iPhone 16 Owners Report Touch-Screen Issues With Most Repairable iPhones in Years

Apple’s latest iPhones are now in the wild, and it wouldn’t be a phone launch without some issues. This time, buyers have reported missed and delayed detection of presses. Early analysis suggests this is a software rather than hardware issue, but physical problems with the phone might be easier to fix now. Several of Apple’s new phones make removing the batteries safer and easier, which has the crew at iFixit pretty excited. After giving the iPhone 15 a 4/10 for repairability, the iPhone 16 gets a 7/10.

Online complaints from early iPhone 16 Pro buyers show many people having issues with touch-screen sensitivity. It appears that simply holding the phone with your fingers near the screen is being registered as a touch input. That triggers the phone’s touch rejection feature to prevent accidental inputs. However, in this case, it prevents your intended touches from being registered.

Most of the touch-screen complaints point to the area around the new camera control as the likely culprit, but 9to5Mac has claimed that the issue appears to affect all edges of the screen equally. It could be the area around the camera control is simply where people’s hands overlap the screen most often.

Since the touch issues don’t happen at all on the lock screen, this will likely be fixable in an iOS update. Fixing physical damage could be less painful this year, too. According to iFixit, Apple has finally made some major strides in repairability—yes, the company that chose to burden us with component pairing and pentalobe screws is doing something good for DIY. We’re surprised, too.

All four iPhone 16 variants now support Apple’s front or back entry design, which allows repair techs to remove either the back glass or the display to access components. While this design debuted on the iPhone 14, it took until now for it to come to the Pro models.

The iPhone 16 repair manual shows where to attach power when dissolving the glue.
Credit: Apple

Getting the battery out of a smartphone is often frustrating, forcing you to wrestle with pull tabs and ribbons to slice through the strong adhesive that keeps the lithium-ion cell in place. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus have a new kind of adhesive that doesn’t require any of that. You just run a current through the glue via a small contact pad, and it dissolves in about a minute. Apple says you can use up to 20v to release the adhesive, but even an 8v battery is enough to get the job done. iFixit tested 20v, finding that it freed that battery in just five seconds. You can see the battery talk starting at 2:30 in the video below.

Smartphone OEMs have regularly cautioned against users replacing their own batteries due to the possibility of damaging the fragile cells and causing a fire. Batteries can be made more robust, though, and that’s what Apple is doing. The new phones have batteries with a hard steel case that won’t be as easy to damage. However, the iPhone 16 Pro Max doesn’t have this, making it the only model without a battery repair upgrade. Give it another year, and maybe even Apple’s most expensive phone will have all the DIY battery goodies.