [1] looks like laser sintering. It’s got the telltale melt pools and the laser scanning direction from hatch passes

Maybe Apple has figured out economic electron beam melting at scale?

[1] https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2025/09/20111617/USBC-...

Those friends could have been managers or sales or HR. Not necessarily engineers. And to save face they are just parroting fab methods they heard in passing.

Obviously not DED or binder jetting, and anyone who knows metal printing would see that instantly. DED has the resolution of a hot glue gun, laying down thick beads of molten metal that could never produce such a fine, intricate lattice - it's built for large-scale, rapid deposition, not delicate internal structures. Binder jetting is even more of a non-starter; you're essentially gluing powder together and then sticking it in an oven to sinter. That process leaves behind a distinctly porous, slightly grainy microstructure because the particles are fused, not fully melted, which looks nothing like the smooth, continuous, and fully dense solidified strands you see in this micrograph. This image screams high-precision, localized melting, which is the exclusive domain of powder bed fusion techniques like SLM or DMLS.

This indeed does not look like any sintering MLS or otherwise surface I’ve seen which looks like this https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/0c9b8ea/2147483647...

Edit closed surface finish I’ve seen is indeed of a Laser Assisted DED here is a research published this year https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221486042...

Could it be post processed by milling?

No this isn’t a milled surface this looks like DED/DMD as you can see the individual melt pools but at a much finer scale then I’ve ever seen.

Good reference right here.

Just because Apple is using space-grade titanium (likely Ti-6Al-4V) for the new Watch case doesn’t necessarily mean the same material or process is being used for the USB-C housing. As mentioned in the video, the scratch resistance of the watch case appears to be higher than that of the USB housing. This could be due to differences in surface finishing, post-processing, microstructure, or even different base materials. Scratch resistance generally correlates with hardness, which in turn scales with yield strength of the material.

Regarding the manufacturing method, based on the sectioned images and visible layer patterns, the USB housing does appear to be additively manufactured, likely SLM or DED, not binder jetting. However, those optical images alone don’t provide enough evidence to pin the exact AM process used. The visible "fish scale" surface texture could result from either Directed Energy Deposition (DED) or Powder Bed Fusion (PBF/SLM) since fish scale morphology is a result of remelting of the previous deposited tracks. Without cross-sectional images showing the interface between the housing and the substructure, it's hard to tell whether the part was printed directly onto the assembly (DED-fashion), or printed separately (SLMEd) and then soldered on. Even some additional simple SEM images that reveals the microstructure at 50 micron scale would give more information since DED and SLM have inherently different cooling rate that gives different grain morphology and pattern in sub-micron scale.

Worth noting that while DED has advanced enough to achieve relatively fine resolution today, DED Titanium typically exhibit higher ductility and lower strength/hardness compared to PBF, due to its beta-phase dominated microstructure as opposed to the alpha dominated structure + martensitic phase in PBF. A scale bar on the optical images would’ve helped estimate melt pool size or hatch spacing, giving more insight into the process used. As it stands, we can speculate, but more detailed characterization is needed to be 100 % sure. Cheers

The video mentions a patent for the 3d printing tech. I think it's this one https://www.patentlyapple.com/2023/08/apple-inherited-a-3d-p...

To sum up, it uses an inkjet to spray binder to metal layer by layer.

Looks like spot melt laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF). Electron beam doesn’t make sense for something on a smaller scale like this; it wouldn't have the resolution. Spot melt is interesting. Renishaw is the only manufacturer I’m aware of that uses a pulsed laser vs continuous wave (and I’m not even sure if they’re still doing that for their newer machines). I would’ve guessed it would’ve been printed on a Farsoon since it’s in China. I just wish the images had scale bars to give a little more info.

Apple's own repair manual for the iPhone Air was out on day one.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/123052

It was mentioned in the video https://youtu.be/woya8vjeFpo?t=455

They even have the section for the SIM card replacement …. Which does not exist on this phone

The "SIM card issues" article is a generic troubleshooting document, not specific to this phone. (It even mentions that some iPhone models don't have SIM cards.)

but should it then even be listed there?

All the iPhones sold in India comes with SIM card slot including 17 series.

The iPhone Air, however, does not.

(Which is technically in line with you saying “17 series”, since there’s no number in the Air’s name. But your comment makes no sense unless you thought the Air was included in that, and so…)

See: https://www.telegraphindia.com/gallery/at-5-6mm-ultra-slim-i...

The US model only has eSIM. The Chinese model has dual SIM. All other regions have one SIM tray and support eSIM.

On the regular models, the iPhone Air in China will only have eSIM, along with the European models.

This is the only time I've considered sim tray removal acceptable, because there's physically no where for it to go.

Apart from all that junk space next to the camera lens.

This is such a big win for community stalwarts like the EFF who have pushed for right to repair laws.

My guess would be: it's primarily due to existing EU right to repair laws and even more so due to incoming ones.

That would be impressive from any major tech corp., but its especially so from Apple.

In other words, Apple complies with paragraph 18 of EU-Directive 2024/1799: "manufacturers are to provide access to spare parts, repair and maintenance information or any repair related software tools, firmware or similar auxiliary means."

This directive applies EU-wide for all devices sold after 31st of July 2026. Some countries have earlier deadlines, e.g. devices sold in Germany after 20th of June 2025.

I'm glad that they didn't try to delay it for the better part of a decade like they did with USB charging ports.

