An iPhone is surprisingly repairable, and after the switch to the rounded chassis (with iPhone6) I’d consider it more repairable than the earlier iphone5 form factor.
The only part that is using any significant adhesive is the battery, it can’t be fit because it needs to be able to grow, so it is fit into a too large space using a piece of adhesive tape to not move around.
The phone is built to be quickly servicable by Apple technicians, so obviously no cables are soldered, everything is using easy to fit ribbon connectors.
I’d have no training and found it easy to replace many parts in iPhones such as e.g the screen.
There are parts that Apple have made harder to user replace such as the fingerprint/home button module but that at least has good reason.
I recommend the ifixit step by step repair guides that also make it obvious that repairing a modern smartphone is not much different if it says google or Apple or Samsung on the back. The only major difference is a user accessible battery in some models.
A major difference is that Apple does not sell parts to anyone who is not a licensed repair partner. All these screens you can put in your phone are fakes, refurbished or parts of stolen phones.
This is a good point: iphones are easily serviced physically but you may not get the parts.
There have also been rumors that some parts would not be replaceable unless you used original parts but I have never had any problems with “original” parts (eg refurb screen with new 3rd party glass), obviously if a phone required parts one could not buy it can’t be considered user serviceable at all.
In the past, without warning, they bricked phones with refurbished screens. These are Apple manufactured screens, just ones not original to the phone (repaired by third parties). Using third party screens used to work, but the firmware now checks for this and disables brightness controls if it detects them. This also happened without warning after an update (I believe 11.1 or .2). It might not be hard to fix the phones, but in reality the software is going to have the final say.
That's incredibly misleading. The phones were bricked because the screen assembly included the TouchID sensor and the sensors weren't re-keyed. Apple, for security reasons, bricked phones that had TouchID enabled where the sensor didn't match the Secure Enclave. They didn't envision that people would want to replace the displays at the expense of losing TouchID functionality or device security. As soon as it happened, they released an update to simply disable TouchID and warn users that it was now disabled as opposed to disabling the entire phone.
Do you have any source where I can read more about this? Is this for particular models? Refurbished screens work well on iphone6 on latest iOS as far as I can tell
They have tried to pull this stunt multiple times already. But have been forced to revert due to the amount of negative press it was getting. It's astounding that they tried it more than once.
I get your point, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a user-removable battery, like you'd have in an old dumb-phone?
I know that modifies the engineering (aka, the phone must be thicker) but it's not clear to me that there's much a of a real benefit to a phone being especially thin?
I don't want a removable battery, and I do want a thinner and lighter phone. The market seems to show that making iPhones thinner and using embedded batteries doesn't hurt sales.
I don’t think it would make much difference. An extra mm wouldnt matter much but I wouldn’t want to sacrifice any water resistance for it.
Over the lifespan (ownership) of e.g 3 years I usually replace the screen at least once, usually also some other component. Having the battery user replaceable wouldn’t make much difference, it would be 2 services instead of 3 in case the battery died.
I never replaced a battery on any of my 3 smartphones nor on any of the 4 dumbphones before them.
The only part that is using any significant adhesive is the battery, it can’t be fit because it needs to be able to grow, so it is fit into a too large space using a piece of adhesive tape to not move around.
The phone is built to be quickly servicable by Apple technicians, so obviously no cables are soldered, everything is using easy to fit ribbon connectors.
I’d have no training and found it easy to replace many parts in iPhones such as e.g the screen.
There are parts that Apple have made harder to user replace such as the fingerprint/home button module but that at least has good reason.
I recommend the ifixit step by step repair guides that also make it obvious that repairing a modern smartphone is not much different if it says google or Apple or Samsung on the back. The only major difference is a user accessible battery in some models.