The iPhone 16 Pro has many positive traits, but one thing it does lack is personality – and a new transparent mod of the phone has just shown us how much more interesting it could be if Apple released its design handbrake.
Crafting transparent versions of Apple’s latest phones is something of an annual tradition for the Phone Repair Guru YouTube channel, but this year’s might be its best yet.
The see-through mod naturally has echoes of the Nothing Phone 2, but the iPhone 16 Pro looks particularly good as it has “some of the most stunning internals we’ve ever seen in an iPhone”, as the channel notes.
You naturally can’t buy the transparent 16 Pro as the modding technique is a pretty involved, warranty-busting process. As you can see in the full video below, once the various components have been stripped from the back plate, there’s the not-inconsiderable task of removing its recycled aluminum finish.
That’s where gallium comes in – a metal with a low melting point that also looks very Terminator T-1000, it can seemingly eat through aluminum for breakfast. So the channel applied it to the iPhone 16 Pro and the aluminum (eventually) peeled away like paper, leaving them to clean up and remove the remaining paint to create a transparent back plate.
All very ‘do not try this at home’, but the impressive result – with a metallic battery, copper-colored wireless charger, and labeled taptic engine – has now got us craving an iMac G3-style iPhone.
Echoes of the iMac G3
There is a close-to-zero chance of Apple releasing a transparent iPhone Pro, even though it did pioneer a similar kind of translucent look with the iMac G3 back in 1998. Still, all we really want for the Pro series is for it to get some of the bolder colors seen on the base iPhone 16 series.
Our recent WhatsApp poll asking which iPhone 16 models you were planning to buy saw way more engagement for the base iPhone 16 models, with the ultramarine shade beating teal and black.
Despite the arrival of the ‘Desert titanium’ shade on the iPhone 16 Pro series this year, its colors are otherwise very drab. While that certainly makes them more business-friendly, there are surely a significant number of Pro buyers who simply want a fun shade alongside the flagship model’s bonus features like 5x optical zoom.
There are some early signs that Apple may have held back some bolder colors as part of its upgrade strategy for next year’s the iPhone 17 Pro series, with a leaker suggesting that a Teal Titanium, Green Titanium or Dark Green Titanium shade could be in the pipeline for 2025.
We’d take that speculation with a hefty pinch of salt, but it would certainly be an improvement – even if Apple leaves the transparent offerings to modders.