FCC Accidentally Leaked iPhone Schematics
engadget.com
engadget.com
The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module". The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware, not the traces on the PCB.
About the most useful thing you're getting out of this are capacitor values, which are easy to measure either way.
Things used to be different 2-3 decades ago, but nowadays, most commodity PCBs are exceptionally boring - it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
Laptops, motherboards, microwave ovens and whatever else has "commodity PCBs" are much more repairable than the highly size-optimized phone market.
My mom's Samsung phone suddenly failed to charge a year ago, but in a weird way. Tried some tricks but it ended up getting stuck on a black screen during boot.
I handed it to a repair shop in town that had good reviews. Three days later they called back. I asked what was wrong, and it turned out they had to replace one charging chip, a power sequencing chip and a third chip I can't recall the purpose of, along with the USB port. The reason it took so long was they got a bit further for each chip they swapped.
I'm in Norway where prices are high, and we have a 25% VAT on top. I paid $180 including VAT, or $144 before VAT.
For that I might have gotten a very cheap Android phone on sale, however my mom's phone was a premium model from a few years earlier. Besides, less e-waste and saved me time reinstalling everything. Personally I think the repair was well worth it.
There's discussion here in Norway to drop VAT on repair jobs such as this, and in that case I think it would definitely make sense to repair such cases.
In modern phones the key part numbers for ICs aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy.
At best, you can see the part numbers for the passives and their alternate suppliers. The part numbers for most of the actives aren't going to be useful to anyone outside of the manufacturing chain for these parts. A repair tech would simply source the donor parts from an identical phone model.
...on the open market.
However, if your repair shop exists just down the street from one of Apple's component supplier's factories, then knowing the part number of one of the ICs or other actives, might be enough to let you walk in there one day and submit a hand-written PO for a few boxes of said part (...as a cash transaction, of course.)
I assume most physical damage and corrosion etc affects the board and passive components.
The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.
Most of the parts on the PCB are custom and not available for purchase separately. The passives aren't likely to be points of failure, but even when they are they're usually swapped from some other donor board rather than purchased new.
Right, but, knowing what the nominal in-line resistance is between any two pins on the board, will let you do some empirical tests to determine whether a given black-screen fault lies in the board itself, vs in one or more of the SMT components, no? (And so whether you should bother attempting to salvage the board, vs just scraping off the high-value parts and chucking it in the bin.)
You are so out of touch, PCB repair is very common.
This is just one example of via/pad repair: https://rewa.tech/iphone-12-pro-max-not-booting/
The whole repair industry in China is really insane.
>The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.
This is always the case, but there is difference between swapping the whole camera module and just swapping the camera lens.
Hell they even use fiber laser to fix stripe line screen.
However having high quality documentation that is easily accessible is always the first step, and if there are information there that are important it is _much_ more likely it will be known.
It is not "a much less of a deal" as you say, it is a pretty big deal for a global product that billions of people touch.
It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.
Schematics are extremely valuable!
Sure thing if you copy the schematic, routing, you don't suddenly get a working iPhone, but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
Consider, for example, how useful this schematic would be vs an AMD motherboard schematic.
You imagine that because apple has a bunch of money to spend that they are spending more than a competitor would on PCB design. But that's just not how hardware works.
The money Apple is spending on R&D is almost entirely going into the design of their M series chips and their software/firmware.
At GHz frequencies, the PCB isn't a passive substrate; it's an active RF component. Managing signal integrity, controlling impedance, and mitigating EMI in a dense layout is a monumental engineering challenge, not a solved problem from the "1930s radio" era.
The AMD comparison is backward. AMD provides public datasheets and reference designs. This schematic is valuable precisely because Apple's silicon is a black box. It's the only public blueprint for a successful, validated implementation.
The chip and board are a co-designed system. A brilliant SoC is useless without the board-level engineering to power it cleanly and cool it within a tiny physical envelope. That system integration is the R&D.
Any signal that uses passive termination, and would therefore show up in the schematic, is basically a tacit admission that this line needs something, but basically anything remotely close to 50Ω will do. Which is something you could've gathered by inspection of the final product.
No it doesn't. That entire field operates primarily within the ASICs, not the PCB.
> At GHz frequencies, the PCB isn't a passive substrate;
Yes, it actually is. There is some noise and cross talk that's emitted from the signals but it's minimal and easily blocked. Very simple rules, like minimum trace distances, solve pretty much any problem that comes up from the frequency of the signals.
But further, those problems are peanuts compared to dealing with the exact same problem within the ASIC. Very simple rules are needed for the PCB.
> mitigating EMI in a dense layout is a monumental engineering challenge, not a solved problem from the "1930s radio" era.
