To be honest, we were holding our breath for the iPhone Air. Thinner usually means flimsier, harder to fix, and more glued-down parts. But the iPhone Air proves otherwise. Apple has somehow built its thinnest iPhone ever without tanking repairability.
Just a few months ago, Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge pulled off a similar trick in an ultra-thin package. How’d they do it? And how’d Apple follow suit?
The secret: Thinner can actually be more repairable, with clever design.
A thin phone party! From left to right: Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge: 5.8 mm, iPhone Air: 5.64 mm, and Moto Z (the OG thin smartphone): 5.2 mm.
Clever Use of Space
Apple made one huge design shift in the Air, which they teased in their keynote and we confirmed with our Lumafield Neptune CT scanner: The middle of this phone is basically just a battery with a frame around it. Apple popped the logic board up above the battery, a large part of how their design got thinner without compromising repair.
When we score repairability, 80% of our score is determined by the ease of replacing the parts that are most important and most likely to break. To figure this out, we build a model of the repair process. What’s the path you have to take to get to the battery, or to the screen? We call this the “disassembly tree.” The ideal (if unlikely) disassembly tree is flat. No parts in the way of other parts.
A linear disassembly tree on the left. A flat disassembly tree on the right. Every time you’ve got to go through another component, you risk damaging it, and repairs take more time.
A thin device often means, advantageously, a flat disassembly tree. Stacked parts are thicker than parts side-by-side. Our friends over at Framework have been saying this for a long time: It’s totally possible to make a thin and light device that’s also built for repair. The Framework Laptop has done this from the start, with nearly all major components accessible when you remove the cover.
And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the Air. The logic board shift freed up room for the battery and helped the phone stay thin without cramming parts on top of each other. It also conveniently puts less stress on the board if the phone flexes in your pocket. It’s a smart workaround for the “bendgate” problems that haunted earlier slim iPhone designs. Not that the Air’s really going to be bending much, as Zack’s test at Jerry Rig Everything suggests.
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