iPhone 5 Teardown | Hacker News Reader

iPhone 5 Teardown

ifixit.com

113 pointsmichael_miller41 comments

In the review they say Antennas are sized to be fractions of full wavelengths. I thought I read a year ago that the reason the 4 and 4s didn't have LTE was because the physical size of the phone wasn't large enough for the radio antenna needed for LTE. Is it true that they needed to extend the size of the phone to get the right fractional size for an LTE antenna?

In the US the lower frequencies being used for LTE are 700/800 MHz which corresponds to a wavelength of between 37 and 43 cm.

A dipole would be at 1/2 wavelength or 21 cm at the lowest frequency. At 1/4 wavelength you'd be looking at 10 cm long.

The iPhone 4S is 11.5 cm long so I think that a 4G/LTE antenna would fit inside just fine.

No. The antennas are much smaller than the length of the phone.

Looks like the teardown is underway, so only a few pictures are posted. Would be fun to get a live feed of them hacking on it!

They're just disassembling in style, not hacking anything.

I love this site. My MBA fan had an issue and I only stumbled across it while researching my repair options.

I was able to buy a new fan and all the tools at less than half the cost of getting an Apple repair center to do it. I'll certainly be able to reuse the tools as I build up my "repair shop".

They have very detailed video guides that explain every step of the process--and they have them tailored for every MBA generation, explaining the little differences between them as they go. Very cool. I especially like their retro philosophy of DIY and repair vs. recycle and discard.

Wow, did they actually go to Asia to buy the iPhone5 so that they'd be the first ones to post the teardown? (it seems that there are a few sites that compete in this teardown/BOM space)

When I want to find out what screwdrivers I need to open my MacBook, the first thing I think of is iFixit – oh, and hey, turns out I need a screwdriver I don’t have at home and they are selling it.

I think being the ultimate teardown website is worth a lot of money for them. I’m honestly not even sure how some small website selling repair tools could get that kind of exposure and attention any other way.

I think that is a symptom of a larger problem to be honest. Odd screws don't stop tampering, they just cost you lots of money to tamper. Why bother? this is another circumvention industry that doesn't really need to exist.

My Lenovo can be stripped bare and reassembled with a Swiss army knife in a few minutes and not much effort or head scratching.

For reference, Lenovo have a web site which SHOWS you how to take your stuff to bits:

http://service.lenovo.partner-management.com/et.cfm?eid=1369

Pick a unit, click the Take course link. Videos for everything.

I couldn’t care less. That is one aspect I do not even consider when making a purchase decision. Sorry, I hope that doesn’t offend you :-)

But that wasn’t really what I was talking about, now was it? Your ideology might be showing if you make completely off-topic comments and free associate once something comes up your ideology tells you you should care deeply about.

Not quite, they went to Australia.

Yeah, it's an Australian $2 coin in one of the photos. I'm quite surprised that being ~16 hours ahead of the competition is worth an airfare to Australia but impressed nonetheless.

Being the teardown site brings a lot of traffic and business. I know I go there first when I want to know how to tear apart stuff, and I bought my small drivers kit from them.

Apparently they have an office in Australia already.

And it's 10 hours i.e. one sleep between LA and Sydney.

It's ironic that, after all this engineering, it's reduced to court cases about rounded corners sigh

It's sad that, after all the facts, you still think it was a court case about rounded corners sigh

I'm interested to see if they discover a firmware disabled NFC chip, similar to how Bluetooth was originally included but disabled. And yes, I'm aware it was publicly denied.

You need a large antenna for NFC:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus-S-Teardown/4365/1#s2013...

(hover over the second picture on Step 3)

Even if a chip existed, the iPhone 5's aluminum back wouldn't provide a spot to place an NFC antenna.

NFC antennas are huge, it wouldn't be possible for the phone to have one internally with a metal backplate.

Bluetooth was originally included but disabled

What?

Some ipod touch devices had a bluetooth chip in them and it wasn't enabled.

Not some, the entire second generation.

You know, seeing how many chips are in there makes me realize how much more the electronics have the potential to shrink as these things continue to integrate. Even in the same sized case, it might be possible to slip in quote a bit more battery.

Given that Apple already has two Apple-branded chips on board, that's somewhat likely.

Some of the chips, specifically ones that are mostly analog or mixed analog/digital, will likely remain discreet for quite a while.

good, I hate it when ICs get gossipy.

Yeah, I find it interesting that they haven't integrated stuff like the touchscreen controller into A6. Maybe it has too much analog on it.

They've been on step 8 for about 45 minutes. I'm looking forward to hearing what obstacles they ran into that slowed them down a bit.

Our memcached server bit the dust, and it took a while to populate a new cache machine so we could switch back to dynamic serving. In the meantime, our Varnish box served the static cache (showing up to step 8). So our teardown team was still working like mad, and it took the servers a bit of time to catch up.

In step 9 they removed the glued on battery.

Didn't realize the iPhone 4/4S did away with the simple screen replacement. I was really impressed with that when I broke my iPhone 3G display and came to replace it.

I was kind of thinking they'd sacrifice that with the new, even thinner iPhone 5, though. It's a pleasant surprise to see the screen assembly is effectively user-removable.

I just wish Apple supplied replacement screen assemblies. With the new integrated touch screen it's only going to become more difficult for third parties to manufacture passable replacement parts...

Can someone explain why both this and the iPad need two different touchscreen controllers?

Different screen size; each controller is probably better at handling one size.

No, I'm not asking why the iPad and the iPhone use different controller chips: The teardown says that the iPhone has two controller chips on the board & goes on to say that the iPad is the same. Not only do they both have two chips, but the chips are different!

That's what I'd like explained: any ideas?

Ah, I misread your question.

According to their notes, "Rather than a single touchscreen controller, Apple went with a multi-chip solution to handle the larger screen size, à la iPad.".

But I'd guess that it's not (just) the size that makes them use two chips; since they're different chips they probably have different strenghts and weaknesses. Or maybe just having two different representations of each touch make it possible to be more accurate.

Maybe one for multitouch and one for more accurate single touch detection?

There can't be separate touch controller for "multitouch". In fact the word multitouch is not even a technical term. Touchscreens are multitouch by default. The two chips probably work in parallel to handle the needs of the larger touchscreen.

Galaxy Tab 10.1 actually has three Atmel touch controllers, which is probably why scrolling on it is smoother than most Android devices.

Enlighten me: How exactly does having two, or even three controllers make for smoother scrolling? Assume I know nothing about touch screen controllers!

Speculation (I know nothing about the technology, either):

There are two factors to smooth scrolling:

- high-resolution, low latency measurement of finger location.

- fast, low latency scrolling of screen content.

I guess one can use multiple detectors to increase spatial resolution of position detection. For example, with two detectors that each have a X DPI resolution, one could place them in two layers, staggered from each other behind the screen to double resolution in one direction.

Alternatively, if there is no technical limitation to DPI, it might be a limitation to the controllers one can buy. If they have a maximum number of lines they can detect, one could use two controllers, each one covering half the screen, and double resolution that way.

What stops them from doing the full teardown at once? Why only the first few steps?

I believe they are posting it as they are tearing it down, so there is more to come!

They are working on it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com