iPhone 14 Teardown: One Key Change Makes Repairs Much Easier

As has become an annual tradition, iFixit has taken apart the iPhone 14, Apple’s base flagship for 2022. While at first glance the iPhone 14 appears almost identical to its immediate predecessor, iFixit found one major difference that Apple hasn’t publicly announced. A: It’s much easier to repair.

iFixit calls it “the most significant iPhone design change in a long time”, at least for their purposes.

In a YouTube video detailing the teardown, iFixit shows that it started with the usual approach to breaking into an iPhone: gently removing the front of the screen. But I was surprised to find a noticeably different design inside, with a metal screen instead of a battery on the front panel and a simple way to turn off the screen – this is already a victory in maintainability, they say.

But with this shield on the way, he realized that access to the rest of the insides was not from the front, but from the back, which was previously impossible. The back part opened in much the same way as the front. It was there that iFixit saw the battery and other components it would normally expect when opening the front panel.

Back glass replacement used to be one of the most complex and expensive iPhone repair operations requiring specialized equipment. Non-AppleCare+ users who wanted Apple to perform this repair will be charged $599. But now, for the first time since the iPhone 8, this particular repair is relatively easy.

iFixit also notes that the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models have an older design without a removable glass back cover. So this change is unique to the regular iPhone 14 and possibly, or even probably, to the iPhone 14 Plus due out next month, but we’ll have to wait a few weeks to find out for sure.

At the end of the video, iFixit gives the iPhone 14 a repairability score of 7 out of 10, which is certainly not the highest score, but an improvement over other recent iPhone models.

Listing image by iFixit