Yeah, this stuff needs to be plastered on billboards in Times Square.

Almost every time they do this stuff, it's because the EU is forcing them.

Do we also have board view. it sound like i'm entitled, but it's much better to replace a single IC or capacitor than replacing the entire new motherboard.

On a sidenote, youtuber jerryrigseverything tested the iPhone air and was pretty shocked at the durability of the titanium frame. Something like 170kg of pressure on the middle line of the screen was required to break the glass panel. The LCD and touchscreen were still working. I too expected the thing to break with two thumbs only.

I was impressed too, but it was “only” 98kg i think

yeah, JRE is American so the numbers displayed were LBS which is why the confusion.

My bad he mentioned both units and I probably quoted the wrong one

I think it's funny how expectation defying the Air is. Most people were assuming that being so thin would mean it's super easy to bend by hand. Zack certainly isn't a weak man and he was unable to easily bend it by hand. People have also been assuming the battery must be terribly small, but its capacity is larger than the iPhone 15 battery was and only 100 mAh smaller than the iPhone 16 battery was.

Apple has seriously good engineers to be able to make that happen in a device that's so thin.

They do have good engineers. But they’re chasing wrong goals set my management. I don’t know many people who said “man, I wish iPhone was x mm thinner”. But I do know many who say “man, I wish iPhone battery was much larger”.

And what did Apple do? Build thinner phone with an external battery pack.

And what else did Apple do? Build two “Pro” phones with even bigger batteries for these folks. Come on, let a thousand flowers bloom!

(Yeah that phrase has unfortunate Mao-era baggage, but personally I really just want the mini series back—which many also consider to have too little battery capacity—so I feel encouraged by Apple broadening the iPhone lineup.)

Seriously, it's bizarre to see this argument from people that Apple isn't caring about what people want in terms of battery life. Apple in their keynote called out that they made the Pro models slightly thicker for the sake of a larger battery! Like, why ignore the standard models of iPhone and only focus on the Air when making complaints?

These improvements could be laying the groundwork for future products. Engineering wins in this regard are almost never useless - that’s a short sighted take imo.

But I agree this iphone air as a product is kind of weird. Similar to the original macbook air maybe? Ahead of its time but a bit limited by today’s tech. A peek at the future…

It's simply utterly pointless as things stand due to the camera. They claim it's thin, but the camera makes it far thicker.

They did make the batteries bigger in the iPhone 17 phones … so they are indeed chasing the right goals.

Other users want a lighter phone (decent amount of iPhone mini fans) and that’s what the air achieves.

> I do know many who say “man, I wish iPhone battery was much larger”

This group is adequately served with an external battery pack.

A good product is judged on how well it sells. The question is less "is this fragile" and more "is this worth paying extra for" when the target audience gets it in their hands.

The batteries aren't their tech, though. See what Oppo, OnePlus, Xiaomi have been doing with Silicon Carbon.

I'm not saying they're engineering the batteries. But they did have to engineer the whole phone to fit in a very small space without making serious spec compromises. And my statement about their engineers isn't comparative to other companies. They can all have excellent engineering teams at the same time.

Silicon Carbon sucks, it's longevity is pretty bad, and most people I know keep their iPhones for a long time and expect the battery to remain high enough quality for years.

Battery life is rated in charge cycle. Having higher capacity means lower charger cycle in the same period of time.

3d printed titanium USB-C port, in a mass produced device??

3D printing is really unsuitable for mass production due to being so slow and therefore expensive.

I wonder what properties this port has that apple didn't feel they could achieve any other way?

Thinness, I would presume. Titanium is hard for tooling.

Yeah 3D printing may be bad for volume production, but CNCing a metal part is an order of magnitude worse, as you can't even batch runs together.

What. Who says you can't batch CNC?

I was thinking 5 axis, I suppose you could batch simple parts on a 3 axis mill, but that limits you a lot in terms of what you can make?

titanium is notoriously annoying to work with so for a tiny part, it might just be easier and cheaper to print.

Specifically, the tool heads need to be harder than titanium (expensive), and titanium is prone to catching fire during machining (so the work piece usually needs to be submerged during).

Nearly all tools used professionally now are harder than hard Ti alloys. HSS has been niche for decades now.

> and titanium is prone to catching fire during machining (so the work piece usually needs to be submerged during)

Using spray or mist coolant is common in machining anyway for hard materials. Also titanium fires can't be put out with water. That said Ti is not magnesium and does not burn readily: you have to be both unlucky and incompetent.

What makes tiny parts harder for titanium compared to larger ones?

It's not that tiny parts are harder for conventional, but that for 3d printing metal, the smaller it is, the faster.

this would be metal sand laser sintering, these machines have fairly large print volumes, they can probably produce 1000 pieces at a time if not more (to be fair, it's also surprising to me, I haven't seen these machines used this way, just speculating it wouldn't be bad for such a tiny piece)

The dot pattern suggests to me it's more likely some inkjet printing a resin binder onto a metal powder.

But do you have industry experience for the suggestion to mean anything?

The Apple Watch Ultra 3 also has a fully 3D printed body casing. So they’re definitely quite confident in being able to build in quantity and have stability.

Apple is kinda famous for scaling processes that are not supposed to be viable at scale.

They may be just buying out all of the worldwide (China-wide) available capacity. Perks of sitting on an impossibly large pile of cash I guess. Still, impressive.

