The iFixit team has posted its detailed teardown of the iPhone 13 Pro revealing all the internal changes Apple has made on its newest iPhone. Accessing the internals of the iPhone 13 Pro is very similar to that of the iPhone 12 Pro: you pry open the display.

Right off the bat, the team noticed that Apple has merged the digitizer and display layers. This has helped the company in reducing both the thickness and cost of the OLED panel. Secondly, the earpiece speaker is no longer mounted on the display. This will make display replacements easier, but earpiece replacements will become problematic.

To reduce the notch size by 20 percent, Apple merged all the IR emitters for Face ID. Apple has further managed to reduce the size of the layered logic board this year. A side effect of this is that the SIM card is not soldered on the logic board.

As a part of the teardown, the iFixit team swapped the display between two iPhone 13 Pro units. However, doing so disabled Face ID and gave a non-genuine Apple hardware used error. Their sources claim that this is a bug that Apple intends to fix in a future iOS release. This was also verified by another YouTuber who tore down his iPhone 13 Pro.

Nonetheless, despite how easy it is to access the internals of the iPhone 13 Pro and the modularity of most components, it only managed to score 5/10 in iFixit’s repairability score — the lowest score ever for an iPhone. This is primarily because Apple links the software with the hardware making third-party repair difficult. The company using a bunch of different screws despite not being required also makes things difficult.

Head over to the source link below to get a complete overview of the iPhone 13 Pro’s internals and how to access them.