Here’s the iPhone 15 Pro Max teardown, iFixit claims the titanium coating is scratching easily

Here’s the iFixit teardown video for the bigger iPhone 15 Pro – the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which sports the unique (for this year’s Apple phones) periscope camera system. The zoom capabilities of the 15 Pro Max have been a topic of many discussions since the September 12 Wonderlust event, and in the video, you get to see the actual part that’s delivering the 120mm of equivalent focal range (5x optical zoom, in other words). Instead, iFixit isn’t obsessed with the periscope and wants us to talk about something else – the durability of the titanium coating. Through their tests, they’ve found that it’s easily scratched.


iFixit’s teardown preview of the iPhone 15 Pro Max is a mere six minutes long, but it shows the interior of the maxed-out flagship in detail. Plus, around the 4:30 minute mark, there’s a cool short clip by Evident Scientific that will get sworn iPhone foes singing. The short clip is insanely enlarged footage through a microscope showing how easily the titanium coating is being scratched. Here’s a screenshot – mind you, that’s magnified as hell:



“They’re using titanium because it makes the phone 18 grams lighter and titanium sounds cool. Unfortunately for the cool factor, we found that the color on the titanium shell scratches easily, a process that is only satisfying under the magnificent magnification of the microscope kindly loaned to us by Evident Scientific”, says the iFixit reviewer and then adds: “I could scratch this thing up all day”.

The Pros now open from both directions

“The 15 Pro and Pro Max also now open from both directions, but in an unexpectedly opposite manner: all of the internals are hiding behind the screen still instead of behind the back glass. That back glass is now removable, too, just like the 14. Why? It may have to do with the larger camera array. However, this inverted chassis arrangement makes critical repairs like battery swaps slightly riskier than on the 14, because you’re removing the expensive, fragile display rather than an inert sheet of glass”, the review states.

So, access is easier, but battery swaps on the iPhone 15 Pro are riskier than on the 14 Pro.

Going from 7/10 to 4/10 in iFixit's book

iFixit has retroactively dropped the iPhone’s Repairability Score from a “recommend 7/10” to a “do-not-recommend 4/10”. Overall, they’re unhappy with the way Apple has decided to conduct things – yes, it’s now technically easier for newer iPhones to be self-repaired by a simplified interior design, but there are software limitations on repairs. One needs what iFixit calls “a software handshake” through Apple’s System Configuration tool. It contacts Apple’s servers to “authenticate” the repair, then “pairs” the new part to your system so it works as expected.

Defenders of that decision point out that’s how one can be sure that he/she’s getting genuine Apple parts and that scamming threats are minimized.