This may have seemed like a boring iPhone update year, and it sort of was!
And that’s okay—it is totally not sustainable to expect a major design refresh every year.
Despite how green Apple claims to be, the only thing that does is create more waste.
Even though there weren’t big changes, there were plenty of interesting changes we found
in our teardowns! In this video, I’ll walk you through five of them, with a little help from
our livestream and our written teardown, both of which we’ll link in the description below.
the new cameras in the Pro iPhones are … almost unbelievable. Just
look at the difference in size between the 12 Pro and 13 Pro camera modules.
It’s wild that they were able to make this much room in the non-max body.
Cameras are quickly becoming my favorite part of smartphones, not because I take
pictures with them, but because they are so intricate and interesting to take apart.
I’ll show you what I mean. Here’s an iPhone 13 Pro camera assembly, fresh out of an iPhone.
Behind the metal housing, you can already see some of the tiny image stabilization hardware.
Usually, a bunch of heat lets me pull the whole standard wide unit out, but today,
just the sensor wanted to come off, so we can get straight to the good stuff. In their keynote last
year, Apple showed off the iPhone 12 Pro Max with sensor-shift image stabilization.
This is an all-new sensor and lens, but the stabilization hardware is pretty similar.
It will subtly move the sensor around up to 5,000 times per second to counteract your shaky hands.
The smaller 12 Pro Max sensor on the left now lives in the mini
and standard iPhone thirteens. The telephoto and wide cameras
also have image stabilization, but it only moves the lens, not the sensor.
I was hoping to put the lens-less sensor back in the phone and show you how it moves around,
but unfortunately, neither of the cameras that I disassembled survived. Maybe next year.
Apple announced one major change to the iPhone 13 Pro displays on stage with ProMotion,
but we found another upgrade they didn’t mention:
All four iPhone models are using new OLED display technology with an integrated touch
layer. Our friend Tobias from instrumental explained this in our livestream.
If only … they didn’t pair the screen to the logic board. More on that in a bit.
For a few years now, Apple has been utilizing some pretty cool battery tech
to take full advantage of the extra space around their super-dense
stacked logic boards. We found a couple patents that show how they accomplish this:
carefully layered electrodes, and a clever notch on the inward corner.
The 12 Pro battery last year shared the regular 12s rectangular shape, which was great for parts
compatibility! (again, if the things weren’t paired). This year it made a return to the 13 Pro,
more powerful than the 12, but less so than the rectangular 13. That’s right: even though
it looks bigger and takes up more space, it’s not quite as potent as the good ol’ rectangle.
While everyone else has moved on to hole punches, Apple has been content with their signature notch
for the last few years. This year on stage, they announced the iPhone 13 notches were 20%
smaller. What did apple do with the extra screen space? … Not a single
thing. The redesigned Face ID module inside is interesting though. To accomplish this nothing,
they took the infrared flood illuminator off of the display and integrated it with the rest of the
Face ID hardware. Now all the infrared flashy lights co me from the same spot in the notch.
Well, we saved the worst for last. Believe it or not,
the iPhones 13 are still victims of Apple’s attempt to monopolize their repair.
In our livestream we were able to perform a battery swap, which felt like a win, since
some rumors were claiming an iPhone 13 wouldn’t even turn on with a foreign battery installed.
But that small victory didn’t last very long. After a long day of extensive testing, we (and
some others) found that, despite the simple new display replacement procedure, any display swap
we performed, even transferring the original Face ID hardware, would disable Face ID completely.
I will say the behavior feels buggy, and it’s possible that this could be fixed with software,
like we saw last year, where camera swaps between iphone twelves would cause the camera to glitch
out until a later software update. But even if Face ID worked flawlessly after a DIY display
swap, you’re still losing other important features like true tone and auto brightness.
Add to that the fact that you have to deal with annoying warnings and constant
reminders from the settings app, and you’ve got a downright awful repair experience.
Apple has reasons for parts pairing and safety pop-ups,
and some of them are even valid! But don’t you for one second
believe that they couldn’t find another way around the problem if they wanted to.
This is the same company that makes a $30,000 user-serviceable cheese grater, you know.
That thing doesn’t give you any warnings when you swap a part, believe me. Okay, rant over, sorry.
For a more comprehensive look at the ways parts pairing affects the iPhones 13, you can check out
Hugh Jeffreys video, which we’ll link below. We should have our own blog coming soon with
all of our testing results. Oh and one fun, but unhelpful thing we found in our parts testing:
it’s not pretty, but if you really want to, you can put an iPhone 13 Pro Max screen
on an iPhone 13 Pro, and vice versa. You’re welcome, softwaregore subreddit.
Thanks for watching! No matter how cool you think the new iPhones 13 are, we can’t say it enough:
don’t upgrade unless you need to. These phones are fine,
but the best phone is the one you already have.
If you haven’t had a chance, you can click here
to watch the livestream of our iPhone 13 and 13 Pro teardown.