iFixit: Apples’ ‘iPhone 16 lineup makes three big leaps for repairkind’
iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus are available in five bold colors: black, white, pink, teal, and ultramarine.
Repair site iFixit, famous for it’s Apple product teardowns, finds Apple’s iPhone 16 lineup to be a big deal, writing that “the iPhone 16 lineup makes three big leaps for repairkind.”
First: The adhesive that secures the battery, in the vanilla and Plus models, is this fancy new sticky stuff that can debond when you pass an electrical current through it. That means no more reliance on finicky, brittle adhesive strips, just a consistent, easily repeatable process. It will require a new tool, of course—more on that later.
Second: The 16 Pro battery has a hard steel case instead of a soft pouch, a form factor that looks familiar from the Apple Watch. Every time we’ve heard electronics manufacturers suggest that repairs could be dangerous because of lithium-ion batteries, we point out that the power to make battery repairs safer is in their hands: Hard cell batteries instead of soft pouch batteries won’t get accidentally punctured by a slip of a screwdriver, and so they’re way less likely to catch fire. Since the Pro doesn’t feature the new adhesive, getting the battery out may sometimes require prying, and a hard case will make that process safer. The one model with no battery improvements? The flagship 16 Pro Max.
Third: We’ve lauded the “enter through either the front or the back” design that debuted on the base iPhone 14, but it took two generations for Apple to trickle that innovation up to their pro phones. It’s here on all models now—and it looks like it’s here to stay. Having to remove an expensive, fragile, ProMotion OLED during a repair path isn’t ideal, so being able to avoid it for simple repairs streamlines procedures…
The iPhone 16 earns a respectable 7 out of 10, a significant upgrade from last year’s model.
MacDailyNews Note: Here’s iFixit’s full teardown:
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