iPhone Air teardown reveals a phone that’s more durable, repairable than expected

As is now a long-standing custom, iFixit performed a full teardown of the latest iPhone—this time, the newly launched iPhone Air. These teardowns got pretty routine for a while, as Apple settled into a fairly consistent design for iPhones, but the new design of the iPhone Air offered an opportunity for compelling observations.

Many of the important components—including the entire logic board—are clustered up at the top of the phone, while the majority of its middle and body house a battery.

iFixit found that this battery is identical to the one included in Apple’s iPhone Air MagSafe battery pack—you can even swap the batteries between the pack and the phone with no problems.

Having the battery occupy roughly two-thirds of the device also helps mitigate the problems we saw with “Bendgate” in earlier, thin iPhones a few years ago. Bendgate occurred in part because the logic board was getting damaged under pressure in the middle of the device. Now, the logic board is just at the top, where a bend is less likely to occur, and the battery is more resilient.