In the past couple of years, transparent aesthetics have truly arrived on the scene. From phones and earbuds to handheld consoles and even laptops, it seems everyone wants to follow the trends — except Apple, of course. Industrial design, and everything. Go figure!
But that won’t stop some enthusiasts with the right tools and enough guts from prying open a pricey new iPhone and giving it a transparent makeover. The latest in a series of daring Apple adventures comes from Phone Repair Guru, which has given a transparent spin to the otherwise frosted color glass back of the iPhone 16 Pro.
Before we dig into just how ridiculously good the iPhone 16 looks with a see-through shell, I’ll drop the disclaimer first. The entire process is amazingly tedious, from ripping the phone apart to putting back a transparent shell on the naked chassis without breaking core parts.
It may seem like your standard replace-and-slap endeavor, but the reality is anything but. The iPhone’s glass back has multiple crucial components attached to it, including the wireless charging coil.
The end result — assuming I could ever muster the courage to pull one off myself — is an iPhone 16 Pro that would clearly fly off the shelves with its neat makeover, mic elements, MagSafe kit, and LED flash module.
The whole process starts with blasting a hot air jet to remove the graphite paper, which looks like a painful process in itself. However, the most difficult part seems to be detaching the wireless charging coil from the glass shell.
From the video, it appears that taking it off is not straightforward. Instead, it would take the combination of heat blast, extra adhesives, and a MagSafe puck to take it off without messing with the wires. But that’s merely the beginning of a daunting aesthetic journey.
The folks behind the project had to douse the iPhone’s rear glass panel in acid for three days. This was followed by sanding the aluminum plate underneath the glass and then treating it to Gallium, a silvery metal that is liquid at room temperature and pressure.
The liquid metal essentially weakens the aluminum cover to such an extent that it can be removed like paper using a knife. The whole ordeal is incredibly messy and requires a hot water bath to get the gunk off, with some cool gas bubble fizz to go with it.
The last stage requires some good old-fashioned handiwork. You need to use a thick razer to remove the paint on the iPhone 16 Pro’s glass shell like an experienced artisan handling a block of softwood.
Once the shell acquires its final transparent avatar, the experiment reaches its conclusion after carefully reinstalling the parts, like the charging coil and elements close to the camera module. Thankfully, at the end of the unnervingly complicated task, nothing was broken, and systems like the camera were working just fine. And yeah, it looks freakishly fantastic.
In the meantime, if you’re harboring similar plans for the iPhone eating dust in your drawer, please refrain from any such adventure.
Despite all the repairability and DIY-friendly design changes Apple has made to its smartphones in recent years, the underlying engineering work is still too complicated for an average person to handle, let alone leave it unscathed after giving the colored glass shell a transparent glow-up.
And you’ll probably spend a few hundred dollars alone on the right tools to handle the chore detailed in the video. But if you can’t quite erase the sight of a shiny transparent iPhone 16 Pro from your memory lanes, there are plenty of transparent decals readily available online, including a few really neat options from Dbrand.