iPhone 12 Pro Teardown: 5G Comes at a Cost By iFixit

It's new iPhone season- and that means we've gotten our hands on apple's latest iPhone for professionals, only the iPhone 12 Pro with an updated three camera system that includes LIDAR, a new, well kind of new flat edge design, an updated processor and, of course, who could forget.5G, 5g, 5g, 5g, 5g. In short, the iPhone 12 Pro has all the makings of a very exciting teardown. So, let's get right to it after spending the morning in our super scientific oops machine stress, tester, our iPhone 12 Pro looks a little ragged, but it's still intact. For now, the first steps of the opening procedure are familiar: remove two pantalone screws from the bottom of the phone and then use some heat and a suction cup to separate the display. This phone feels like it needs more heat than previous iPhones to soften the display adhesive, and maybe that's due to the 12 pro's upgrade dip rating apple claims. This iPhone can withstand 6 meters of water for up to 30 minutes.

That's a whole 2 meters deeper than last year's iPhone, 11 pro. What's this our first curveball, the 12 pro opens from the right edge, not the left and the battery and logic board have switched places familiar, but tiny tripping screws hold the cable connector shields in place, and once the battery and display cables are disconnected the 6.1 inch super retina, Dr OLED comes right off side by side with the unprofessional, iPhone 12. The two phones look almost identical even on the inside. In fact, the only difference we can spot at this point is the iPhone 12 Pro slightly different camera shield. Under that camera shield are three cameras and a LIDAR sensor.

The cameras come right out, but the LIDAR sensor seems to be connected to the bottom of the logic board. We'll come back to that later. The iPhone 12 Pro cameras all use, 12 megapixel sensors, but they vary in quality and each one uses a different lens like the iPhone 11 Pro before it. The iPhone 12 Pro has a standard, wide camera, an ultra-wide camera and a telephoto camera. The similarities between the 12 and 12 pro continue here, as it seems, the camera connectors on both phones are the same.

Since we have a non-pro iPhone 12 lying around, we decided to try a quick camera swap we're saving the whole story for our iPhone 12 parts, testing blog so stay tuned to ifixit. com. For that, but, let's just say the three camera array from the iPhone 12 Pro didn't work in the standard iPhone 12. If you happen to like cables, the iPhone pro is going to make you very happy. There are a ton of them connected to the logic board.

The first two release the front camera and face ID sensors. Then the rest go off to places unseen for now, with just a few screws connecting the logic board to the rear case. We attempt to lift it out, but it's firmly connected to some long antenna, cables that wrap around the battery and connect somewhere on the opposite side of the phone once again, we'll leave this in place and come back to it in a minute to clear some space for removing the battery. We pull out the loudspeaker and the noticeably smaller tactic engine with those parts out. Furthermore, we see an interesting repair ability change.

The loudspeaker now has an orange rubber gasket that was previously adhesive. That will definitely make repairs easier for the 12 and 12 pro the iPhone 12 Pro battery sports four handy adhesive pull tabs, but removing the pull tabs proves to be more difficult than we're used to with iPhones. We get the first two tabs removed from the bottom of the battery, but the two at the top are annoyingly blocked by those antenna cables we ran into earlier. So we skip messing around with those pull tabs sneak in a couple drops of isopropyl alcohol and the battery comes right up. This battery is actually identical to the one found in the non-pro iPhone 12.

, it's rated at 10.78 watt hours, which is actually a decrease from the 11.67 watt hour battery. We saw in the iPhone 11 Pro with the battery out of the way we finally have access to that pesky. Cable that connects to what we can now see is the 5g millimeter wave antenna on the side of the phone. Once we disconnect it, we can pull the logic board out on the back side of the circuit board. We can see another 5g, millimeter wave antenna module, and after we separate the two boards, you can now see the a14 bionic and the Qualcomm x55 5g modem.

It may seem like we're out of things to pull from this phone, but don't forget about that. Lidar sensor we left behind with a little help from an opening pick. The LIDAR sensor is free, like face ID. Lidar starts by projecting a grid of infrared dots out into the world in search of a surface, but that's where similarities end face ID recognizes faces by interpreting the distortion pattern on a very fine grid of dots, but LIDAR maps distances around the room by calculating how long it takes each beam of light to bounce back to the sensor, also known as time of flight, the iPhone 12 Pro's camera system uses LIDAR to help with low light, focusing improved portrait mode performance, and it can even measure how tall you are. One thing that remains hidden from us are the magnets that make this iPhone 12 Pro compatible with apple's new MagSafe accessories.

Those are trapped underneath the wireless charging coil, as we discussed in our written teardown, linked in the description below. Thankfully, we have friends at creative electron with really awesome x-ray machines that allow us to see through the case and spot the magnets inside we've run out of things to take out of this iPhone. So, let's talk repairability, not much has changed with the iPhone 12 Pro displaying battery replacements remain a priority and most other important components are modular, but the iPhone 12 Pro still uses a ton of tiny screws that require special drivers to remove and the glass on the front and back doubles the likelihood of drop damage. All that in mind, the iPhone 12 Pro scores a 6 out of 10 on a repairability scale. If you're looking for more tear down content check out our live, tear down of the iPhone 12 and make sure you're subscribed to our channel, we have a ton of really cool teardowns.

Coming up that you won't want to miss.

Source : iFixit