Teardowns

iPhone 5s Teardown Completed

iPhone 5s teardown

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.

Check out the full teardown! Or sample the highlights:

• 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 µ 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

Update: Our friends at Chipworks helped us figure out more about the A7 and the M7.