You are vastly overblowing how big an issue or problem this is. The voltages and current on the lines are minimized to cut back on EMF and power consumption. Those are dictated by the chip design, not the PCB setup.
> A brilliant SoC is useless without the board-level engineering to power it cleanly and cool it within a tiny physical envelope. That system integration is the R&D.
There is some R&D that goes into the board, for sure. However you are completely overblowing how hard or costly it is for apple or others to develop.
High-speed design doesn't stop at the ASIC boundary; that's often where the hardest part begins. The entire field of SerDes engineering exists to solve the "trivial" problem of getting multi-gigabit signals off the chip and across the board to RAM or a port without dissolving into noise. It's a system-level challenge.
At GHz frequencies, a PCB trace is not a passive wire; it is a transmission line. The idea that "simple rules" for trace distance solve this is fundamentally incorrect. Real-world design requires complex electromagnetic simulation to control impedance, manage signal reflections, and design via structures that don't destroy the signal. This is why Signal Integrity (SI) is a dedicated engineering discipline.
EMI is caused by the rate of change of current (dI/dt), not just the voltage level. Modern chips have incredibly fast signal rise/fall times to achieve high performance, which creates massive high-frequency energy that radiates easily. Passing FCC/CE certification is a famously difficult, multi-million-dollar R&D effort, not a trivial detail.
You can't hold both positions that there is a bunch of system dependent physics involved AND that someone can simply copy those design elements and pass CE/FCC licensing.
And no, I don't misunderstand it.
> The entire field of SerDes engineering exists to solve the "trivial" problem of getting multi-gigabit signals off the chip and across the board to RAM or a port without dissolving into noise. It's a system-level challenge.
Right, and most of the problem is inside the specification of the signal. It has (almost) nothing to do with the actual PCB design beyond talking about the voltages and acceptable trace lengths.
You are forgetting exactly what the initial discussion is about, whether or not the schematics are valuable to other hardware manufacturers.
> Real-world design requires complex electromagnetic simulation to control impedance, manage signal reflections, and design via structures that don't destroy the signal. This is why Signal Integrity (SI) is a dedicated engineering discipline.
Simulations that are completely missing from the schematics, correct? You don't even get to glean what those simulations would be and importantly minor changes could by your logic completely ruin a design. Correct?
This is the weakness of your argument.
Yes, these things matter. But you are frankly overblowing how complex or hard they are to create. Everyone is doing them and it's not a huge cost to the actual hardware manufacturing.
> Passing FCC/CE certification is a famously difficult, multi-million-dollar R&D effort, not a trivial detail.
There are hobbiests that have managed to pass the FCC/CE certification with their own custom PCBs. Look, I admit that it's something harder to do with high speed signals. However, it's not a "multi-million-dolar R&D effort" That is, unless you are wrapping the VP of engineering's salary into that calculation.
The biggest problem you actually face as a hardware company is that if there is an issue you have to redesign and resubmit to the FCC/CE which takes a time. Online, I'm finding people saying that 4 or 5 respins is common.
Apple spending more money here would be entirely around avoiding that respin. Buying the same testing equipment and shoring up the testing procedures to make sure they get the certification the first or second time rather than spending a bunch of time needing to retry.
Which, I can't stress enough, is not something that comes out of the schematics. You as a competitor don't get any real information about the testing that was done and you certainly get no information about what the high speed communications between chips looks like (though that is entirely going away).
It definitely seems like they have a bunch of unconnected ways of arguing in this comment section. Like here they are arguing that the PCB design is the hardest act of engineering ever done. Elsewhere they are arguing that just seeing the schematics is all someone needs to build an iPhone.
Looking at their comment history outside this thread, I think they aren't always using LLMs. Perhaps just when something gets more technical than they have the experience for.
None of this is true.
Competitors save no R&D at all because these chips are custom to Apple.
The schematic doesn't show routing of the PCB. It shows logical connections between components. The routing is not represented.
Decoupling capacitor placement is also chip specific so it does not translate to other vendors. At this level of PCB design the board is simulated in very expensive software to determine how the power distribution network performs.
> but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
Not in the slightest. This shows logical connections between Apple specific parts. There are no portable industry secrets hidden in this document.
You claim this is worthless because of the custom Apple chips, but that’s precisely what makes it so valuable. Competitors aren't trying to drop an Apple A19 into their phone; they are learning how Apple solves the universal engineering problems that come with supporting a high-performance, custom SoC or their specific parts.
Seeing the complete power delivery network and high-speed routing for that specific chip is a masterclass. When they see 'a capacitor here,' they learn Apple's validated strategy for handling a transient load or suppressing a specific EMI source on a cutting-edge processor. That engineering principle is absolutely portable to their own custom silicon from Qualcomm or Samsung.