Might (also) be a good way to expand testing and process development, similar to why they - presumably - started with the SIM ejector tool when they incorporated Liquid Metal in their processes.

For what it's worth, the Apple Watch since Series 7 has had 60GHz wireless USB communications for diagnostics, recovery, etc -- we're a few more steps closer to "portless" phones with everything they do.

3D printed mass produced shoes like Adidas 4D. There's also tons of 3D printed toys on the market like https://www.amazon.com/s?k=amazon+3d+printed+dragon

Does it reach the scale of iphone ?

FDM print is slow because it scales with number of parts. While SLA printer has constant printing time regardless of number of parts.

Not sure which method Apple uses (must be really advance one), but 3d printing can be fast if you want.

I betting $10 Apple’s foldable will be two iPhone Airs where one side has 0 bezel hinged together with extreme mechanical precision and maybe some fairy dust to make the gap when unfolded unnoticeable.

This creates a foldable with no durability issues and no “crease” problems. Also the two halves of the display could be on the outside when folded, avoiding the need for a third display and getting a rear display for free. I would buy 3 of these.

This is not what the fold will be like. The air and fold have no relation.

Having the displays on the outside when folded removes all the durability advantages of closing the phone with the screens inside.

I don't even know if that affects my opinion of whether you'll be right or not, because putting glass on the back is definitely more fragile than machining the phone out of a solid block of aluminium. Am I remembering this incorrectly? Was that the unibody MacBooks? Regardless, I found the aluminium backs a lot less fragile, but we all gave them up pretty easily for wireless charging.

Is there something equivalent to longbets.org, but for bets which are about matters that aren't important to society? I'd take you up on the bet - not because I think you're wrong, but because I think it's fun and fairly harmless gambling that is unlikely to lead to either of us developing a habit - but has easily sending small amounts of money internationally been solved yet?

I'll bet $10 it hasn't! That I can't send $10 from one country to another, without paying fees that are a significant proportion of that amount, or needing to put an unreasonable amount of effort into setting up an account with a 3rd party service or doing the transfer with that service.

And the two bets above are a bad look, so I'll also bet $20 that you can't get me doing any more gambling by the end of the day.

The reason you need to worry about the screen of a foldable is because it’s plastic. Normal phones with glass screens are plenty durable. So if you could manage to make a foldable with glass screens, it wouldn’t matter much that the screen is on the outside when it’s in your pocket.

The most popular betting website is Polymarket. Payment is via crypto. The fees aren’t super high. The typical user is more likely to lose money by making bad bets. If you don’t want to spend money, there’s Manifold.

> I'll bet $10 it hasn't! That I can't send $10 from one country to another, without paying fees that are a significant proportion of that amount

I'd take you up on that bet! I'm not sure what an envelope costs, but probably less than $0.1 if you buy more than one, then add a stamp (usually around/below $1 in most places in the world AFAIK, even for international destinations).

Please send the $10 in an envelope to Oranjerie 114, 7311 WP Apeldoorn, Netherlands whenever you can :)

Sweden - Netherland: 3.6 euros to send a letter. Sure I could fit a couple of 500 euro bills there, but the point was that you cant send money with out paying too much.

Or you can just send a SEPA transfer, probably for free.

How could I make a SEPA transfer without having any accounts? I think only banks are allowed inside the SEPA cartel :)

Normal people have accounts.

Huge swaths of the world population is unbanked, are they not "normal"?

Trivial with likes of wise.com etc

Ha! Fine, it will have to wait until I'm next near a post office with time to kill, otherwise it's not convenient. I think you'll allow that "not an unreasonable amount of effort" could imply "convenient".

I think the post offices where I am only sell the envelopes in bulk, and buying a pack will probably add an unreasonable 20% - 30% of the amount, but I'll concede that most people will probably have an envelope from a bank and a glue-stick lying around.

This is very off-topic, but sending something to an address which I can't tell is complete, without a name, has reminded me of something I find interesting.

A few years ago, my mother received a postcard from a friend who didn't have her address handy. She sent it with just my mother's name (first and last), the city, and country (New Zealand). It took some time, but it reached her! In NZ, "city" is used for some pretty small places - the population is only around 70,000. But I'm still very impressed with the effort to deliver that to her. Especially for a postcard - even internationally the postage on those is not a lot!

Hmm - I've just seen that postage is $1.55, so >15% of the amount. I'm not sure that is a reasonable fee. I'm deducting $2 from what I'm sending! Lucky there are $2 notes here.

Of course, if not stated I suppose it would be reasonable to assume international bets are are in USD, but it's close enough, and this feels like it's only just holding up anyway.

And most importantly, I think sending $8 is funnier than sending $10.

> I'll bet $10 it hasn't! That I can't send $10 from one country to another, without paying fees that are a significant proportion of that amount

It has been solved, but the hacker news hivemind hates the solution. Sending USDT on Ethereum chain costs 25 cents usually.

I'm fine with that solution, how can I store the $10 safely in that case?

Download a wallet on your phone, I guess. As long as you are not downloading unverified APKs left and right, your 10$ should be pretty safe. I can even bet a 10$ on it!

What happens if my phone gets bricked?

I guess you'll be more worried about a $200-$4000 phone over $10. If you are planning to get hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of crypto, buy a hardware wallet. They are hack proof and you can write down the seed phrase as a backup in case the wallet bricks.

