Apple’s new variable aperture camera could give the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max more control over portraits and low-light photography, but there’s a catch: the tiny mechanism behind it could be extremely difficult to repair.
That’s according to iFixit, which took apart the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max to examine the new camera hardware. The teardown found a six-blade aperture mechanism, with each overlapping blade measuring roughly the thickness of a human hair.
That makes for some seriously precise engineering, but it also leaves very little room for mistakes when something goes wrong. iFixit says repairing the mechanism isn’t impossible, but comes close, with the tight tolerances and gummy adhesives making it particularly difficult to disassemble and put back together correctly.
The problem is that this isn’t the sort of repair most people will be able to tackle themselves. iFixit says very few repair enthusiasts would have the tools, techniques or knowledge needed to take apart the variable aperture mechanism and successfully rebuild it.
If one of those tiny blades or another part of the mechanism fails, the likely solution could therefore be replacing the entire camera module rather than repairing the aperture itself. That could make an issue with the variable aperture more expensive to fix than a conventional iPhone camera.
It’s worth noting that smartphone apertures aren’t entirely new. Samsung used an aperture mechanism in the 2018 Galaxy S9, allowing the camera to switch between different aperture settings. However, Samsung eventually dropped the feature, with the source noting that the image-quality benefits weren’t considered enough to justify keeping it.
Apple’s implementation is therefore an interesting return to an idea that hasn’t stuck around in smartphones. The variable aperture could offer useful control over how the iPhone 18 Pro handles different shooting conditions, but the iFixit teardown shows that squeezing this kind of mechanical system into a phone comes with its own trade-offs.
For owners, the main takeaway isn’t that the camera is impossible to repair. It’s that the new mechanism adds another highly delicate component to an already complicated camera system, and fixing it may require replacing the whole module if something goes wrong.
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