Apple’s new iPhone 18 Pro carries a camera whose lens contains a moving iris of six blades, each as thin as a human hair, and iFixit’s teardown found no way to repair it short of replacing the entire camera assembly. The repair site estimates that swap at $249 or more, a price it took from the iPhone 17 Pro and expects to rise.
The phone still earned a provisional repairability score of 7 out of 10, the same as the iPhone 17 Pro. The aperture is the exception to that respectable number, and iFixit’s engineers called it about as close to unrepairable as a component gets.
Six blades and electromagnets inside the lens
The mechanism is Apple’s first variable-aperture camera. According to MacDailyNews’ account of the teardown, a mechanical iris of six hair-thin blades is driven by electromagnets that work independently of the optical image stabilisation system. The teardown team nicknamed it the phone’s “winking eye,” and its title for the piece, “Inside the Tiny Unfixable Eye,” shows where the verdict landed. Because the blades and their drivers sit inside the lens stack, an owner whose camera is damaged has no smaller part to buy: the unit that fails is the unit that gets replaced, which is how a mechanism measured in fractions of a millimetre turns a camera injury into a module-sized bill.
The fragility showed up in the lab. When technicians pried apart the lens stack, one blade shot across the room, and the report concluded that if the aperture sticks, the whole main camera assembly must be replaced. Cult of Mac quoted iFixit saying very few repair enthusiasts on the planet will have the tools, techniques or knowledge to get the mechanism apart.
A $249 module swap, priced from the iPhone 17 Pro
The repair path therefore runs through the module, not the part. As The Register summarised the findings in a piece that advised skipping the upgrade, damage to the aperture likely requires replacing the whole assembly, which iFixit says costs $249 on the iPhone 17 Pro and is expected to cost more once the variable aperture is added to the bill of materials.
The $249 figure is a floor, not a quote: iFixit has no price for the iPhone 18 Pro assembly yet, so it borrowed the iPhone 17 Pro number and flagged that the added complexity of the variable aperture is likely to push the real cost higher. There is a mitigating point. Cult of Mac reported that the camera module itself is easily replaceable when the mechanism fails, so the swap is physically simple even though it is not cheap. The expense comes from what is thrown away, a precision assembly in which the aperture, lens and sensor travel together. Other coverage, including TweakTown’s, characterised the new phone as having Apple’s most repairable camera yet while calling the screen a nightmare to get past, a split that matches iFixit’s own tension between easy module access and costly module replacement.
The practical benefit of the aperture is thin, according to iFixit. The team said it does not deliver the wide-aperture bokeh look the term suggests, and noted that Samsung abandoned a similar technology because the functional gain at smartphone sensor sizes was limited. A repair penalty attached to a modest feature is the trade that the teardown puts in front of buyers.
A display frame that broke in three of four teardowns
The score of 7 is provisional for a reason. iFixit assigned it pending further testing of display removal and parts availability, and one finding already pulls in the other direction. The iFixit teardown, published September 20, reported that the white plastic frame holding the screen broke in three of four units while the team reached the battery, which still enters from the front and sits in a metal tray held by conductive glue.
If the frame proves failure-prone in ordinary repairs, iFixit warned, it could force costly full display replacements and undercut the other improvements to the battery job. Other changes recorded in the teardown include that Apple moved the Face ID infrared camera under the display, shrinking the Dynamic Island, enlarged the vapor chamber for cooling, and raised battery capacity across the range. To fit the relocated Face ID sensor, Apple removed alternating pixel rows in that patch of screen, a change invisible to the naked eye but visible under magnification, according to Cult of Mac.
iFixit’s Elizabeth Chamberlain closed the verdict with a recommendation to skip the upgrade, adding that the most sustainable phone is the one a person already owns. The Mac Observer’s explainer on the aperture covers the mechanism in more detail. The provisional score is the number to hold against the final one once iFixit finishes testing display removal and parts availability.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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