If you ignore parts the transaction sure it is cheap. What can I do with USDT? no shop near me would accept it, most major digital commerce stores like Amazon won't accept it, my bank won't accept deposits in USDT.

If I have to start and end with USD which is what anyone interested in other three functions of money want, there is USD -> USDT and back to USD costs, and depending on geography there may not be cheap or legal way to make that trade, which means it is going to be far more expensive than just the $0.25 "gas" fees.

Go to a site like bitrefill and buy a gift card for any store where you want to spend it. I often buy Amazon, Uber, Apple, etc. cards from them. Pretty straightforward. Obviously they might not support any stores in your country, but they seem to have a wide reach. And they are not the only ones in the game.

I think I agree with the hacker new hivemind, but I think I formed the opinion separately. I did a few small transactions with bitcoin ages ago, and it was a huge pain. Buying the bitcoin was painful, and then I couldn't send an exact amount, it's better to receive change to a different address, and the fees weren't as cheap as I expected for small amounts.

I often hear this has been solved with additional layers, and I see that you mentioned Ethereum instead of bitcoin. Is that significantly easier? $0.25 is not bad for $10, so the fee seems fine. I'm accepting money in an envelope as a solution, and that costs more, but I'm keen to hear whether this would have been easier.

Bitcoin maximalists have purposely ruined the cheap transactions on Bitcoin (in order to sell their own centralized solution) by limiting the block size. If everything had gone according Satoshi's original plan, we would have transaction fees in cents today. That's why I mentioned Ethereum, because it's eating Bitcoin's lunch in cheap transactions and contracts.

The advantage is you can put bigger screen into your pocket. You already have one exposed display in there normally.

I think it’s a cool idea, but for there to be no crease the 0 bezel sides would have to have incredibly sharp edges. Seems like a real cutting hazard when the phone isn’t folded out (especially if the screens are still glass instead of plastic)

Unless Apple comes up with a way to have the crease still physically be there, but visually seem like it isn’t. Perhaps using a waveguide or something similar.

Apple fans were fine with the notch. If I were them would embrace the bezel and make UIs like a book with distinct left and right panes. Even embrace multi tasking and run two regular apps side by side.

This would be kind of amazing for reading ebooks, too. Turn most readers sideways (ibooks definitely included) and they tend to give you two columns of text anyway.

The last time Apple introduced a product with a moving part was the Airpods line. I think we'll see a foldable iPhone about the same time we see a touchscreen Mac.

A touchscreen Mac would compete with iPads so that's a no no.

For the foldable phone, it may just have to do with aesthetics.

All the products compete. A foldable phone already competes with iPads. iPad competes with Mac. iPad Mini competes with iPads.

What a weird argument, Apple ships tons of AirPods and MacBooks with hinges, not counting accessories like the iPad keyboard (introduced after AirPods) or display stands.

A hinged iPhone seems totally in the cards.

>> introduced

> MacBooks

Laptops have been a thing since the 80s.

That's funny, a lot of rumors are pointing to a foldable iPhone AND a touchscreen Mac https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/latest-round-of-cred...

I don’t own any AirPods, so this may be incredibly obvious to anyone who does, but what’s the moving part in them?

The hinge of the case (not the buds themselves).

Apple Vision Pro and Apple Watch both have moving parts.

They have straps, not hinges.

I’m referring to the rotating dial.

I'd argue the crown was already well-established from day 0 of Apple Watch, but you're right.

That would be an unacceptably fat foldable. Foldables are 4.1mm to 4.2mm at the head of the class and iPhone Air is 5.6mm. Double that and add a bit for folding and you're still under 9mm (acceptable) with today's leading folders, and about 12mm (not acceptable) for the hypothetical Air.

i wonder why people so obsessed with "no crease". If apple truly care about "perfect screen", they would remove the face id "notch/island" 5 generations ago.

Having both screens on the outside doesn't let you use the main cameras when folded, Apple would never do that.

> And in a fun twist, we’ve confirmed that it’s the exact same cell found in Apple’s MagSafe battery pack. You can swap between them and the phone still boots up just fine.

Are batteries no longer paired with the device? I thought that any battery replacement needs Apple's blessing via their servers, otherwise the phone will claim it's non-genuine.

I'd bet money that it's just a firmware signature check; and magsafe batteries are signed (since they're genuine).

My immediate thought was that the battery packs would be a convenient source of replacement batteries for these iPhones, because otherwise genuine Apple parts are notoriously hard to obtain.

They don't have parts for the iPhone Air yet, but Apple sells replacement parts for all their other supported devices at https://selfservicerepair.com/.

Only in a handful of countries

Starting in iOS 18 this process is self service (although it does require server-blessing and has to be done online) - there’s a built in Repair Assistant app that will guide you through the process.

Also, the phone has always functioned with an aftermarket battery, just with a warning, so the iFixit statement could still be true in that situation too.

Does iFixit still post the traditional photo-slideshow teardowns? Their videos are fine but it’s easier to study the still images.

This is under "news", not a guides. Their "service manuals" have lots of photos as you would expect from them, I think this article is just a SEO hit while they prepare the diff.

https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iPhone_16e https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Nintendo+Switch+OLED+Model+Batt...

What I think of as the classic teardown style by iFixit is not a service manual, e.g.:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+2+Tear...

