iPhone 7 Plus teardown confirms bigger 2,900 mAh battery

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Oh, iPhone 7 Plus -- you weren't long for this world.
Photo: iFixit

While most Apple fans around the world are just hoping to get their hands on a new iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus, our friends over at iFixit have already taken one apart.

In their teardown of the iPhone 7 Plus, the repair experts confirm some important details about Apple’s plus-sized next-gen handset — such as its 2,900 mAh battery, which is slightly more than 5 percent larger than the 2,750 mAh battery used in last year’s iPhone 6s Plus.

There are also some interesting design revelations, such as confirming that the iPhone’s lower speaker grille is aesthetic only. iFixit also notes extra waterproofing in the form of stronger gooey adhesive strips, as well as the way in which the space previously occupied by the headphone jack is now being used for “a component that seems to channel sound from outside the phone into the microphone.”

Intriguingly, the iPhone 7 Plus reportedly opens from the side rather than the top, as in previous models.

In terms of chips, iFixit reveals that the logic board has Apple’s A10 Fusion chip, 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM from Samsung, Flash storage from Toshiba, audio chips from Cirrus, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X12 LTE modem.

For a lot of readers, this may well sound like meaningless jargon — but the two key take-homes are that Apple has, once again, designed a beautifully constructed phone, and that aspects of it are more repairable than in previous iPhones.

“Plucking the logic board from the 7 Plus is much easier than with its predecessor,” iFixit’s resident hardware gurus write. “There’s no need to flip over the logic board to remove the final connections. It may seem like a small victory, but we’re still encouraged — even small design changes can make a difference in terms of repairability.”

Check out the rest of their teardown, complete with glorious dissection images, here.

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