Like the Apple gear they love to dissect, iFixIt’s teardowns seem to just get better and better. Benefitting from the kindness of a customer whose iPhone 4 was delivered early yesterday by FedEx, the premier DIY evangelists took apart and photographed in beautiful detail a brand new iPhone 4, describing the many amazements Cupertino designers and engineers have rolled out with Apple’s newest portable communication device.
Among the discoveries this time out are:
- the ease with which the battery is accessed and removed.
- iFixIt’s CXO Luke called Apple’s integration of the UMTS, GSM, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth antennas into the stainless steel inner frame something that can “only be described as a work of genius.”
- The 1.3mp front-facing and 5mp rear-facing cameras have independent boards, making it possible to remove the cameras without damaging the phone.
- 512MB RAM confirmed.
- 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 core processor.
- Chips from Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Numonyx, Samsung, ST Micro, Skyworks, Texas Instruments, and TriQuint.
A look at the photographs — and there are many more at much higher resolution available at the iFixIt teardown pages — really gives one a sense of the delicate beauty beneath the already gorgeous surface enclosure of the iPhone.
Kudos to Apple and its manufacturing partners for delivering such a well-made device, and to iFixIt for tearing the thing apart with such meticulous care and attention.
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- The iPhone 4 all torn down.
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- One of the two microphones.
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- Removing the logicboard connectors.
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- The tiny 1.3mp front facing camera.
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- Removing the display.
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- The chips that drive the beast.
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- Removing the 5mp main camera.
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- Removing the logicboard.
Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie’s photos on Flickr.