This is teardown post, focusing more on commenting the design. There will be a teardown guide, which includes step by step instructions.

With that iPhone Air Mass distribution and internal component list I am very much looking forward to future iPhone Air.

SoC with TSMC A20 or A14, N2 and C2 ( I expect the two will merge into one at some point ), Tandem OLED, all with better Energy efficiency, Silicon Carbon Battery with double energy capacity. All of these tech are here or ready within next 3 - 5 years. It is more of a question of whether Apple is willing to pay for it to be mass produced.

With the energy efficiency gain and battery improvements I could see iPhone Air getting double the battery life. It would be better than even today's iPhone 17 Pro Max in 5 years time.

This opens up the door for iPhone Air Mini. I say mini but it will probably still be 5.9", but weight the same as iPhone Mini ( I assume that is something Apple will market it as ).

The only thing I wish and I dont know if it is feasible, is the Camera lans to be the same as back of the bump without much loss of photo quality. And I am willing to pay extra $100 to $200 for it. I just dont know if the tech is here in the near future.

(comment 2/2) I got the Air to solve a very specific problem: taking up less space in my hip pack.

It more than exceeded my expectations in this regard while also being _shockingly_ light.

I have not been this excited about an iPhone since the X, and I felt like the hype was warranted.

This phone is a masterpiece. It is finally a worthy successor to my Minis.

> It is finally a worthy successor to my Minis

It's much larger in every dimension that this mini lover cares about.

it is only about 10% larger in overall volume, so for somebody who is most concerned about how much space it will take up in a pack it's a pretty good option.

Yes, it's much larger. The Mini feels better in the hand, for sure.

The Air feels good in the hand, albeit in a different way.

The Air is 2mm thinner than the Mini while being only 20g heavier (which you don't feel given that the phone is larger and the weight more evenly-distributed). This, to me, is a bigger deal than having a small phone.

The weight and thickness of the Pros that came before this were big factors driving my hate for large phones. This phone's ergonomics have, so far, made interacting with its large screen very tolerable (for me).

Between this, a better virtual keyboard experience (by dint of having a bigger screen and iOS 26 improvements) and the 13 mini's aging processor (which makes its already-challenged battery life even worse), the decision to upgrade both of my Minis was effortless.

I'm interested in iPhone Air. How is the battery? How would you compare batter life to your previous phone?

it's hard to compare a new phone to a three-year-old phone because the old phone's battery has degraded, but in the two days i've had it my air is significantly better than my 14 plus, which i've never really had any complaints about.

i went to bed last night with 70% charge remaining. that included about 1.5hrs of voice calls, some texting, some doomscrolling, and a bit of youtube - a pretty normal day of phone usage for me.

Day 2 of use has been similar to my 16 Pro. Mostly music and web browsing, though with lots of screen-on time due to me tracking a flight and listening to ATC.

I so desperately miss iFixIt’s older style pure text and picture only teardowns.

This isn't a full teardown/repair guide, more a first-look video.

Agree. I dislike this trend of putting details or entire content in video format. Text is faster to consume and much more accessible.

We loved writing them, too! Traffic to the photo teardowns dropped and has been replaced by video. If you can help us figure out how to get people to pay attention to long-form articles again, we're all ears!

Thanks for your work. The photo ones are much more practical as a reference though! I would imagine for long term traffic that still counts. You can browse through them quickly and zoom in easily. I’ve been using photo teardowns often as a volunteer in a local repair café and I hope you don’t give up on them.

Small phones used to be all the rage, imagine a trend reversal and an iPhone mini built like this with a flush camera.

Oh what a dream…

This ship has sailed, 90% of the population uses their phone as their primary computing device, and wants large screens.

In fact an increasing number of people seem to want 2 large screens in their phone.

Do you really think it's 90%, in the west? Only 10% of workers are sitting in front of a computer all day?

Regardless. Apple tried, they made the 12 Mini and 13 Mini. Very few people bought it. A few million units is not interesting at Apple's scale.

People want larger batteries and screens than small phones can offer.

(I was in camp 'small phones', but gave up when my 12 Mini had its best time.)

The iPhone 13 mini is a cute little device, I really like it, but its battery life is so abysmal — can not last even a half day.

Yeah, I had exactly the same issue with my 12 Mini, even when the battery was still new.

How much are you using your phone daily to run down the battery like that? My 13 mini regularly goes a day and a half.

The 12 & 13 mini with their 5.4 inch screens are huge. The SE 2nd & 3rd generation at 4.7 is already too big. The 1st SE's 4 incher was probably a little too small, but a slightly bigger form factor combined with thinner bezels would probably allow for a screen of about 4.2-4.5 which should be perfect.

I'm pretty sure that statistic is for personal devices, not what they use at work.

I don’t know of many doing their taxes from a work computer.

I dont use my phone as my primary computing device, but I still like larger screens. My 6.7"-display phone fits nicely into my pocket, the large screen works well as my bike computer display and I like reading books with it and it also has space for more battery capacity.

> This ship has sailed, 90% of the population uses their phone as their primary computing device, and wants large screens.

Same with the camera, and that’s why the bump will exists for a long while.

I want a small phone, but in a different dimension than the one Apple is optimizing for. I don’t care if the phone is a bit chunky: I just want the height and width to be smaller. The Walkman w800 series was a fantastic size.

