Inside of iPad Pro contains way more foam than you’d expect

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iPad Pro Teardown by iFixit

Photo: iFixit

A teardown of the just-released iPad Pro has revealed one of the secrets behind Apple’s redesigned sound system: chambers filled with sound-amplifying foam.

That’s the best guess from the folks at do-it-yourself repair site iFixit, who are strategically dismantling the new tablet as we speak.

As of this writing, iFixit’s iPad Pro teardown is still in progress, but the inside look at Apple’s latest and largest tablet has already revealed some surprising details.

For one, unlike the iPad Air 2 before it, the Pro’s display cables connect directly in the middle of the device instead of along the lower edge. That shouldn’t affect much, if anything, from a user’s perspective, but it presents a pretty big challenge when you’re trying to dismantle the device. Because these cables aren’t serving as a hinge of sorts, letting iFixit lay the display on the table while they disconnect it, they had to hold up the screen while removing the final screws holding it in place.

iPad Pro teardown display cable
And of course it would be like this on the biggest iOS screen Apple has ever made.
Photo: iFixit

The tearers-down compared this to the screen replacement process on an iPhone 6s, which requires the repairer to prop up the display while disconnecting it so as not to damage the connectors.

The iPad Pro teardown has also uncovered what iFixit calls “a first in iPad history”: In order to access the logic board, the team had to get past the electromagnetic interference shielding on top of it. This layer is like the tablet’s tinfoil hat, protecting its brain from harmful rays and outside tinkering.

iPad Pro teardown EMI shielding
Screw you, EMI shield.
Photo: iFixit

But how about that foam?

Apple has been talking up the iPad Pro’s new-fangled sound system, which contains four speakers that adjust their output depending on the orientation of the tablet. The speakers know whether you’re holding the iPad Pro horizontally or vertically (or upside-down, presumably), and it will always send higher-frequency sound output to whichever two speakers are on top. This is to ensure proper sound balance from the new arrangement.

Previous iPads have just carried their speakers at the bottom, which meant that unless you had it on a stand or were holding it in portrait mode without resting it on your lap at all, you were going to block some of your sound. I’ve just gotten really good at forming whichever hand was on that side into a resonance chamber to make the best of it.

The iPad Pro teardown, however, reveals that the new tablet has its own resonance chambers built right in under the hood (they have plenty of space for that sort of thing now). They’re right next to the drivers, obviously, and protected with a layer of carbon fiber. Under that fiber, though? Foam.

iPad Pro teardown foam
Foam for days, you guys.
Photo: iFixit

iFixit guesses that the foam serves sound-amplification purposes, but I suspect that Apple just had a lot of foam lying around somewhere and realized that the absolute best way to get rid of it was to smuggle it out inside of the iPad Pro. That could actually be why they made the thing in the first place: It’s not just a next-generation tablet, a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Surface Pro, and the company’s attempt to create killer hardware for creators and enterprises.

It’s actually a foam mule.

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