Huawei Mate 60 Pro’s kamikaze screen gets it a 5/10 repairability score in a new teardown video

Smartphone teardown videos are a popular genre, if you can stomach watching a pair of faceless hands reverse the building process of a spanking new device that you only dream of having in your pocket.

The latest flagship to land on the operating table is the highly controversial Huawei Mate 60 Pro – the same that got US officials full of sound and fury, and questions with (so far) no answers. Like: How did the heavily US-sanctioned Huawei get to produce a 5G-capable, 7nm chipset? Did it produce it on its own, or did someone cross a red line and sell it to them?

Let’s leave politics and politicians aside and focus on the device itself (via GSMArena). A popular phone teardown and crash-testing YouTube channel by the name of PBKreviews got a hold of the Huawei Mate 60 Pro and disassembled it for everybody’s joy and entertainment. Spoiler alert: the device is now non-functional, as the screen was presumably damaged in some way during the teardown.

Here’s the video, it’s in English:


There’s always the chance that the guy behind PBKreviews did in fact damage the screen by mistake, but that’s probably what couch experts would charge him with. Given how many teardown videos there are in the channel, it’s obvious that the guy knows his stuff. It’s far more probable that the screen on the Mate 60 Pro is fixed too strongly and – in the style of a kamikaze – destroys itself upon contact.

For example, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro is also notorious for being a nightmare to tear down and fix, since the display adhesive is “insanely strong”, as many put it.

After the display removal, there’s a detailed tour-de-parts inside the Mate 60 Pro. Don’t expect to get an answer to the questions that are plaguing US officials, though: it’s just a fascinating teardown. There’s another one, too, but it’s not in English: