Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus teardown reveals unexpected things fitted under the hood

Apple Inc., (NASDAQ: AAPL) launched their new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus this month. According to iFixit, these smartphones are slightly easier to repair than their predecessors, the iPhone 5C and 5S. They came to this conclusion after tearing apart the smartphones in Australia. iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales started this Friday in Australia, where iFixit sent their staff to get their hands on the new smartphones and disassemble the devices.

iFixit, a popular electronics do-it-yourself repair website, gave the new iPhones a repair score of 7 out of a possible 10, equivalent to its predecessor iPhone 5 but better than iPhone 5C & iPhone and 5S. The site said the reason for the better score of this year’s edition of iPhones are easier removal of their batteries and the change to the fingerprint scanner’s cable, which last year was easily torn from its socket while opening the case.

“The battery is straight-forward to access. Removing it requires a proprietary pentalobe screwdriver and knowledge of the adhesive removal technique, but is not difficult,” iFixit said in its iPhone 6 teardown, published earlier this Friday. They also mentioned that Apple has used the pentalobe screws since they launched iPhone 4 back in 2010. “[And] the fingerprint sensor cable has been re-routed, fixing a significant repairability issue with the iPhone 5S and making the phone much safer to open,” iFixit continued.

iFixit’s “iPhone 6 Plus teardown” confirmed that the Apple-designed A8 SoC (system on a chip) contained 1MB of cache memory, and they presumed that iPhone 6 had the same chip as well. The 1MB was the same amount as in the last several years’ worth of iPhone’s A-series SoCs. It was rumored before the devices’ release that Apple would push the SoC RAM to 2MB in at least the iPhone 6 Plus, but it didn’t do so.

The tear-down specialists also revealed that iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were better than last year’s iPhone 5S in terms of power backup as they had more powerful batteries. The iPhone 6 uses a 3.82-volt, 1810 mAh (milliamps hour) battery, compared to the iPhone 6 Plus, which uses a 3.82-volt, 2915 mAh battery for better power backup.