That is the very definition of saving R&D. It’s not about copying parts, it’s about learning the architectural patterns from a successful, finished product to avoid months of costly trial and error.
The board files were not leaked.
I don’t know what you think you’re talking about, but it’s not relevant to the article and the leak we’re discussing.
> Seeing the complete power delivery network and high-speed routing for that specific chip is a masterclass. When they see 'a capacitor here,' they learn Apple's validated strategy for handling a transient load or suppressing a specific EMI source on a cutting-edge processor. That engineering principle is absolutely portable to their own custom silicon from Qualcomm or Samsung.
It is not portable nor priceless.
I’m telling you: I have experience doing this and working with these tools. Nothing you’re saying about this topic is accurate.
Furthermore, it details the complete bill of materials and the exact circuit design for every high-speed interface. To suggest this knowledge isn't portable is to claim that the principles of designing a stable power network or a clean USB4 interface are somehow unique to Apple. Any experienced engineer knows that learning from a competitor's complete, validated, and mass-produced system is an invaluable shortcut. An appeal to personal authority doesn't change these fundamental realities of hardware development.
I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip, but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back of his repair shop.
But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them.
But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them.
A trace on PCB is much more important. Boardview is a must to do board repair.
If anyone is curious
Very nice to see these out in the open though. Saves some work. Even if it is the 16e.
Examples of this happening in the past?
If that were the case, there would be some examples of it like the person you are responding to asked for.
I believe monopolies and megacorporations are a necessity for authoritarian governments.
I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires. This is a nonstarter in court, and furthermore this is not negligence by the FCC. You do not have a right to keep your FCC filings from leaking under all circumstances, and the FCC has not assumed a civil obligation externally to your rights to do so. Government agencies do not sign NDAs when corporations submit technical documents to them. The Federal government has no obligation in statute to keep them secret, you asking them to is a polite suggestion to the FCC and holds no bearing in law. Even if you could prove damages, trying to bring a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the government for this would be a nightmare in any administration, and there's no way that the Supreme Court would cede the idea that the government has an absolute obligation your filings secret forever under pain of civil penalties. It's an embarrassing clerical error, but it isn't a tort.
Statute of Limitations is about how long you have to file the case, by no means is it a deadline by which you must fully prove damages and have no opportunity to continue your case after it passes.
Apple fears the tariffs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...
> The parties acknowledge that monetary damages may not be a sufficient remedy for unauthorized disclosure or use of Confidential Information [...list ways Apple is allowed to nail disclosing partner...]
The law is that you have to submit your schematics to the FCC if you want to sell a device with wireless communications so the FCC can validate that you aren't improperly using the wireless spectrum.
The US might be corporate captured but it's not THAT corporate captured. The US government still has a bigger stick than apple does.
For competitors they're useless anyway - the big guns (think Samsung, Apple, Motorola, ...) all know how to design a smartphone and none of them will want to get caught copying a competitor. Chinese cloners and repair shop suppliers somehow manage to reverse engineer even highly complex PCBs in a matter of weeks, to the tune you can walk around in Shenzen and have a multitude of deepest level repair options, including upgrades by reballing and replacing storage options that Apple doesn't even offer.
But actual repair shops and repair cafes here? They would greatly benefit from having quality documentation and access to tools.
Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.
There have been a few videos posted here or showing up on my YT feed for phone repairs, iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail (and pretty obviously, when looking at the pcb with a heat camera).
Those are actives. On a highly integrated device like this it would most likely be an application-specific PMIC (power management IC) that isn't generally available. It would be an IC that would be salvaged from one board and transferred to another.
The PMIC for a modern SoC is tightly integrated with the SoC. It handles power management, supply sequencing and timing, transitions between power states, standby modes, battery charging, and communication with the SoC. There is digital communication between the SoC and the PMIC to control all of this.
This isn't something you kludge together with a microcontroller and some off the shelf parts.
I haven't seen modern SoCs with tightly integrated PMICs like you're describing, but they could certainly exist. But if they're not using an off-the-shelf chip, why don't they just integrate their power management functions into the SoC? Not enough balls?
Phones do not have electrolytic capacitors because they are too small.
However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private.
The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients.
Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer.
Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
It doesn't even matter if the Chinese companies get it. That will only accelerate innovation because nobody would buy an unrepairable clone if repairability is the norm. The Chinese companies will have to publish their schematics too.
Cloners need to be tackled differently anyway, I'd propose attacking these on the marketplaces - ban all sort of marketplace where the platform operator does not physically buy the product to resell it. The third-party ecosystem was an experiment, and it had a good run - but it also has significant downsides, and it's not just taxes or barely any enforcement of environmental safety laws, but particularly from companies not caring at all about waste. So much utterly cheap crap that would normally not pass any incoming QC from a classic big box store gets imported into our markets, our consumers discover it's crap... and while the consumers usually get a refund, the crap has to be disposed of at the consumer's and eventually taxpayer's cost.
Schematics are absolutely copyrighted.
Maybe you meant that the knowledge about connections between parts can't be copyrighted? Someone could have reverse engineered the connections and posted their own interpreted schematic.
However, the schematic that is shared is very much copyrighted. Any competition trying to use it internally in any way would put themselves at legal risk.
In this case, the value to competitors is virtually nil as the schematic is for Apple specific chips which competitors wouldn't have access to.
A competitor can legally use the information to build their own product; they just can't reproduce the drawing.
The schematic is also incredibly valuable. It's a blueprint to Apple's design philosophy and the only public map of how their custom silicon actually functions in the real world. That's priceless information for any competitor.
The logical connection of components is not, but the literal schematic PDF is indeed copyrighted.
The schematic is also not “priceless” information. It does not give any secret information about how the Apple part functions. Most of it is generic connections between parts which are not the least bit surprising to any experienced EE.
I have actual real world experience working on these types of systems. I don’t understand how so many HN commenters are so confident about their EE knowledge when they clearly don’t have the experience.
No one suggests every connection is a revelation. The value is in the complete, validated system architecture for a black-box SoC. It’s the specific power sequencing, the exact filtering on high-speed lines, and the full support circuitry taken as a whole. That integrated blueprint is the "secret sauce," and its value is self-evident, regardless of any single engineer's experience with generic circuits.
Two, take a look at the system specification and block diagram also.
I guess an argument can also be made for security. Publishing schematics makes it easier bad actors.
Copyright applies, even with schematics published. Somehow, the repair people end up with schematics through back channels. It is ridiculous they have to use these channels.
I'd argue the public interest is above any benefits Apple gets with this layer of obfuscation.
>Or worse, they patent the design and sit on new tech for 20 years which stifles innovation for other companies.
Don't companies do that anyway? Or do you mean steal ideas and then patent them? Prior art invalidates this.
>I guess an argument can also be made for security. Publishing schematics makes it easier bad actors.
Security through obscurity isn't a thing. Actual security requires a good design, not obfuscating a flawed one.
Extremely helpful for both repair and modding.
Tim has made some terrible choices – I'm sad this is so accurate.
Because the FCC didn’t publish specifics. I think one would get better, more specific information from a teardown. It’s even in TFA:
”Competitors could simply buy a handset and open it up to get to this information…”
You talk as if that's some secret.
Common "jellybean" passive components like resistors, capacitors, inductors... are designed to be standardized and interchangeable with any other component of the same specifications. The remaining factor might be cost and manufacturer (their quality control), but knowing which makes of capacitor are consistently reliable is hardly trade secret knowledge.
Not even close to true for capacitors and inductors. True for resistors mostly, but inductors and capacitors have wildly different specifications depending on their intrinsic parameters. The derating curves (AC, DC, etc) vary wildly depending on the individual part selection. One capacitor may have double or triple the capacitance of another for the same size, nominal rating, and type at a specific voltage condition.
Sure you can overbuild and not worry too much, but given the wildly small size of phones don’t be shocked if the individual components selected are very critical.
Most of it, yeah.
Any teardown org would be absolutely salivating at this info.
I'll disagree and say that any teardown org would be able to figure this out on their own in an afternoon, and end up with more information than the PDF in the process. You vastly over-estimate the value of schematics showing wire traces from one black box to another.
Granted, there are some specifics that could be interesting from a design analysis perspective like the bill of materials (BoM) cost, or the specific choices made in the design (e.g. using a buck regulator IC to improve efficiency, tradeoffs between cost and redundancy, etc...).
I maintain that most of the specifics contained in the schematic aren't useful for an engineer designing another phone. An experienced electronic engineer facing the same design problems would make similar decisions regarding which components to use, based on known principles - but that's only if they could access Apple's proprietary chips in the first place.
Everything we can see in the schematic could have been generated from a teardown as you mentioned. Not sure what "certain consumers" you're referring to - I imagine the schematics would help repair shops most in knowing what test points to diagnose and what components are involved.
Huawei, Xiaomi, et al. don't need Apple's schematics. They have plenty of design engineers of their own, and can't access Apple's chips anyway. The parts that do use market-available chips don't have any critical details that might take away Apple's edge.
HTC built up the required R&D and supplier-structure in China then, years before they put their own logo on the first device.
The remaining gap was the lack in experience on mobile platform/UX design and localization, something Microsoft wasn't very experienced themselves. But Google came to the rescue with Android, so Chinese vendors just had to study the UX on other devices and rebuild them in Android...