Still have my W800. It was a marvel at the time, still is really. The only thing that irked me what the proprietary connector - which has perished now.

I dont want an iphone air but it is so much more impressive than I would have expected. They seem to have made a really good phone.

The real question is how many parts have been serialised and impossible to replace without Apple's proprietary software? Will there be a large parts aftermarket?

I hope not.

Modern phones (especially iPhones) are worthless on the aftermarket so they're not as strong targets for theft.

(this is not to say that phone theft doesn't happen, in fact, it's pretty rampant in the UK, but they target people using their phones in the hope they're unlocked so they can be resold as entire units: components are useless).

Yeah I’m all about repairability, but I’ve found the serialization of components to be quite nice.

A Channel 4 documentary reckoned locked iPhones end up in Shenzhen. Because (according to someone they were interviewing) that is the only place that can deal with locked iPhones. People who's phones were stolen got pings from the Shenzhen area before they went dark. They showed location history for at least one.

Of course they could just be being stripped for parts, which is probably hard for most places to do at scale and Shenzhen could also deal with.

I'm sceptical that the idea of stealing while unlocked really stacks up. It seems it would be hard to keep it unlocked after an e-bike snatch. Then thief would have to stop and reset the Apple ID password before the phone locked (presumably with the access they have to the owners emails), and factory reset the phone before the owner got access to their Apple ID again.

I recall the same documentary, but I recall that Stranger Parts used to use locked boards (he lived in Schenzen) for testing, but that they were useless and could not be unlocked by anybody.

Of course I have no first hand knowledge myself- but he definitely gave me the impression that they were functionally useless aside from their components.

The fact that seemingly 90% of stolen iPhones end up pinging from Shenzhen months later seems to indicate it's the inevitable top of the pyramid for the vast majority of the stolen phone market. As you mention due to the abundance of highly sophisticated large scale reverse engineering and disassembly capability in a cat and mouse game with Apple's expanding parts serialization. Plus, maybe 1/100 victims fall prey to the various phishing or threatening harassment strategies also associated with Shehnzen pings to remove the iCloud lock giving them full resale value occasionally as additional incentive.

So despite the meme that stolen iPhones are "worthless" while locked, the presence of large buyers with demand for unlimited quantities of locked iPhones means that the fence value at the lowest level of the food chain is still more than enough to incentivize rampant theft (even if it were only like $50 to a thief for a $1200 phone, that is worth $200 to a Shehnzen buyer).

I'm making the numbers up, but the point is that even if iCloud activation lock and serialization destroys the vast majority of the phone's value it's not enough to truly discourage theft rings selling to wholesale buyers overseas. It just put the humble local neighborhood thief or opportunist reselling on eBay out of business, with the vacuum quickly filled by organized crime.

In a world where most people don't carry around cash or valuables that's the best a street level thief is going to do unless you run into the odd person with a Rolex or jewelry with rare actual pawnable value, and it's a bottomless crime of opportunity in a big city or festival/concert/etc so adds up quickly.

> activation lock

Tangentially, it is utterly trivial to completely bypass Apple MDM, in a manner that breaks nothing, and survives OS upgrades, minor and major. Just requires the right combination of three DNS names at one point of install, and no internet at another, and you will get a completely de-fanged Mac. The only time you need to repeat the process is if you completely erase the SSD.

Where is this method documented? Because if you aren't full of shit, then I'd like to pressure Apple to fix it.

I found https://github.com/assafdori/bypass-mdm and the bash script does “neuter” 3 domains via /etc/hosts editing

But no idea how stable/reliable this it.

It's unclear that it works around Apple Find My, unclear that it's executable starting with a locked device, or that it's permanent.

At this point, I've seen no evidence that FireBeyond's extraordinary claims have any merit.

What does Find My have to do with MDM?

I have Find My running on this computer (which is unlocked) now. I've upgraded from Monterey to Tahoe without issue (startup that went AWOL).

However, you touch on two things - 1) I have no idea (and doubt) that this would bypass a device that has been locked, and 2) newer versions may not be as vulnerable. This computer is an M1, and Monterey can be made to go through a full install process without internet access, as described, but newer versions will not (or they may, but I couldn't find a way to force it with Sonoma or later). That means if I do an erase, I have to do a new Monterey install, and then upgrade (but nothing untoward there, don't have to do iterative updates).

I think you're asking "what parts can be replaced without the end buyer noticing?"

You can replace almost any part on an iphone, but if it isn't an Apple part its functionality is reduced. The only people that care are people reselling iphones with substandard parts.

...and people who want healthy competition.

> The only people that care are people reselling iphones with substandard parts

So if i replace the part with perfectly good components, from other iphone, it won't complaint, right ?

Is it normal for Apple to not mention the capacity of their batteries, or are they worried about how bad the numbers will look on paper?

I'm pretty pissed at them (again). Over the last couple of years, we've seen significant gains in battery capacities for the first time in more than a decade — you can now buy “standard” thickness phones for sane amounts of money with 6-7.5 A·h batteries, and I expected to see 8 A·h shortly. Two times the capacity of just a few years ago with the same volume and for the same amount of money.

What does Apple do with these gains? Crap out a new thinner phone, of course. Now other manufacturers will follow suit, just like they did with the 3.5" jack, and we will be back to square one.

Not once do I remember thinking "I would like this phone to be thinner", yet I wish that this thing would have a bigger battery almost daily.

