Actually, we're pretty mad
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Here’s a thought experiment: When does an iPhone stop being an iPhone? If you replace the battery—even with one from another iPhone—and the phone tells you it’s not "genuine," is it still a real iPhone? Or if you replace the screen and lose half its features? At what point does Apple’s deathgrip on repair kill the iPhone you tried to save?

As for this iPhone 13 Pro we just tore down, we’ve got good news, great news, and bad news. The good news is that we’re finished, and we even added more to Part 1. The great news is that there’s a lot of new stuff inside this supposedly off-year, incremental model: combined digitizer and display layers, merged IR emitters that shrink the notch 20%, some head-scratching design choices, and more identified silicon than you can shake a stick at.

That brings us to the bad news: Apple’s newest parts-pairing problem. Right now, if you replace your screen, Apple kills your Face ID, unless they control the repair. We swapped sensors and front-facing camera hardware across multiple brand-new units, restarting each one, but nothing worked. Fixing your own iPhone screen could trap you years in the past, in the passcode times.

If this isn’t a bug, we’re gonna riot. We’ve heard from an Apple-licensed repair tech that Apple support calls this a bug to be fixed in a future iOS release. But if Apple withholds a major feature from anybody who doesn’t take their busted screen straight to them? That’s a very, very bad sign from a company that moves the tech market. Apple’s intent seems clear from their history with home buttons, batteries, and screens, and we faced a similar policy-or-mistake dilemma with the iPhone 12 camera. It’s sad when the best-case scenario is that repair doesn’t make the pre-release cut for iPhone quality assurance.

This iPhone reaches a new low for modern models, earning a 5/10 on our repairability scale. We love the thoughtful display-first entry, modularity, and restrained use of adhesives. But what’s the point if software sabotages otherwise reasonable hardware? Can you alone actually fix this iPhone, or do you end up with something different? When does an iPhone stop being an iPhone?

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