Just like every new Apple device, the iFixit team has performed a full teardown on the iPhone 17e. The standout discovery? You can upgrade your iPhone 16e to include MagSafe support simply by swapping in the iPhone 17e’s back panel.
The two models share nearly identical designs, making their rear panels interchangeable. While the upgraded 16e won’t gain the full MagSafe animations or the signature “thunk” sound (due to software differences), it should still enable more reliable magnetic attachment and potentially faster wireless charging.
ajesh Pandey for Cult of Mac:
Besides the faster chip, the other key upgrade on the iPhone 17e is MagSafe support. Thanks to the built-in circular magnets, the phone can seamlessly attach to magnetic accessories without a case.
With minimal design differences between the iPhone 17e and iPhone 16e, iFixit’s teardown found that Apple has largely stuck to the same internal design. That means the phone is still relatively repairable, featuring a dual-entry design. So, you can access the phone’s innards from the front or back, depending on the repair you need to carry out.
In its teardown, the iFixit team discovered that most of the components between the iPhone 17e and iPhone 16e are swappable.
“The weird part came when we started swapping parts. Nearly everything inside the 17e appears to be cross-compatible with the 16e. In our testing, you could transplant a 16e logic board into a 17e and let Repair Assistant sort out the new hardware,” says the iFixit teardown team.
This even includes the MagSafe back panel from the iPhone 17e, which can be installed on the iPhone 16e…
In iFixit’s testing, the iPhone 16e with the iPhone 17e’s MagSafe back panel pulled 10W of power wirelessly.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote upn the releases of iPhone 17e, “The addition of MagSafe (which the previous iPhone 16e should’ve offered) will be among the iPhone 17e’s biggest selling points.”
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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]