The iPhone 18 Pro's fancy variable aperture camera is incredibly hard to repair

Apple

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max come with a new feature for camera enthusiasts: variable aperture. Yet, as great as it may be for portraits or low-light shots, it also creates a repair challenge.

According to iFixit, repairing the new iPhones' aperture mechanism isn't impossible, but "is about as close as it gets." The iFixit team took apart the Pro and Pro Max to get a closer look at the new lens and its six overlapping blades — each about the thickness of a single human hair. They called it a "feat of precision engineering" but noted that there's no room for error. You can see the whole process in iFixit's YouTube video.

If an issue does occur, it might mean needing a whole new mechanism rather than being able to fix it on your own. "Very few repair enthusiasts on this planet will have the tools, techniques, or knowledge to get this variable aperture mechanism apart in a way that allows it to go back together," iFixit says. "The tolerances are tight, the glues are gummy." 

While iPhone cameras have always been tricky to fix on your own, the variable aperture mechanism offers more opportunities for things to go wrong and could be more expensive to replace than a typical iPhone camera. iFixit even suggests that users will have to replace the module if something breaks within the variable-aperture camera.

Companies like Samsung have previously added aperture mechanisms to smartphones (the 2018 Galaxy S9, for instance). Yet the image-quality benefits didn't make it worth it, and Samsung later dropped the feature.