iPhone 5 teardown display

For the 2024 global interim I did a project I had been wanting to do for a while, a teardown display of an iPhone. Recently the Makerspace received a donation of several old Apple products, one of them being an iPhone 5.

I spent a while trying to find a good template that I could transfer to an .svg file for laser cutting. After doing this I designed a magnetic frame assembly that would let me take the whole frame apart.

The frame consists of three pieces, a backboard, mid frame, and top frame. The teardown display sits in between the backboard and mid frame while a piece of clear acrylic sits between the mid and top frames.

My original design had the individual layers of the frame cutout in two parts, while seeming like a good idea at first, I later realized that the way I designed it wasn’t all that good, resulting in a more painful assembly process. This design has since been fixed for anyone willing to replicate the project in the future.

Disassembly of the iPhone was a much less painful experience, with help from Damien I was able to get it all taken apart and glued onto the board.

This project fits into the global theme of this week’s interim since it displays all of the globally sourced internals of an iPhone, Japanese batteries and Cameras, Taiwanese silicon, American glass, and Korean processors all put into a phone designed by Apple in California.