Thanks again, Apple.

> Is it normal for Apple to not mention the capacity of their batteries, or are they worried about how bad the numbers will look on paper?

Their numbers do look awful on paper. Battery capacities tend to be a lot lower than Android phones. OTOH, Android phones consume far more battery, so comparing raw numbers isn’t really a fair comparison.

It’s purely an Apple choice. They could use good batteries and have even better battery life.

They know however that battery failing is the first thing pushing consumers to change phone and being Apple they always have to take the most anti consumer stand possible.

Admittedly it’s a less of a problem that it used to be. Outside of the Air their batteries are still not state of the art but they look less punny than they used to.

Selling phones with generally longer real world battery life yet lighter batteries, and longer battery longevity due to superior battery recharge rate management is the most anti-consumer stand possible?

Are you at any point planning to address the core of my comment: Apple was for a long time purposefully undersizing their battery compared to the state of the art and what they should have shipped, or will you entirely refuse?

Because your comment is entirely missing the point at the moment.

Do you think that the most important metric for the state of the art is raw battery capacity, or hours of real world usage?

The point is not how long it lasts, the point is that it should have lasted significantly longer if they didn't skimp. There was absolutely no valid reason to not provide a decently sized battery in these phones.

Lower weight while still having longer endurance isn’t a valid reason?

How long the battery lasts, for it’s weight, is pretty much the only point of a battery.

Having the most accessible and convenient and in some cases cheapest manufacture’s battery replacement service is anti-consumer? What does that make every other phone manufacturer?

No offense but Apple is one of the only manufacturer which requires you going through them to get a battery change and aggressively restrict the availability of spare parts for their phone.

It’s also not cheap at all especially if you don’t pay their extortionate extended warranty fee which should be included from the start.

You don’t have to get the battery through Apple.

The spare parts are readily available through their parts portal.

And it cost less than $100 to get the battery replaced on any iPhone as far as I’m aware at an Apple Store without a warranty.

Well lucky for you Apple have actually brought out an even thicker phone, with and even bigger and longer lasting battery. Its named the iphone 17 pro and iphone 17pro max.

The air is not for you.

You can just not buy this phone. If you want an iPhone with a larger capacity battery, you can buy the one that they sell with this feature.

Not once do I remember thinking "I would like this phone to be thinner", yet I wish that this thing would have a bigger battery almost daily.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge was first with a thinner phone (and some Motorola that most people have probably never heard of?). But it is also quite misplaced, since they just released the 27 Pro, which moves the (stacked) logic board close to the camera to be able to fit a larger battery, going from 3582 mAh in the 16 Pro to 4252 mAh in the 17 Pro (both US eSIM capacities, 18.7% more!). But they also used the space to add a vapor chamber for better sustained performance.

The Air is just a different market. The Air and Pro optimize for almost the opposite:

- Thinness vs. battery life.

- Thinness vs. an additional GPU core.

- Thinness vs. sustained performance.

- One back camera vs three back cameras.

I like this year's line-up because there is much more choice: getting the absolute thinnest phone, getting an absolute performance monster with a large battery and plenty of cameras, or getting a great middle ground, which is almost as light as the thin phone, but has longer battery life, and one more camera, and no lousy 60Hz display this year.

"thinnest iphone", well no, i am sure the Iphone (2007) or iphone 3g was slimmer. Only a big part of the device is slim with iphone air.

And to not put your phone on the camera lens, I would put it in a case that is as thick as the thickest glass part, which looks not that slim.

Thinnest isn’t necessarily speaking about the widest part, or we’d consider breast circumference rather than belly circumference when saying if women are thin or not.

IE the idealized hourglass 36-24-36 is considered thinner than a woman at 34-30-34.

The Air is more like 24-37-48 (body-plateau-lens), so I’m not sure how well the analogy translates. ;)

The plateau seems more like the rib cage in that analogy.

Also, the numbers are top to bottom so IMO the phone would be 48-24-24, a rather absurd proportion for a person and possibly why phones seem so ugly these days.

I don't put an entire woman into my pocket.

Fair, average thickness is somewhat meaningful when you have other stuff in your pocket. However, all phones are thin enough these days it’s kind of a silly comparison. Linguistically it’s a more interesting question IMO than in terms of marketing nonsense.

I think for people thin is mostly in reference to volume for a given height. But there’s a bunch of related factors involved like weight and clothing sizes which keeps it relatively ambiguous.

The Air is a bit like a hammered-flat 16e, where the hammer missed the upper part with the camera. ;)

(Their dimensional volume is close, and their weight almost the same.)

(comment 1/2) The article that they linked to that outlines Russia's command of the Ti supply chain and mitigations Western countries have taken during the war is fascinating. https://www.efeso.com/knowledge/insight/the-impact-of-the-ru...

Sorry, whats happening around 2:40-3:00, where he discharges (?) the adhesive tape? Or is he heating it with current?

The new adhesives they use for their metal batteries can be undone by applying 9v for like a minute or something.

Looks like the battery is glued down with heat sensitive glue. Those are the terminals to connect to a built-in heater (i.e. piece of wire). This replaces a finicky 3m-command-strip-like thing. That's what I gather; I've never opened a modern iPhone.

The glue isn’t heat sensitive- there is no built-in heater. The glue is chemically changed by the electric current to no longer adhere.

electrically-released adhesive.

https://hackaday.com/2024/09/22/hands-on-with-new-iphones-el...

