mmWave goodbye, high 5Gs all around! This teardown is a wrap.

It’s shaping up to be a 5G world, and Apple’s living in it. It seems like they made some serious compromises to make way for shiny new 5G components.

The new battery is gaunt and relatively low-tech, no longer an elegant L. The logic board has ballooned in size, giving up the gains in miniaturization from recent years. The Taptic Engine seems smaller, and the speakers are a new shape—maybe not diminished, but different.

It's odd to see such concessions to this nascent technology. Of all the possible Apple innovations, this feels the least inventive. But! At least Apple didn't give up their tried-and-true screen and battery repair procedures.

That said, the iPhone 12's repairability score comes with a huge, ugly asterisk. We've laid out some troubling findings in a followup article: Is This the End of the Repairable iPhone?

Before we score it though, there's one more thing.