On the outside, the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max look identical and have the same dimensions as last year’s iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max. But on the inside, the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max are quite different, with bigger batteries, a new A20 Pro chip, a significantly larger vapor-cooling system, and tiny mechanical aperture blades in the main camera’s lens.

As the new Apple pro phones make their way into people’s pockets, they’re also appearing in durability testing and teardown videos. 

Tech reviewer Zach Nelson dropped a pair of iPhone 18 Pro videos on his YouTube channel, JerryRigEverything: one showing how the new pro phone did in a scratch and durability test, and the other showing him dismantle Apple’s new handset.

On Sunday, the tech repair and advocacy site iFixIt did a teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro, and not all of it went according to plan. Taking the back glass panel was relatively straightforward, but there’s not much that a person can repair aside from the panel itself.

Of the four 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max models that iFixIt took apart, the plastic frame behind the display broke on three. Apple doesn’t sell the plastic frame part, so if it’s damaged, it can only be replaced by getting a whole new display module. You could put the display back on without the plastic backing frame, but it wouldn’t sit flush with the body. I should note that in Nelson’s teardown, he didn’t suffer the same calamity and gave Apple a “thumbs up for repairability” after removing the display.

“Four phones are too few to establish a failure rate. Adhesive strength, heating, technique, or a difference in the plastic could all matter. That plastic frame has been present since the 15 Pro. But it hasn’t given us nearly as much trouble in previous years,” wrote Liz Chamberlian and Carsten Frauenheim, iFixIt’s director of sustainability and repairability engineer, respectively, in a blog post. “Using isopropyl alcohol might make display removal more consistent, but we’ll have to do more testing to be sure.”

Nelson and iFixIt’s teardown, along with Apple’s Ireland site, gives us a complete picture of the battery capacity for the new iPhone Pro models, SIM card and eSIM only models. Both the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max have larger batteries compared to last year’s 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max. The variants sold outside the US have a slightly smaller battery to afford room for a SIM card tray.

The new variable aperture on the main camera of the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max is another curiosity. It’s made of six tiny mechanical blades. For CNET’s iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max review video, our cinematographer, Celso Bulgatti, filmed it in action.

If any of the rear cameras on the iPhone 18 Pro or 18 Pro Max break, you’d likely need to replace the entire camera array, which includes the new mechanical aperture.

“We dismantled the main camera and concluded that an aperture-only repair isn’t going to be feasible: if your aperture gets stuck, you’ll be looking at replacing the entire main camera assembly,” noted Chamberlian and Frauenheim.

On the whole, iFixIt gave the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max a provisional repairability score of 7 out of 10, the same as the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max and 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max.

You can watch more of iFixIt’s findings in the company’s full teardown video below.

Patrick Holland

Director of Content

As Director of Content, Hardware, I lead CNET’s team of journalists and editors, covering news and testing on smartphones, laptops, wireless carriers, AI, and pretty much anything with a battery.

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