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The teardowns give us some new info and confirm some old rumors.
Andrew Cunningham-
The iPhone 7 Plus, exploded.
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The new Taptic Engine is way bigger than the old one.
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Here's the comparatively tiny version in an iPhone 6S Plus.
It's iPhone release day, and while
people around the world wait impatiently by their windows for the
delivery truck or in line at Apple Stores, the iPhone teardown cottage
industry has been ripping the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus apart to see how they
tick.
iFixit's is still the teardown of record, though as of this writing it has only torn down the larger of the two phones.
The write-up focuses in part on the stuff that Apple is doing with the
space freed up by killing the headphone jack. A bigger battery is part
of that—the 2900mAh, 11.1wHr battery in the 7 Plus is a step up from the
2750mAh battery in the 6S Plus, though still not quite as large as the
2915mAh battery in the old 6 Plus. Chipworks' teardown
notes that the standard iPhone 7 battery is now 1960mAh, a step up from
the 1810mAh in the iPhone 6 and the 1715mAh battery in the 6S.
A lot of that space goes to the new Taptic
Engine, too, which is several times larger than the version in the
iPhone 6S Plus. Apple says the larger Taptic Engine is more precise,
something necessary both to make the solid-state home button feel like a
physical button and to enable the haptic feedback API supported on both
iPhones 7. And some of it is taken up by a plastic bumper "that seems
to channel sound from outside the phone into the microphone."
That solid-state home button and the removal
of the headphone jack also help with waterproofing, and there's other
evidence of water-resistance all throughout the phone. This
waterproofing mostly comes in the form of adhesive and rubber gaskets,
all of which you'll need to be careful about if you want your phone to stay
water-resistant after you put it back together. And the phone still has
a water damage indicator on the inside, driving home what we pointed
out in our review: water damage won't be covered under warranty, no
matter how resistant the phone is.
The waterproofing can complicate some repairs,
but iFixit points out a few areas where the iPhone 7 is an improvement
over the 6S. That solid-state home button can still be removed and
replaced, but making it a fake button instead of a real one removes a
common "point of failure on past iPhones." The logic board is now easier
to remove. And the battery is still pretty easy to access, remove, and
replace, although new tri-wing screws (instead of the Philips head
screws from past iPhones) may require a tool you don't already have in
your arsenal.
On the component side, Chipworks' teardown
confirms that the A10 Fusion is being made by TSMC but not whether Apple
is still dual-sourcing chips from both TSMC and Samsung. One
interesting wrinkle is that the chip is apparently using TSMC's "Integrated Fan-Out"
(InFO) packaging tech, which reduces the height of the chip. Both the 7
and 7 Plus use LPDDR4 RAM, 2GB in the 7 and 3GB in the 7 Plus.
Finally, reports from late last year and earlier this year
that Apple might use Intel modems in some models has been proven
correct. The company appears to be dual-sourcing modems from both Intel
and Qualcomm (which has historically provided all modems for all
iPhones)—the iFixit iPhone is all-Qualcomm, while Chipworks' teardown
includes an Intel part. Apple may just be buying different modems from
different companies to ease supply constraints, but it could also be
using different modems for iPhones intended for different cellular
networks or different countries.
iFixit gives the iPhone 7 Plus a 7 out of 10
on its repairability scale, receiving good marks for the relative ease
with which the battery can be replaced and for the solid-state home
button. The water-resistance features may also help reduce the need for
certain kinds of repairs, though when you do open the phone up they can
make it more difficult to put it back together.
Listing image by iFixit
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