This week marks a decade since Steve Jobs walked onto a MacWorld stage and announced Apple’s newest product: the iPhone. What a presentation it was—the iPhone was a game changer. While Apple can’t take sole credit for the invention of the smartphone, modern phones owe a ton to that first little device.

The first generation may look like a smaller, thicker cousin of modern iPhones—but the devices have changed a lot over the last decade. We would know; we’ve taken every single one of them apart. All 15 of them.

iPhones have become taller, wider, and skinnier. But they’ve also become more repairable. The very first iPhone earned a dismal 2/10 on our repairability scale. It had a soldered battery and was almost impossible to open without breaking the case. Repairability improved radically from there—jumping to a 7/10 for the iPhone 3G. And the phones have remained relatively repair-friendly since. The most recent iPhone offering, the iPhone 7, earned a respectable 7/10 on our scale in 2016.

Take a moment to wander down memory lane with every iPhone teardown we’ve ever performed:

iPhone 1st Generation: 2/10

iPhone 6 Plus: 7/10



iPhone 6s Plus: 7/10

