New gaskets and seals make iPhone 6s and 6s Plus less prone to liquid damage than predecessors
Is the New iPhone Waterproof? We Opened It Up (Again) to Find Out — On Friday, we tore down Apple's two newest iPhones and found something new lurking (quite literally) just below the surface.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after its teardown revealed the iPhone 6s's smaller battery and 3D Touch display, iFixit went back inside and found gaskets and seals around the chassis that make both new iPhones less prone to liquid damage than their predecessors. Apple shipped the protection silently — no waterproof rating was advertised.
The find matters because it reads as a deliberate intermediate step: a year later the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus arrived marketed on ruggedness and waterproofing, turning what was an unannounced hardware hedge into a headline upgrade feature.
First-order effects
- iPhone 6s and 6s Plus owners gain passive liquid-damage resistance they were never told about, while Apple gets splash tolerance without committing to an ingress-protection rating it would have to honor.
Second-order effects
- Sealing the chassis adds disassembly friction for repair shops and DIY fixers, forcing the repairability trade-off that iFixit's teardowns keep measuring — a tension still visible when the iPhone 14's redesigned midframe was later praised for restoring front-and-back access.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, water resistance moves from optional insurance to a baseline phone spec, and every generation's internal redesign gets judged simultaneously on durability and on how much sealing costs the repairer.
The trend: Smartphone makers are absorbing environmental-sealing into standard industrial design, trading repairability headroom for durability claims they can market within a product cycle or two.