It can often feel like modern devices are less hackable than their thicker and far less integrated predecessors, but perhaps it’s just that our techniques need to catch up. Here’s an outstanding hack that adds a dual SIM slot to a US-sold eSIM iPhone 15/15 Pro, while preserving its exclusive mmwave module. No doubt, making use of the boardview files and schematics, it shows us that smartphone modding isn’t dead — it could be that we need to acknowledge the new tools we now have at our disposal.
When different hardware features are region-locked, sometimes you want to get the best of both worlds. This mod lets you go the entire length seamlessly, no bodges. It uses a lovely looking flexible printed circuit (FPC) patch board to tap into a debug header with SIM slot signals, and provides a customized Li-ion pouch cell with a cutout for the SIM slot. There’s just the small matter of using a CNC mill to make a cutout in the case where the SIM slot will go, and you’ll need to cut a buried trace to disable the eSIM module. Hey, we mentioned our skills needed to catch up, right? From there, it appears that iOS recognizes the new two SIM slots seamlessly.
The video is impressive and absolutely worth a watch if modding is your passion, and if you have a suitable CNC and a soldering iron, you can likely install this mod for yourself. Of course, you lose some things, like waterproofing, the eSIM feature, and your warranty. However, nothing could detract from this being a fully functional modkit for a modern-day phone, an inspiration for us all. Now, perhaps one of us can take a look at building a mod helping us do parts transplants between phones, parts pairing be damned.
fpc means Free Pascal Compiler … to me. So … I see that isn’t what was meant here. I was curious :) .
Flexible Printed Circuit – the yellow (or sometimes black) super thin and flexible PCBs, like the one shown in the picture being sodlered to the iPhone mainboard!
Jesus, the things people do?
Not for the faint hearted.
oh this one seems to be reasonably easy to install, as far as phone mods go! the scale is small, sure, but it looks quite well-developed and thus convenient enough to apply. there’s also quite a few tricks of the trade shown, like using solder paste on testpoints to make sure you tin them well; all in all, worth learning from!
The only thing that was iffy was the machining of the slot for the SIM card. Special rig and tools are needed to make that one come out right. Everything else was straight forward.
But I still don’t get why someone would want to do this?
What is the new benefit?
It adds dual physical SIM?
It’s analogous to someone adding a 3.5mm stereo jack to a phone that has all the internal hardware to support one, but doesn’t physically have the slot.
Err, yeah – but so does buying a Canadian-market one on eBay, and selling the USA-market one for about the same amount of $. Seems like a fool’s errand.
What I’d like to see is someone doing a smaller display hack. I’d love to have an iPhone 15/16 Pro Mini.
That to me sounds like a job for a ‘hackentosh’ style software mod on a android phone… Perhaps the Unihertz jelly, as that thing is tiny. Not sure how possible such a thing would really be, not looked into Apple phone stuff at all. Though if I’m honest also not sure why you’d want to – Apple phones are not garbage, but the price is so bonkers and the software features don’t seem special either. So it would be lots of effort for no real gain as far as I can tell.
Not really possible unfortunately; hackentosh works because for a while (prior to the arm chips) apple used x86 processors, so they weren’t that difficult from a pc.
An iPhone is running on a completely different set of hardware; you would have to do a massive amount of work to effectively port ios over to a completely different system.
Best bet would be to try to get an iPhone motherboard to talk to a smaller display; even that likely is not possible as Apple has taken to cryptographicly locking hardware together. Sometimes even almost identical displays that should work fine will refuse to work because they don’t have the right id.