Apple iPad Teardown

ifixit.com

19 points·icco··8 comments

Page one of this same article is probably a better place to start:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1238669

Oh lame. I was viewing the single page view, My bad.

wow. I sure hope he was able to put it all back together because the page doesn't seem to have any ads on it to pay for a new iPad.

They sell replacement parts, you get the necessary step by step instructions for free on their website. They are also pretty much always the first to (systematically and publicly) pry open new Apple gizmos.

Seems to be a great strategy. When I wanted to research prices for iPod mini batteries yesterday the first address that came to my mind was ifixit.com

I'm curious how much RAM it has but it seems no one knows yet even after a teardown.

The teardown indicates that "K4X2" is written on the A4 chip and they believe this to be a Samsung DRAM part number. I Googled for it but found nothing helpful so am going to stab in the dark and guess 4 gigabits (a more common measurement on-the-chip for memory) * 2 == 512MB * 2 == 1 gigabyte. Of course, that's a total guess and I've not seen memory part numbers work quite that way before ;-)

From Step 15 (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/2):

Markings on the A4:

- N26CGM0T 1007 APL0398 33950084 YNL184A2 1004 K4X2G643GE

- Yes, the K4X2 is a Samsung DRAM part number!

- Decoding the part number shows there is 2Gb of memory inside. This translates into ~256MB of memory.

- This means the A4 processor is probably being manufactured by Samsung.

- The DRAM was stamped at the end of January, while the processor die was likely manufactured the third week of February.

Just FWIW, that "Decoding the part number" bulletpoint wasn't there when I made my post :-) But.. hmm.. that sucks!

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