Digital repair community blogger Yang Changshun livestreamed the teardown of the newly launched iPhone 18 Pro. He not only displayed all the materials and internal structures of the new device to the audience but also initiated an extreme challenge to upgrade the 256GB model to 1TB.
From the exposed internal structure during the teardown, the iPhone 18 Pro features a VC vapor chamber that covers almost the entire internal space of the device. Compared to the previous iPhone 17 Pro, which only had a small heat dissipation module in the middle of the chassis, the increase in cooling area is dramatic. Yang Changshun directly called it the largest built-in heatsink he has ever seen in all the phones he has repaired.
In addition, the A20 Pro chip featured in this year's iPhone 18 Pro adopts a separate packaging design for the CPU and RAM for the first time.
Unlike previous generations, Apple no longer stacks the RAM directly on top of the CPU, completely avoiding the issue of RAM being baked by residual CPU heat for extended periods. The heat dissipation path is now more direct and efficient. The blogger直言 that this year's A-series CPU should be the most powerful generation ever in terms of potential.
However, the actual AnTuTu benchmark score recorded on site was less than 3.4 million. The overall theoretical performance of the A20 series falls far short of the latest flagship chips from the Android camp, such as Xiaomi's Xuanjie O3 chip, whose AnTuTu score has already exceeded 5 million.
During the teardown and testing, Yang Changshun also identified several shortcomings in user experience. He bluntly stated that the variable aperture mechanism on Apple's new phone is far less smooth than similar structures from Huawei and Xiaomi, with a jerky opening and closing process. Even more surprisingly, the launch unit he received had a quality control defect: dead pixels on the original screen.
The highly anticipated challenge of upgrading the 256GB model to 1TB ultimately failed. Yang Changshun tried several modification schemes but couldn't bypass Apple's newly upgraded full-link hardware encryption and verification mechanism, thus failing to complete this extreme storage expansion operation.
