Credit: iFixit

As is now a long-standing custom, iFixit performed a full teardown of the latest iPhone—this time, the newly launched iPhone Air. These teardowns got pretty routine for a while, as Apple settled into a fairly consistent design for iPhones, but the new design of the iPhone Air offered an opportunity for compelling observations.

Many of the important components—including the entire logic board—are clustered up at the top of the phone, while the majority of its middle and body house a battery.

iFixit found that this battery is identical to the one included in Apple's iPhone Air MagSafe battery pack—you can even swap the batteries between the pack and the phone with no problems.

Having the battery occupy roughly two-thirds of the device also helps mitigate the problems we saw with "Bendgate" in earlier, thin iPhones a few years ago. Bendgate occurred in part because the logic board was getting damaged under pressure in the middle of the device. Now, the logic board is just at the top, where a bend is less likely to occur, and the battery is more resilient.

The main goal behind these teardowns is to assess how easily repairable and serviceable these phones are, and iFixit gave the iPhone Air higher marks than you might expect. Intuitively, you might assume that a smaller, thinner device would be harder to repair, not easier, but iFixit argues based on this teardown that, partly because of this thin design, there is less layering of one component on top of another. That means it's easier to get directly at whatever you're trying to service than with other iPhones—be it the USB-C connector, the battery, or something else.

That, alongside the dual-entry system, earned the Air a 7 out of 10 provisional repairability score from iFixit—pretty good for a smartphone these days, though there's always room for improvement.

You can head to the iFixit website or YouTube channel for the full teardown.