"This is the most repairable iPhone in years."
From Kyle Wiens' "Inside Apple’s Secret iPhone 14 Redesign" posted Friday on iFixit:
The best feature of the iPhone 14 is one that Apple didn’t tell you about. Forget satellite SOS and the larger camera, the headline is this: Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair. It is not at all visible from the outside, but this is a big deal. It’s the most significant design change to the iPhone in a long time. The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max models still have the old architecture, so if you’re thinking about buying a new phone, and you want an iPhone that really lasts, you should keep reading.
If this surprises you, you’re not alone. It surprised us! The new features and external changes to the iPhone 14 are so slight that The Verge suggested it should have been called the iPhone 13S, saying “The iPhone 13, which came out a year ago and Apple is still selling, is nearly identical to the 14.”
But that’s actually not true—though almost nobody had any way of knowing. Apple didn’t mention the secret redesign in their keynote. If reviewers had disassembled the phone, they would have discovered this: The iPhone 14 opens from the front and the back.
My take: That's one way to get on iFixit's good side. The iPhone Pro models, however, remain at the 5-out-of-10 level.
But, repairability is not an issue for users. It’s just an arcane topic for critics, because iPhones have the highest resale value.
To me the repairability issue amounted to nothing more than creating a business opportunity for firms like iFixit.
Sometimes “repairs” break things.
The complaining of 100 pounds of tools being shipped around to facilitate such a program… My assumption, it was just a test run to see how everything goes when they start shipping devices that likely won’t require such extensive / elaborate tooling. Shake the tree to see what’s loose.
It’s fine. Though I wonder if this is the death of the iPhone Mini and we won’t see a future SE model reuse the chassis due to the success of such a design’s longevity.
Props to the hardware team!