This week marks the tenth anniversary of the unveiling of the iPhone. Steve Jobs took the stage a decade ago to unveil what he at first teased as three products in one — “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device.” Now, iPhone teardown masters iFixit are celebrating the iPhone’s tenth birthday by taking a look back at ten years of tearing down Apple’s popular handset.
As you’ll see in the photos, quite a bit has changed. We’ve only posted the teardown results of the first iPhone and the most recent iPhone 7 Plus here, but the iFixit website offers up all ten teardown photos. It’s fun to take a look at them and see how things have changed over the last decade.
iPhones have become taller, wider, and skinnier. But they’ve also become more repairable. The very first iPhone earned a dismal 2/10 on our repairability scale. It had a soldered battery and was almost impossible to open without breaking the case. Repairability improved radically from there—jumping to a 7/10 for the iPhone 3G. And the phones have remained relatively repair-friendly since. The most recent iPhone offering, the iPhone 7, earned a respectable 7/10 on our scale in 2016.
Here’s to many more years of new iPhone models, and many more iPhone teardown postings by iFixit. The site is also a great resource for how-to videos and instructions on repairing your own electronic devices. Check them out sometime.