That's such a great idea.

Certainly beats using a heat gun and a prying tool to dislodge a battery.

Would be interesting to know where the iPhone Air was built; India or China ? I'm asking because I understand it requires some very advanced tooling and expertise which the Chinese are not keen to share with the Indians and I'd be surprised if they have

Is any iPhone "built" in India ? I was under the impression India (and Brazil?) only have iPhone assembly lines, nothing producing actual parts.

Good news.

Also -

Can anyone imagine what the impacts might be if Apple “Sherlocked” iFixIt and reviewers, and did teardowns, battery tests, etc. themselves?

It's very unlikely they would do that. They might be making decently repairable devices in a specific generation but if they release guides people will expect it in future generations too, and I doubt any company wants to hold themselves to this.

Apple provided the repair manual on the day the product launched.

I think apples lawyers would strongly advise against them publishing teardown videos.

As well as opening up liability and warranty issues when users consider those as 'instructions' to disassemble apple devices, it could also be seen by courts in some countries as publishing the design and internal details which would weaken Apples IP protections in some places.

It reminds me that Sony provided a super clean teardown video of the PS5 at launch.

I sincerely doubt it matters in term of IP/patents. Apple might not want to deal with any of the press that could come with it, and for a corp doing nothing is cheaper that doing anything. IMHO the loss on Apple Store revenue ans hgiving je image of a brand you can tinker with outweigh any legal part.

IIRC they started doing it with the PS4, then PS4 Pro, PS5 and PS5 Pro.

The point of iFixit is being a secund/third party. They can keep helping for devices Apple discontinues and provide advice Apple might not be willing to give.

Apple should provide teardowns, but that would only minimally impact the ecosystem IMHO.

> reviewers > tests

Would you trust a company's own product reviews and tests ?

They won’t.

Apple tells us what they want and nothing else. They don’t tell us how much RAM there is or intimate details of the processors or battery size or lots of other things.

They much prefer “here’s magic, check it out” to “here’s tons of gory details”.

Doing teardowns like this would directly contradict that message.

All this praise for the titanium casing makes it a real bummer that the Pro has been downgraded to aluminum.

Different use cases mean different materials. The Air needs to be strong against bending forces because of the thin body, the Pros needed aluminum for thermal transfer for better sustained performance.

How can iFixit team up with the electronics barbarian bald guy? They immediately lost credibility.

Wow, yeah that's disappointing.

What's wrong with him ?

Burning the screen has always been a bit silly. And he probably should have switched to more reproducible/quantifiable tests for durability a long time ago. I don't mind his videos, but there's a clear lack of rigor and it's odd that iFixit would want to associate with that.

Apple fans dislike him because he rightfully pointed that their phones were garbage when they were full of glue.

I successfully replaced the batteries of several iPhone models that were supposedly ‘full of glue’ without any issues. That stuff was always way overblown. After all, Apple needed to be able to replace the batteries themselves.

Nah he is like a modern day charlatan.

Always amazed at apple engineering and Chinese/Indian manufacturing

The book “Apple in China” delivers an amazingly detailed description of both, with jaw-dropping anecdotes.

It's been a while since Apple has had a 0.7 repairability score for a phone.

It doesn't seem to have been a priority for them, but we'll have to see if this shows up in their marketing.

Feels like we are entering a better era. Apple probably knows if they don’t clean up their act, it’s going to bring in regulations which will be out of their control. Better to preempt the regulations and just make reparability a focus.

They started doing it at least partially because of regulation, including California and EU law.

I think it also matters for them, since they sell a ton of Apple Care+ subscriptions. That wouldn't be profitable if it was a PITA to replace the battery or the screen, so this ends up being a win-win.

Starting with the iPhone 15, iPhones have had 7 repairability scores on ifixit

Cool. Thanks for the correction.

Been awhile, since I looked at that (I'm still using a 13).

They’ve been improving a lot in the last few years. Legal pressure from various governments is likely a big part of that.

More likely to be Apple’s giving in to the inevitability of right to repair laws and their emphasis on ecological friendliness. Otherwise, you’d see more Android phones becoming more easily repairable.

Some of this may be self-interest in how hard it is for their people to repair the phones in Apple Stores.

Mostly though I agree it’s pressure from California and the EU and such to make things more repairable.

they changed the color of a same hand on their first picture.

I think that might just be a lighting difference? But you're right though, that is the same person's hand.

Camera bumps are stupid.

That's it. That's the post

is it just me or this titanium casing sounds like snake oil?

See for yourself.

https://youtu.be/sQ56ve39l2I?si=Y3TIUV9R3O2TA9qE

What makes you say that?

Don't know if this par for iFixit, but this sort of reads like an ad. To be fair, it sounds like the phone is not too bad in repairability. We should also have scores for software repairability and replacement.

Don’t agree with this take; software doesn’t need repairs when you drop your phone, when it is submerged, when it is charged/discharged daily for a few years, and so on. Freedom to use your hardware however you like is more of an ideological discussion, whereas repairs are simply necessary due to the unavoidable wear-and-tear.

I think that replacing your software after it stops getting security and feature updates and loses compatibility with apps extends the longevity of your phone's life and creates less e-waste. I used my old OnePlus 6 for longer than I would have if the software couldn't have been replaced because I could install a custom ROM on it.

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