iPhone Air teardown reveals easy reparability and one cool trick

Apple’s first novelty phone, the iPhone Air, has been a source of great fascination since its announcement. We all wanted to know how well it did in a bend test (spoiler alert: it did great), and now we want to know what it’s like on the inside.

Reparability experts iFixit are on the case as usual, and have made two important discoveries, one of which is quite unexpected.

First, the iPhone Air is surprisingly easy to get into and repair, and got a relatively high score from iFixit. It still uses the uncommon pentalobe screws and the display and the back glass are still glued in. However, these are both common to all previous iPhones, and anyone looking to get inside should be expecting them at this point.

However, beyond that point, the phone is relatively easy to take apart. Thanks to the magic of downsizing, the iPhone Air has relatively fewer components, and the ones that are present are easier to remove than before. In fact, the glued glass panels are probably the only real pain point here as the rest of the phone comes apart like LEGO.

Now comes the interesting part. As it turns out, the iPhone Air uses the same battery found inside the new iPhone Air MagSafe Battery accessory that Apple announced alongside the phone. Not similar, but identical.

Apple iPhone 17 Air

This has interesting implications. As discovered by YouTube channel Phone Repair Guru, you can just remove the battery out of the $99 charger and put it inside your Air should the Air’s battery die at some point, and it works fine. As long as the MagSafe Battery accessory is on sale and you have the gumption to go through the replacement process yourself, you will always have a relatively inexpensive, if a bit wasteful, way of replacing the iPhone Air’s internal battery.

In the end, the iPhone Air has turned out to be as fascinating on the inside as it was on the outside. There is undeniably some real ingenuity and engineering work that has gone into its design, and we are looking forward to testing it further in our full review.

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