iFixIt iPhone 5s Teardown
iFixIt teardown specialists extraordinaire iFixIt comment:
Thanks to a little time zone hacking, we managed to get our iPhone 5s before the official release day in the States (a big thank you to everyone on the eastern side of Australia for being bold enough to live your lives almost a whole day into the future).
We loved the iPhone 5 when it came out a year ago. And we were curious: was our 5s just an iPhone 5 in a shiny gold package? Almost, but not quite. There are a lot of design similarities between this iteration and the last, but we noticed a big, sticky difference when we went to remove the battery: repair-unfriendly glue. Unlike the iPhone 5, it took heat and spudgering to pry up the battery this time – an automatic demerit to repairability, knocking the 5s’s score to 6 out of 10 on our repairability scale.
The teardown:
• The A7 has 1 GB RAM, two cores, and is based on the ARM v8 64-bit instruction set
• Qualcomm MDM9615M LTE Modem & WTR1605L transceiver
• The 1.5 pixel pitch iSight camera is a new, until-now-unseen 12MP sensor from Sony
• A Murata Wi-Fi module most likely houses a Broadcom BCM4334; Apple opted not to upgrade the iPhone to 802.11ac
• Hynix H2JTDG8UD3MBR NAND Flash
• Broadcom BCM5976 touchscreen controller
• Additional components from Skyworks, Triquint, Texas Instruments, and Avago
What we don’t yet know:
• Who manufactured the A7. We need to decap the chip for that, which will take a bit more time.
• Who made the MEMS sensors that feed into the M7.
• What, or where, the fabled M7 is.
Apple’s A7 is Made By Samsung
iFixIt says:
There was mighty speculation among the internet as to the manufacturer of Apples new A7 processor. We uncovered it last night during the iPhone 5s teardown, but now Chipworks has taken it one step further. Through the magic of decapping an IC, their internal shots revealed the A7 to be made by Samsung….
For more information, visit:
http://ifixit.org/5315/apples-a7-processor-is-made-by-samsung/
For the full teardown, visit:
http://goo.gl/2ri41O
