

iPhone 5 Teardown - michael_miller
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-5-Teardown/10525/1

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seanalltogether
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?

~~~
jgrahamc
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.

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cloudwalking
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!

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

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Todd
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.

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hkmurakami
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)

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arrrg
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.

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eckyptang
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.

~~~
arrrg
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.

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

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

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taitems
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.

~~~
glhaynes
_Bluetooth was originally included but disabled_

What?

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

~~~
shinratdr
Not some, the entire second generation.

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bane
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.

~~~
zdw
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.

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riffic
good, I hate it when ICs get gossipy.

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ghshephard
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.

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kwiens
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.

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aes256
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...

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

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

~~~
pja
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?

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m_eiman
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.

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

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esolyt
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.

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

~~~
Someone
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.

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

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

