Hang out with iFixit
Between spreading the word about why repair matters and tearing down all the coolest devices, we’re pretty busy here at iFixit. And this fall, we’re especially busy. In the coming months, our CEO Kyle Wiens will be roaming the world to talk about our mission at iFixit and Dozuki: teach people how to do real world things.
If Kyle happens to be in your area, come down and hang out with iFixit! He’s always happy to chat about repair, teardowns, and technical writing.
iPhone 5: An Evolution in Repair
This article originally ran with TreeHugger.
The iPhone 5 is selling in droves—more than 5 million iPhones in just three days. You can tell at a glance that this iPhone is different. It is 20 percent lighter, 18 percent thinner, and—with a 4-inch display—taller than previous editions. But the changes are more than skin deep: the iPhone 5 is the most repairable iPhone we’ve ever seen.
This new, highly repairable iPhone comes just three months after Apple voluntarily withdrew from EPEAT’s green electronic standard. Their exit sparked a backlash so fierce the company was forced to issue a public apology. I run iFixit, where we are building a free repair manual for everything. At the time, we speculated that Apple backed out of EPEAT because their new flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro with Retina display, wasn’t repairable enough to meet the green standard.
Tech giants have long been charting a production path of thinner, sleeker, faster devices—and Apple is leading the charge. But as our teardown specialists dismantled these super-slim devices, they found that thin and sleek frequently came at the cost of durability and repairability.
When we started our teardown of the iPhone 5 last week, we expected more of the same trend. But Apple surprised us. Once you get past the anti-customer proprietary screws guarding the entrance, the iPhone 5 is easy to open and easy to repair. That’s not just a win for the environment or the consumer; repairable design is also a win for Apple’s bottom line.
Read the rest of this article »
iPhone 5 Internals Wallpaper
Apple goes to great lengths to make their products beautiful, both inside and out. And thanks to our iPhone 5 teardown last week, the whole world got a chance to goggle over the phone’s gorgeous guts. But imagine if you could goggle over the iPhone 5′s internals every time you looked at it — just like if you had X-ray vision! Well, thanks to our awesome new iPhone 5 Internals wallpaper, that dream is now a reality. This wallpaper is specially tailored to look exactly how your iPhone 5 would if the LCD were invisible. If that’s not awesome, then we don’t know what is!
Simply visit this post on your iPhone and click the image below to view the wallpaper in the iPhone 5′s native 1136 x 640 resolution. We’ll also tweet the link to this post, which is a super-easy way to get it on your phone.
Above is a “true-to-scale” image of the iPhone 5 internals. Below is the same image, only slightly zoomed out. We realized that there are some pretty cool features around the perimeter of the iPhone 5 that wouldn’t normally be viewable. Half of us liked the top image, half of us liked the bottom one — so we’ll let you decide which wallpaper to use.
iPhone 5 Cameras: Sony and Omnivision Win
The iPhone 5 is full of win for both Sony and Omnivision. Our buddies at Chipworks have found that the main 8 MP camera is manufactured by Sony, while the front-facing camera is an Omnivison OV2C3B unit. Read the rest of this article »
iPhone 5 Teardown
The iPhone 5 practically flew apart under our nimble spudgers once we got it on the operating table. Good news for all the phone droppers out there: the front glass/display is the first thing that comes off the iPhone 5! Replacing a cracked front panel is significantly easier than the iPhone 4/4S.
And the further we delved, the more excited we got — even though we had to remove two pentalobe screws to get inside. The oft-broken and hard to repair home button now sports an integrated metal support bracket that should reduce the chance of failure, and the battery comes out just as easily as in last year’s model. Overall, the iPhone 5 received a very solid 7/10 repairability score!
MJ explains it all:
iPhone 5 Teardown Underway
Hey, great news: the iPhone 5 teardown is underway!
After months of iPhone rumors, days of post-announcement anticipation, and hours of waiting in line, we’ve managed to get our repair-happy hands on the new iPhone 5.
iFixit co-founder Luke Soules trekked halfway around the world to Melbourne, Australia to be one of the first to receive the iPhone 5. Then, he flew like the wind back to MacFixit Australia’s office and started taking apart our unit. The process is now well underway.
Check out the details of the teardown now, or wait for the full summary of findings to follow!