14 DAY TRIAL // There are many things that phone manufacturers can copy for Apple, and for what it’s worth, some have already “borrowed” design ideas or features for their own devices, but there’s one single part that a company should never ever get from Cupertino: the pentalobes used on the iPhone and the Apple Watch.
So it might take many by surprise to find out that Huawei has actually copied these screws for its new P9, which for one unknown and totally awkward reason now comes with pentalobes.
iFixIt has discovered in its Huawei P9 teardown that the Chinese firm has turned to this type of screws to keep the case in place. Just like Apple did on its own iPhones. This is the very first time when pentalobes are being used on a device other than Apple’s and honestly, it’s hard to find a reason for this choice since it’s really terrible, impossible to work with, and quite easy to strip.
If you’re an Apple Watch user who buys new bands, you might know that most sellers offer a pentalobe screwdriver with every product, just because it’s almost impossible to work with these screws without a dedicated tool. Not to mention tearing down an iPhone for whatever reason, as Apple’s proprietary screws are being used to secure the case of the device.
iPhone 7 will also use pentalobes
The experts at iFixIt have been shocked too to see the pentalobe being used on the Huawei P9.
“Antenna bands, chamfered edges, brushed aluminum and—Pentalobes? The P9 seems to have taken the iPhone design as law, down to the nasty proprietary five-lobed screws. This marks the first time we've seen such a tiny pentalobe screw outside the Apple ecosystem; we can only hope this is an outlier, not a trend,” they say.
“Seriously, there's no good reason to use pentalobe screws. They are shallow and have round lobes, making them excessively easy to strip. The only reason to use them is to prevent the average user from getting them out.”
In case you’re wondering, the iPhone 7 launching later this year will also use pentalobes, not necessarily because they’re such a “great” innovation, but because the design is very similar to that of the iPhone 6s. More info on the iPhone 7 here.